Table Of Content

Archaeological Situations This book is an introduction to theory in archaeology – but with a difference. Archaeological Situations avoids talking about theory as if it was something you apply but rather as something embedded in archaeological practice from the start. Rather than see theory as something worked from the outside in, this book explores theory from the inside out, which means it focuses on specific archaeological practices rather than specific theories. It starts from the kinds of situations that students find themselves in and learn about in other archaeology courses, avoiding the gap between practice and theory from the very beginning. It shows students the theoretical implications of almost everything they engage in as archaeologists, from fieldwork, recording, writing up and making and assessing an argument to exploring the very nature of archaeology and justifying its relevance. Essentially, it adopts a structure which attempts to pre-empt one of the most common complaints of students taking theory courses: how is this applicable? Aimed primarily at undergraduates, this book is the ideal way to engage students with archaeological theory. Gavin Lucas is professor of archaeology at the University of Iceland. His main research interests are in archaeological method and theory and the archaeology of the modern world. He has published several books on archaeological theory, most recently Writing the Past (2019) and Making Time (2021), both published with Routledge. Archaeological Situations Archaeological Theory from the Inside Out Gavin Lucas Cover image: Cover image by Gavin Lucas First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Gavin Lucas The right of Gavin Lucas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-56545-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-56010-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09829-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003098294 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of Figures vi List of Boxes ix Acknowledgements xi Read This First 1 1 Who’s Afraid of Theory? 5 2 Doing Fieldwork 22 3 Making Records 53 4 Writing Up 84 5 Building a Case 115 6 Doing Research 141 7 Defining the Discipline 165 Coda: Theorizing Without Theory 192 Index 195 Figures 1.1 Some contemporary responses to the current state of theory 6 2.1 Section drawing showing the interpretive problems of an interface: is the top of deposit 1203 a surface or a cut – perhaps a horizontal continuation of the cut 1211? 26 2.2 A comparison of two context sheets (left: Cambridge Archaeology Unit; right: Ardnamurchan Transitions Project) 27 2.3 Excavating the edge: Tony Baker excavates a second- and third-century “corn dryer”, finding the edge of the clay foundation from the flue’s infill deposit 31 2.4 Students planning with traditional tapes and paper (left) and a total station (right) at the university fieldschool in Iceland 33 2.5 Recording sensory distances over which sound (human shout and conversation, wooden whistle and stone striking) can be heard and human body movements can be communicated 37 2.6 Different levels of community engagement 45 2.7 Andrew Dafnis, Homeless Heritage project, surveying Turbo Island, Bristol, in 2010 48 3.1 The DIKW or data pyramid 55 3.2 The data trail 57 3.3 Map of excavations at Longstanton and Oakington, 5 km northwest of Cambridge (Northstowe Phases 1 & 2 [2014–2019]). The excavated areas revealed Middle to Late Iron Age, Roman and fifth- to seventh-century CE settlements, alongside other sites based on comprehensive trenching, geophysics and airborne transcription program [2005–2007, 2020–2021]. What data can you draw out from this map? 59 3.4 Extract from the CIDOC CRM pertaining to the category of “thing”; what kind of ontology does this entail? 