Post-modernism, rhetoric and scholasticism at TAG:the current state of British archaeological theory

JOHN BINTLIFF*

We reported last year on the course of TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) and itsannual conferences over several years. This further report reads the meaning of the

post-modernist agenda which dominated the most recent TAG conference.

The most important impression from TAG lastyear (December 1990) at Lampeter Universitywas the palpable evidence for a flourishingintellectual tradition in all branches of Britisharchaeology. Lampeter began as a theologicalcollege in a rural corner of Wales, yet some 400archaeologists made their often tortuous waysthere to savour the latest in TheoreticalArchaeology. Offers of papers continue to strainthe capacity of the 3-4 day meeting, and withthree parallel sessions, the quality of competingpapers led to much paper-hopping betweenlecture-rooms. Session organizers, authors ofindividual papers and the general audiencerepresented a good mix of 'professional'archaeologists (from units, museums andrelated institutions) and university staff andstudents, pace Francis Pryor, whose commentson the 'elitism' of TAG (Pryor 1990:149) reflecta distant prospect of TAG rather than theviewpoint of a TAG regular. The overall confer-ence organization was also excellent.

What of the content of this TAG? Naturally Ican only comment on the sessions I attended, oron those I missed but picked up strong reactionsfrom. One highlight was the 'visiting team'session, in the TAG tradition of a sessionorganized around a group of theorists fromanother (usually European) country. This yearHeinrich Harke (Reading) had invited aminibus-load of compatriots to present a ses-sion on archaeology in Germany titled AU quieton the Western Front? I was speaking in aparallel session, but heard plentiful reportssuggesting that a very illuminating conspectuswas offered on developments in - or more to the

point, the lack of developments in - Germantheoretical archaeology.

A unifying theme to nearly all the Lampetersessions was the dominance of the Post-Processualist (or Post-Modernist) agenda. Theirresistible rise of Post-Modernist approaches,the striking feature of the previous two TAGs atNewcastle and Sheffield (cf. Chippindale 1990),was completed at Lampeter where no othergeneral theoretical viewpoint was on show.Appropriately, two of the younger Post-Processualists, Julian Thomas and Chris Tilley,were hosts to the conference.

The very young sub-discipline of (explicit)Archaeological Theory appears to have adopteda habit of total renewal almost every decade.Rather than proceeding in cumulative fashion,deepening our theoretical perspectives, weseem instead to write off the research aims andachievements of each preceding decade. Newdirections are derived from established andattractive theoretical approaches in other disci-plines, rather than via refinements of existingapproaches or genuinely internal innovationswithin archaeology (cf. Bintliff 1986). IanHodder, the doyen of Post-Processualism hasfollowed a 'theoretical instability', pullingalong a large body of practitioners of theory viathe influential, populous body of researchstudents at Cambridge. In the 1970s Ian wasadvocating the spatial analysis of New Geo-graphy (already outdated within geography).Rejecting this for its implied determinism, hemoved on to commend Structuralism, particu-larly in its French anthropological manifest-ation (despite its being on the wane in all other

* Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, 46 Saddler Street, Durham nul 3NU.

ANTIQUITY 65 (1991): 274-8

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disciplines). Dismissing this approach, too, forits behaviouristic determinism, from the mid-1980s he has promoted a package of Post-Modernist approaches, under the guise of 'Post-Processualism'. Needless to say, the Post-Modernist movement is now widely seen in thehumanities as crumbling.

Now it would be foolish to inveigh against theperiodic questioning of established concepts ina discipline, and it is actually healthy thatarchaeological theory discards its old clothes,even though it always reappears in clean butborrowed finery.

However, a remarkable number of Post-Modern papers at Lampeter received little or nodiscussion. No genuine debate arose on thestrengths and weaknesses of the movement as aguiding programme for theoretical and appliedarchaeology. Judging by comments picked upfrom the 'older' delegates (i.e. mid-30supwards!), the generation which helped topioneer 'New Archaeology' in Britain in the '60sand early '70s was solidly unenthusiastic aboutthe whole Post-Processual movement - butwere not prepared to make public statements.The predominantly 'younger' delegates alsoseemed to have l i t t le to say, confronted bymulti-channel Post-Modernist propaganda.Moreover, in the only session deliberatelyaiming to challenge Post-Processualisrn, parti-cularly for its critique of 'ArchaeologicalScience'(cf. Fleming & Johnson 1990: 305-6;Edmonds & Thomas 1990: Edmonds 1990;Thomas 1990), James Rackham and his scienti-fic colleagues were largely on the defensive,asking for more opportunities to abandon theirmicroscopes and read vogue French philoso-phers and German sociologists.

