I recently attended the Nordic-TAG conference in Århus in Denmark. It was a gathering of some 200 Scandinavian archaeologists and archaeology students interested in theory. After one paper I made a comment that I did not find very original at the time, but I received so many reactions even after returning home that I am now thinking it may be worth considering this question again on this blog.
My point was simple. The speaker had framed his talk by the dualism of ‘processualism’ and ‘post-processualism’, suggesting a way of finally overcoming this long-standing division. I commented that this division was current some 25 years ago, that nobody except a surprising number of Scandinavian graduate students and post-docs nowadays seriously thought in terms of these polar categories, and that maybe it was time to realise that it is futile now to suggest (or wait for) the next big theory to replace ‘post-processualism’ as the key point of reference, whether positive or negative, for the entire discipline.
Fittingly, two British speakers were next in the session. Promptly they were asked about their view of the currency of ‘processual’ and ‘post-processual’ approaches in the UK today. It became clear that the terms were still around but that their meaning had shifted somewhat. Whereas in the 1980s the two sides involved in this discussion were very serious about the oppositional programmes they believed in, today both terms are generally used in an ironic way (“he is a bit of post-processualist…”).
So what, then, has happened in archaeological theory in recent years? Which theory has replaced ‘post-processualism’? I do not care to remember how often discussions with graduate students and at conferences (not only in Scandinavia) have circled around that question. In fact, although (or rather because) I started studying archaeology nearly twenty years ago, I do not remember a time when this topic was not discussed! Obviously there is not an easy answer, although many have tried to set a new agenda trying to overcome the division in various ways and find a new consensus, but nobody seems to have emerged as the winner.
There is a large variety now of what is considered theoretically sound and appropriate. Many different approaches to archaeological research are growing, and some blossoming, at the same time, with some of them dominant in one part of the world, others in other parts, and many existing side-by-side throughout the Western world. So is that it, maybe, a new multiplicity and plurivocality in archaeological theory replacing the two dominant approaches of the past? Although this may very well be the best answer one could give (and I think I once suggested that too), somehow it is not very persuasive as a final answer to that intriguing question.
What I suggested in Århus is that maybe we have all been asking the wrong question all along. For archaeology has moved on tremendously over the last two decades with profound changes both to the entire discipline and the socio-political context in which it is operating. All of that has been happening though beyond the relatively narrow field of University-centred ‘archaeological theory’. We have to face the fact that archaeological theory is quite simply no longer at the heart of archaeology, as it perhaps was from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s.
Instead we have seen over the last few decades an enormous expansion of commercial archaeology, now controlling far more funding than the Universities and responsible for the lion share of archaeological research. We may or may not like that fact and what it led to in terms of research results but commercial archaeology is undeniably today a far bigger player in the discipline than its poor sibling, University-based research. (In Sweden, some large commercial enterprises are producing one hardback monograph expensively produced in full-colour after another, whereas for academic Departments even the running of fairly limited training excavations has increasingly become a major financial stumbling block.)
At the same time, the wider society has seen an ever growing heritage sector over the past few decades. Whereas in the 1980s the ‘heritage industry’ was still fairly new and hotly debated as to its commercial intentions and dubious ideological overtones, today there is a global ‘Experience Economy’ in which the cultural heritage is one of the biggest assets for any region. Disadvantaged areas in Europe and developing economies around the world invest in heritage attractions as tourist magnets. Ever more ‘Medieval Fairs’ are being held across Europe. There are probably more reconstructed ‘Prehistoric villages’ today than there are traditional archaeological museums. Historically situated role-play, computer games and TV-docusoaps have been growing at a constant rate and their constituencies are now far bigger than those of historic museums, educational TV or public academic lectures. What all these trends mean for the future of academic archaeology has hardly begun to be explored by those teaching the subject in the Universities.
In short, archaeological theory has been sidelined and now occupies nothing but a small niche of the discipline within the Universities. To my mind this is what has happened not in but to archaeological theory over the past two decades.
Hi Cornelius and anyone else,
I think the division between PA and PPA has been passe for a while. I think that the reconciliation comes through the old notion that PA would be constantly evolving as new theories were developed rather than the ossification that actually occurred. I think PPA went about as far as it could go when Chris Tilley wrote in Reading Material Culture that archaeology exists only as text. I think, in some ways, that archaeology has become post-theoretical in that it is now up to archaeologists to work through their material using the theoretical approaches that have been out there for a while.
I would propose the term “entertainment archaeology” for what you are describing. In my experience, the sciences have made enormous progress with the processual paradigm, now moving into the “sciences of complexity,” multiple agency (i.e. multiple causation and parallel process), artificial life, artificial societies, artificial culture and evolutionary computation. It is process “all the way up” and process “all the way down.” If archaeology and anthropology have taken a holiday from this mission, it is truly a shame. The process paradigm we are presently engaged in, for those who like “post-” affixes, has been elsewhere described as the “posthuman.” Long live process, “it’s all we’ve got.”
Cornelius’ comment reaises a number of interesting points; I’ll comment on only one. Why is that, a quarter of a century after the ‘debate’ raged most strongly, and at a point at which most serious scholars would really like to move on, does the ‘processual/postprocessual’ dualism still govern so much of theoretical discourse?
It’s an odd jump to make but I was very struck a few years ago by an essay by Stephen Greenblatt on atheism in 16th century Europe. He made the point that it was unlikely, given the mentality of the time, that anybody was actually consciously an atheist, but that the fear of atheism and the need to rebut it permeated much of 16th century discourse. Atheism, then, occupied an intellectual space that needed to be filled, even if nobody actually believed it. Reading 16th century rebuttals of atheism, then, told you little about the reality, but rather offered a window on the concerns and anxieties of literate Europeans of the time.
So it is, I believe, with the P/PP dualism. The two extremes refer to two very basic fears or concerns in the modern world: the fear of a disabling relativism on the one hand, and a fear of a rampant Science on the other. It’s very easy to deconstruct these fears, a basic theoretical move to demonstrate that neither demon actually exists. It’s very easy to say ‘we have moved on’. But the fears refer to wider social and cultural currents, not just the restricted domain of ‘archaeological theory’.
In this sense, Cornelius’ later comments on the growth of the heritage sector when compared to the restricted domain of theory, however defined, hold the answer to his problem. The P/PP dualism is a vehicle for articulating intellectual anxieties about these and other trends in the world outside Nordic-TAG and British TAG for that matter. Its longevity may baffle us if considered in strictly logical and intellectual terms alone, but when seen as a reflection and refraction of a wider commentary about the state of knowledge within society, it’s still very pertinent. That’s why we can’t get away from it. It doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t stop trying to get away from it.