65 3.5 Vessel types used for liquid and semi-solid foods in the Potomac typological system (POTS) which attempted to connect emic and etic classifications by matching terms from documentary sources (mostly probate inventories) with excavated pottery forms 68 Figures vii 3.6 Conceptual oppositions structuring a medieval longhouse in Dartmoor, England. Although not explicitly presented as a structuralist archaeology, the influence of structuralism in this example is clear 69 3.7 Making a pot: island of Sifnos, Greece 72 3.8 The Holywell witch bottle 74 4.1 The fragmentation and synthesis of the archaeological process 90 4.2 The architecture of the Rigny excavation archive 94 4.3 In the Virtual World of Second Life, Ruth Galileo stands on top of Okapi Island, aka the East Mound of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, surveying her team’s construction in 2007–2008 of Neolithic houses (based on the South archaeological area) and, on the right, the shelter over the BACH archaeological area 97 4.4 Principal genres in archaeology and their relation to disciplinary knowledge 100 4.5 Principal modes of address in writing with hypothetical examples 106 5.1 Two views of archaeological knowledge. Left: jigsaw model, where the goal is to fill in the blanks by simply accumulating more pieces (induction). Right: crossword model, where the goal is to fill in the blanks by ensuring coherence between the pieces and correspondence with the clues 118 5.2 Diagram showing the structure of hypothesis testing in Lucero’s example 120 5.3 Diagram showing the structure of IBE in Bogaard’s example. Four hypotheses (H1-H4) are tested against three strands of evidence. Ticks indicate the presence of evidence showing only one hypothesis (H4) withstands all three tests 123 5.4 Diagram showing the structure of arguments adapted from an example in Chapman and Wylie (2016). A claim of provenance is made on the basis of specific data linked by warrants; note the criticisms (rebuttals) which largely focus on the warrants as the weak link in the argument 126 5.5 The hermeneutic spiral 129 5.6 The evidential relations and Peircean semiotics of fingerprints 133 5.7 Three types of binary thinking based on the nature of the relation between two concepts 137 6.1 Working out the value of a plate using George Miller’s CC indices 151 6.2 Formal analogy between prehistoric stone gorgets and contemporary potter’s tools 155 6.3 Jemez tribal member Aaron Tosa collecting obsidian and ceramic samples at the ancestral Jemez pueblo of Kwastiyukwa 161 7.1 A pavement on Mill Road, Cambridge, England; like an archaeological site, it is mix of multiple past events whose material presence persists in the present 167 viii Figures 7.2 Drift matter in Eidsbukta on the Sværholt peninsula, Finnmark, Norway 172 7.3 A tree growing around a sign in a park in north London, 2014; for whom does this sign matter? 174 7.4 The swinging pendulum of archaeology between the sciences and humanities 177 7.5 Diagram showing the different degrees of integration between multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research 182 7.6 Different ways to align archaeology depending on which aspect is privileged 183 7.7 The artefact as metaphor for two ways of looking at the archaeological record: as loss or as transformation (objects not to the same scale) 185 8.1 A plot from Google Ngram viewer using the search term “archaeological theory”. How well does this reflect the status of theory in archaeology and if it does, what does it mean? 194 Boxes 1.1 The Three-Paradigms of Archaeological Theory 6 1.2 Three Views on the Relation Between Facts and Theory in Archaeology 11 1.3 Levels of Archaeological Theory? 13 1.4 Strong and Weak Theory 15 2.1 Total Recovery? 23 2.2 The Context Sheet 27 2.3 Following the Cut 30 2.4 Paper Versus Pixels 31 2.5 Gendered Fieldwork 34 2.6 Phenomenology and Fieldwork 36 2.7 Sutton Hoo in the Summer of ’39 39 2.8 Research-Driven and Development-Led Excavation in Europe 41 2.9 What Do You Mean by Collaboration? 44 2.10 Community Archaeology as Intervention 47 3.1 What Do Maps Do? 58 3.2 AI and Machine Learning 62 3.3 Open Archaeology and Conceptual Reference Models (CRMs) 64 3.4 Making a Pot 71 3.5 Artefacts or Belongings? 75 3.6 Digital Collections and Archaeological Prosthetics 78 4.1 Honouring Ambiguity and Dealing With Doubt 87 4.2 Rigny Excavation: An Online Excavation Report 93 4.3 Virtual Reality at Çatalhöyük 96 4.4 Storytelling on the Acropolis 107 5.1 Hypothesis Testing and Mayan Household Rituals 119 5.2 A Process of Elimination: Modelling Neolithic Farming Practice in Central Europe 122 5.3 Networks of Trade and Networks of Inference: the Case of the Copper Ingots 125 5.4 Hermeneutics at Haddenham: Evolving Interpretations of a Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure 128 5.5 Bodies of Evidence or Silent Witness? 131