This matter of the 'right reading-list' providesa key. Since the 1960s, the proponents of eachtheoretical renewal programme in archaeologyhave excluded the preceding generation byreorientating theory around a novel biblio-graphy of intellectual traditions likely to beesoteric and unpalatable to their predecessors -who 'write themselves out' of debate by failingto read the new sacred texts. Remember how theNew Archaeology claimed that computerilliterates would be intellectually redundant,and bamboozled the 'Traditionalists' withtiresome debates about hypothetico-deductive-nomological/empirico-inductive strategies andthe like? Post-Processualism asserts, mischie-

vously, that useful archaeological theorizingrequires continual reference to Lyotard, Lacan,Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Habermas, Gad-amer and Giddens (none of whom,'unenlightened' reader, have contributed any-thing in their writings to the discipline ofarchaeology - including Foucault's mis-leadingly-titled The archaeology of know-ledge). Those, old and young, who have notread, or do not care for, this new canon areexcluded from the new theoretical agenda.

Is this 'Exclusion Principle' a seriouscriticism of Post-Modernism in archaeology?Yes, in the way the letter's proponents use thetechnique to legitimize Post-Modernism as theonly contemporary paradigm in archaeologicaltheory, - but no, in terms of the potentialusefulness of the Post-Modernist theoreticalagenda. Nonetheless the criticism does accountfor the silence of older TAG delegates, who withhardly an exception, will not have read thecollected works of these philosophical andsociological luminaries. It also accounts for thesilence of younger delegates. Universitystudents will face reluctance from their lectur-ers in including Post-Modernist texts in theirreading lists, whilst in the units and museumsthe pressure on limited time and resources forstudy will become even more acute if Post-Modernist authors are to become significant forBritish archaeology. Hence an audience unableto respond creatively rather than passively tothe unadulterated diet of Post-Modernist philo-sophy served up at the Lampeter TAG.

My impression is also that many in the 'older'generation, who not long ago were organizinginnovative TAG sessions, are largely caught upin developed research programmes conceivedunder preceding approaches, making aparadigm-change in mid course time-consuming and disorientating.

The positive contribution that a Post-Modernist perspective can make to archaeologyis worth stating. Firstly, its emphasis on a'critical' examination of the archaeologist'ssocial responsibility offers a valuable antidoteto the creeping mindlessness of the 'heritageindustry'. (Did you see the media cover ofEnglish Heritage's sponsored re-run of theBattle of Hastings? Apparently the Saxons justwouldn't lie down!) Archaeologists should lookbeyond stamp-collecting typologies and stra-tigraphie engineering to the broader aims of a

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moral and emotional involvement with 'thepast in the present', and thus tap into how thegeneral public actually interacts with the past.

Secondly, Post-Modernism distances us fromunquestioning readings of all archaeologicalpublications as 'fact-sheets' at various 'publica-tion levels', in order to refocus on them asexpressions of specific culture-historic atti-tudes to the past. Thirdly, Post-Modernismencourages multiple views about the past, pro-moting greater sensitivity to the experience ofwomen in the past, of ethnic minorities, and ofthe non-élite 'people without history'.

However, it is likely that the drawbacks andweaknesses of the Post-Modernist agenda coulddebilitate British theoretical archaeologyduring the 1990s.

Archaeological Post-Processualism hasimported, uncritically, the whole spectrum ofPost-Modernism, as if it were a unitary pro-gramme. In fact, the only thread linking thediverse Post-Modernist theorists is their rejec-tion of the optimistic, Modernist belief in thecumulative accretion since the Enlightenmentof true knowledge about human societies,founded on rational enquiry modelled on thehard sciences and mathematics. Beyond that,there is total incompatibility between theMarxist-inspired Critical Theory of Habermas,who believes in the regeneration of a purifiedEnlightenment rational enquiry through anethical analysis of human action (freed of'Modernist', dehumanizing views of people asrational robots), and the Deconstruction Theoryof Derrida, Foucault and Gadamer, whichdissolves analysis into an endless plurality ofinterpretations, the concepts of'valid inference'and 'reality' being rejected as meaningless.

Post-Processualist texts in archaeology findsuch a critically-unprepared audience that theyget away with an agenda that includes suchtotally contradictory theories. Ian Hodder'sReading the past (1986) vacillates incom-prehensibly between a practical programme forreconstructing the intentions behind past beha-viour ('Contextual Archaeology'), and a viewthat we only project modern preconceptionsinto 'an essentially unknowable past'. Duringthe Lampeter TAG a lecture by Julian Thomason the Post-Modern approach (sic) to the pastlandscape employed similarly incompatibleintellectual positions. At its conclusion, MikeRowlands (who will have read the approved

authors critically) drew attention to the pecu-liarity of Julian's intellectual porridge, claimingas it did to find a common attitude to humansociety in the writings of that active SocialistRaymond Williams and the Nazi mystic MartinHeidegger.

At another Lampeter session, The social roleof the urban archaeologist, I expected a coher-ent professional response to the developer- and'heritage industry'-led corruption of profes-sional archaeology. To my disillusionment, theoverriding message of the session was that thereis no 'real historical past' which we should tryto uncover. Professional archaeologists shouldwrite any narrative that pleases the public,regardless of its relationship to any 'truth' aboutthe past (the latter idea being considered asmeaningless anyway). Here the active rela-tivism at one end of the Post-Modernist spec-trum is offering a disturbing redefinition of therôle of the professional archaeologist towardsthe public. Since the most popular books on thepast are by Astro-Archaeologists, and, in partsof the States, by Fundamentalists, are we now todevote gallery and site-publication space totheir 'narratives'? What about the NationalFront - whose racist views are under-represented in the archaeological media - whoare we to privilege our historically-imposedbias of liberal thought?

This attitude represents a total abdication ofresponsibility by archaeologists to their realduty to contemporary society. Beyond 'enter-taining' and 'giving the public its money'sworth', professional archaeologists have a morefundamental duty: to uncover the evidence of'what actually happened' (sic) so as to preventthe fabrication of the past by those who mightmanipulate it to suit α priori ideologies of Left,Centre, Right, Green, Ethnic, Sexist or Feministfactions in contemporary society.

If Post-Modernists demand a plurality ofinterpretations, why should we listen to any oftheirs as opposed to any other of the infiniterange of methodologies and philosophiesavailable in world literature? One weakresponse by the Post-Modernists is to elevateRhetoric as a guiding principle: it will not be the'facts of the case' that should persuade you, butthe emotional sway engendered by powerfulword-play and charismatic texts. The LampeterTAG offered a show-case example when JohnBarrett (in the Constructing landscape session),

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gave us a familiar harangue on the Marxist viewof the human past, touching at no point on anyarchaeological or historical specifics, As rheto-ric it was entertaining, but at the same time ithas to be ironic that a highly-educated TAGaudience should receive, in silence, a party-political broadcast on behalf of an ideologicalmovement whose former adherents have beendeserting it in millions over the last couple ofyears. The anti-positivist attitude fostered bymainstream Post-Modernism would takeEuropean thought back towards a pre-scientific,pre-rational, pre-Enlightenment and pre-Renaissance era - the Middle Ages - whenindeed we can substitute for the modern idealsof'Knowledge' and 'Analysis' those of Rhetoric(word-skills rate more than truth to facts) andScholasticism (the value of a theory rests uponthe summed names of famous thinkers whosupport it).

In reality, many of the truly useful insights ofPost-Modernism (those more in the Haber-masian than Deconstructive vein), can be har-nessed into a constructive twosome withpositivist, 'realist', 'scientific' research, as hasalready been argued by Colin Renfrew (1982)and myself (1986; 1988: 1991).

Were one to contemplate such a way forwardof peaceful co-operation and constructive dia-lectic of Processual and Post-Processualapproaches, it would still remain essential thatsuch an improved framework for the disciplineof archaeology should rest upon a firm founda-tion: empirical data-collection, rigorous data-description, and the analysis of all potentiallysignificant associations between artefacts, eco-facts and structures and their stratigraphical,cultural and ecological contexts. If you do notbelieve such an agreed 'core' can exist, then I seeno point in continuing a 'profession' of archaeo-logist. The thesis that the archaeological recordcomes to light as empirical data existing inobjectively patterned association, as a separatephenomenon from the contentious sphere ofbehavioural interpretation, must be the basis forany hopes of adjudication between all or anytheories about the kinds of human activitywhich gave rise to certain properties in the data.

When we move beyond this basic level ofdata-collection, description and pattern-recognition, we certainly rapidly enter theoperational area for models and hypotheses,many difficult to verify or falsify and deriving as

much from personal philosophies and ideolo-gies as from observation of the data underanalysis.

Julian Thomas saw this 'pyramid of infer-ence' (in the discussion following the sameLandscape session) as a restatement of Christo-pher Hawkes' 'infamous' 1954 paper on thelimitations of archaeological inference.Although I can't agree with Hawkes that firminterpretations beyond the economic and tech-nological spheres will always lie beyond ourcapabilities, the last 37 years have repeatedlyconfirmed his grain of truth: that reliable recon-structions do become increasingly difficult andcontroversial when we address the social andpsychological. A more appropriate ancestor formy position would be General Pitt-Rivers, oneof the key figures in the establishment of empi-rical, scientific archaeology, who demanded ofexcavators that they record and keep all thatthey find and observe, even if much of it appearsof no obvious value at the time; the records willbe there when future archaeologists come tothem with new questions. When Pitt-Rivers'entered' the discussion, Barbara Bender, fromthe audience, reminded us that he was a viru-lent racist in his interpretations of history (andone might add, unpleasantly right-wing in hisother opinions). Pitt-Rivers, like the rest of us,was impelled along his researches by subjectiveprejudices. Yet Pitt-Rivers' case demonstratesstrikingly that one can and must separate empi-rical research from the variable motives whichled to data collection and the use or abuse ofthatdata to tell stories about the past. For all hisinterpretative bigotry, Pitt-Rivers' fieldworkand excavation records are so refined that Rich-ard Bradley (who, despite training as a lawyer ina previous existence, is certainly neither a racistnor a fascist), in re-excavating some of Pitt-Rivers' sites, has been able to reinterpret themon the basis of details recorded a century ago ofwhich the General was unable to understandthe significance (cf. Barrett et aï. 1990),

In any case, the too-often repeated charge ofPost-Processualists, that all archaeologists seekout data in the blind service of their subjectiveideologies, may suit aristocratic right-wingeccentrics like Pitt-Rivers, or middle-class left-wing intellectuals in comfortable academic cir-cumstances feeling uneasy with their socialconsciences, but bears little relationship to therealities of most professional and academic

if I

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archaeological research programmes. Where,pray, does the unit director's personal ideologyintervene in choice of data, when a major slicein the midst of his historic town is threatened byrapid redevelopment? On a personal note, likemost regional survey specialists, I simplycannot imagine what kinds of patterned beha-viour may be awaiting our project in the field ineach new season, nor where ultimately theinformation we are recording might lead to interms of the picture we will obtain of thevicissitudes of past societies. This element of'surprise' is perhaps a distinctive feature of thepresence of an autonomous empirical elementin research as opposed to entirely theory-ledprogrammes.

In conclusion, if you want to find out moreabout this rampant monster of Post-Processual-ism, I recommend a sceptical approach thatmixes reading the original Post-Modernistmasters with the powerful criticisms their workhas evoked. I remain unconvinced that the mainbody of this intellectual movement will 'bearfruit' in terms of enabling us to get closer todescribing and interpreting what actually hap-

pened in the past. That small remaining part ofPost-Modernism which has got something tooffer centres on two things: an interest in humanmotivations, which is merely an extension of agrowing research area within the most recentphase of Processual archaeology (cf. Renfrew's'cognitive archaeology'); and a commitment tomake archaeology more emotionally andmorally challenging, which, likewise, was agrowing theme within New Archaeology andhas been discussed with greater sophisticationas 'reflexive archaeology' within the mostrecent phase ofthat tradition (cf. Wilk 1985).

As for the greater part of Post-Modernismwith its determination to topple science,reason, truth, objectivity, a 'real past', andprofessional responsibility, from their privi-leged status in the hearts and minds of seriousresearchers,-well, fellow archaeologists, if youdo feel tempted to respond to the frantic signalsof its local practitioners the Post-Processualists,- be advised that, in the words of that poignantpoem by Stevie Smith, they are 'Not waving, butdrowning'.

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