Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology

Anth 321WIntellectual Background of Archaeology MWF 9:00-9:55AM 008 Life Sciences Bldg

Abstracts • A: 10 • B: 1 • C: 4 • Late: 2

Observations • Paper must emphasize the history of research • An important site • A key method • An influential individual or school of thought • Paper not the recounting of recent interpretations of some case study. An interrogation of how thought has changed. • Define a case study. • Heavy use of emphasis dash • Additional proofing • That/which

Processual/Post-processual Debate &The Great Theoretical Divide Postrocessual • Idealist • Postmodern • Romanticism • Romantics inspired by Herder celebrated diversity • Strum and Drang • humanistic • Processual • Materialist • Modernism • Enlightenment • 19th C Evolutionists studied regularity • rationality and stoicism • scientific

Enlightenment • Self titled cultural and intellectual movement. • Enlightened thinkers would enlighten the populace. • Originates ca. 1650-1700 • John Locke (1632-1704) • Isaac Newton (1643-1727) Principia Mathematica (1687) • Kant (1784) “What is Enlightenment? • "Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error." • Ends ca. 1790-1800 • French Revolution (1789) • Napoleonic Wars (1804-1815)

Beginnings • Decartes(1637) Discourse on Method • Thomas Aquinas 13thC, recovery of Aristotelian logic and use to defend theology. • These thinkers called “schoolmen” or “scholastics” • Later in 1632, Galileo Galilei used the logic of the schoolmen to argue for the Copernican notion that the earth rotates around the sun. • The Church silenced Galileo, but not the application of logic to the development of science. • Voltaire, a major figure in the Enlightenment, referred to the schoolmen as “doctors” meaning “doctors of theology”.

France a center of Enlightenment • Denis Diderot (1713-1784) edits Encyclopédie (1751–72)

Enlightenment: Theatre and Literature • Voltaire and Rousseau both Enlightenment thinkers. • Rousseau also part of Romanticism • Voltaire • supremacy of intellect • Equality was impossible • Repeated truisms • Rousseau • Emphasized emotion • Inequality was unnatural • Explored original thought in many directions

Johann von Herder (1744-1803) Enlightenment but also proto-Romanticism. • Emphasis on folk traditions • The Strum and Drang movement

Enlightenment: Political Philosophy • John Locke (1660) First Tract of Government • British empiricist, social contract theory, knowledge determined by experience derived from perception. • Thomas Hobbes (1651) Leviathan • Absolutism of sovereign, right of individual, natural equality, artificial character of political structure • Adam Smith(1776) Wealth of Nations, advocated liberty in the sphere of commerce and economy. • The invisible hand • By preferring the support of domestiek to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Romanticism • More easily defined in time 1770-1870. • The “age of revolutions” • American (1776) • French (1789) • Imagination assigned an elevated position. • Contrasts with supremacy of reason. • Imagination key faculty in creating art; the faculty by which humans constitute reality. • We not only perceive the world, we in part create it (Wordsworth). Contrast with Baconian empiricism of Locke and Hobbes.

Opposition to Versailles Neoclassicism, freedom from mechanical rules. • Reconciliation of opposites central for Romantics • Victor Hugo (1831) Hunchback of Notre Dame • Shelly’s (1818) Frankenstein • Importance of emotion and mood • Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), and American Romantic

Post-processual/Interpretive • Mosaic of theoretical positions and goals • No strict creed or intellectual messiah • What purposes are served by the creation of archaeological knowledge? • Who is it for and how has it been used? • Material culture plays a role in how we make social relationships • Individuals must be a part of theories of material culture and social change • Archaeology has close explanatory ties with history • Tends to draw on post-modern theories of history.

Processual and postprocessual dominated theoretical debate • Concepts excluded by both camps now appear important • Neither processual nor postprocessual are sharply defined approaches. They are clusters of related non overlapping positions.

Thomas Khun (1962):Structure of Scientific Revolutions • Khun sought to explain development of scientific knowledge over time. • Paradigm shifts rather than slow unilinear progress. • Paradigm shifts open up fundamentally new ways of understanding a subject. • Paradigms are incommensurate. • Comprehension never fully objective; must account for subjective perspective as well.

All aspects of archaeological research are influenced by assumptions that constitute implicit theory. • Better to deal with these assumptions consciously than to leave them implicit. • High-level theory necessary for a mature self-critical discipline.

Processual/Post-processual debate • The fact that different theoretical approaches are mutually comprehensible and selectively integrated indicates that these are not paradigms. • Paradigms are incommensurate—one paradigm cannot be clearly understood by someone working in the context of an alternate paradigm. • Treating theoretical orientations as paradigms encourages exclusion and polemic rather than comparison and synthesis.

Possibilism and Determinism • Trigger describes how geographic possibilism helped him avoid the trap of environmental determinism that plagued early processualism. Environment sets limits and offers possibilities for personal and cultural development. Yet, humans can selectively respond to any factor in a number of ways. How a people react and develop is a function of the choices they make in response to their environment. Paul Vidal de La Blache

Comparison and cross-cultural research • Early comparisons focused on a search for regularities between cultures. • Kingship • Irregular aspects of culture were essentially ignored. • Variation in the nature of rulership

Trigger’s Conclusion • No theoretical formulation involving a narrow range of causal factors will likely account for the totality of human behavior or material expressions • Comparative approach required consideration of idiosyncrasies and similarities • Theoretical conclusion: processual and postprocessual approaches based on antithetical positions, but they are complementary

Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology