The Annales School and Archaeology Edited by John Bintliff

133 Pages·2007·52.55 MB·English

The Annales School
and Archaeology
Edited by
John Bintliff
Leicester University Press
(a division of Pinter Publishers)
Leicester, London
© Editor and contributors 1991
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Leicester University Press
(a division of Pinter Publishers)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the Leicester University Press.
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British Library cataloguing in publication data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7185-1354-1
Typeset by Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, Wiltshire
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
List of figures vi
List of contributors vii
1 The contribution of an Anna/iste/structural history
approach to archaeology
John Bintliff I
2 Two Italys, one valley: an Annaliste perspective
Graeme Barker 34
3 Structural history and classical archaeology
Anthony Snodgrass 57
4 The place and role of the Annales school in an approach to
the Roman rural economy
J.P. Vallat 73
5 Archaeology, the longue durée and the limits of the Roman
Empire
Rick Jones 93
6 Annalistes, hermeneutics and positivists: squaring circles
or dissolving problems
Christopher S. Peebles 108
Index 125
List of figures
1.1 The Annales paradigm.
1.2 Braudel's model of historical time.
1.3 The Annales paradigm: 'beyond Braudel'.
1.4 Settlement map for the period 600-200 BC, in the area covered by the
Boeotia Survey.
1.5 Extent of the small town of Askra during the period 600-200 BC, as
indicated by the surface distribution of pottery of that period within
the modern field system over the ancient site.
1.6 Settlement map for the period 200 BC-AD 300 in the area covered by
the Boeotia Survey.
1.7 Extent of the small town of Askra during the period 200 BC-AD 300.
1.8 Settlement map for the period AD 300-700 in the area covered by the
Boeotia Survey.
1.9 Extent of the small town of Askra during the period AD 300-700.
2.1 Italy, showing the location of the regione of Molise and the approxi-
mate area of the Biferno Valley survey.
2.2 The Biferno Valley, showing topography and the zones selected for
the archaeological survey; contours in metres.
2.3 The Biferno valley: Neolithic settlement.
2.4 The Biferno valley: Bronze Age settlement.
2.5 The Biferno valley: Iron Age settlement.
2.6 An example of classical rural settlement in the lower Biferno valley.
5.1 The Roman frontier zone in Britain, showing Roman roads and major
Roman forts.
5.2 The complex of Roman military sites at Newstead, based upon
evidence from air photographs and excavation.
5.3 The plan of Binchester Roman fort revealed by resistivity survey.
6.1 The growth of Moundville phase settlements in the Black Warrior
Valley, Alabama from AD 900-1600.
6.2 The growth of the Moundville site from agricultural village to major
ceremonial center, AD 900-1550.
6.3 Selected economic, ecologie and demographic measures for Mound-
ville and the Moundville phase, AD 1050-1550.
List of contributors
Graeme Barker, Department of Archaeology, University of Leicester.
John Bintliff, Department of Archaeology, University of Durham.
Rick Jones, School of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford.
Christopher S. Peebles, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Uni-
versity of Indiana.
Anthony Snodgrass, Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of
Cambridge.
J.P. Vallat, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Quai Anatole-
France, Paris.

1 The contribution of
an Annaliste!
structural history
approach to
archaeology
John Bintliff
Introduction
How many times have I sat at the beginning of a symposium listening to
the organizer setting out a new and trendy approach to transform the
theory and practice of archaeology? More often than not, the new ideas
are poached from other disciplines, and in presenting to you the
importance of the Annales' paradigm, the fruits of France's leading
group of historians, I am surely perpetuating an academic syndrome.
Indeed, did not David Clarke at the beginning of our British version of
New Archaeology (1968) and more recently Ian Hodder (1986), demand
that archaeology create its own independent world of theory and prac-
tice?
Actually I should like to stand this argument on its head. Whilst
agreeing that recovering and collating our data, primarily buried mate-
rial culture, are tasks best left to our discipline to deal with, with the
mutual agreement of other disciplines, I have exactly the opposite
opinion about the interpretation of past societies from this and other
evidence (such as standing structures and written sources). Here I can
already introduce a fundamental battle cry of the Annales' scholars—the
call for a truly interdisciplinary collaboration on exploring and analysing
Past societies. To the outsider, intellectual demarcation between sub-
lets supposedly studying the same phenomenon—human societies—
2 John Bintliff
seems bizarre, yet few scholars in archaeology, history, sociology, social
anthropology, geography or psychology make any regular attempt to
follow the literature and development of ideas and approaches across
this spectrum of related disciplines that converge on human community
studies.
You may ask: how can I have the time to read journals beyond my
discipline, and in any case, who says I could learn anything useful by so
doing? The answer to those questions is devastatingly simple: if we
analyse the development of ideas in archaeology since the latter part of
the nineteenth century, it is quite clear that the same underlying
concepts and intellectual approaches characterize our subject, for
periods of a decade or more, as can be found in the other disciplines; but
usually intellectual movements in all these subjects are out of phase with
one another. The diffusion time for a major new concept may take so
long to pass, e.g. from sociology to archaeology, that by the time its
potential is being proclaimed at, say, a TAG (Theoretical Archaeology
Group) Conference, sociologists have exhausted its value and found it
seriously wanting, and perhaps are already entering a new conceptual
approach. This time-lag of innovation is certainly the case with the
Annales' paradigm. The first moves were made towards this new
approach in the discipline of history in France around the turn of the
century, whilst the full-blown paradigm was victorious in the French
history establishment by the late 1940s (cf. Stoianovitch 1976); Anglo-
American enthusiasm amongst historians for Annales' scholarship can
be dated to the early 1970s, and British geographers were recommend-
ing the Annales' approach as the solution to the so-called post-positivist
problématique from the late 1970s. Meanwhile in contemporary archaeolo-
gical debate we can still hear speakers or read articles forcefully arguing
for the application of positivist New Archaeology in historical archaeol-
ogy (and rightly so, for without it, post-positivism is irrelevant).
So the problem is simply poor communication and blinkered attitudes
to our real context as one branch of the human sciences. By introducing
the Annales' approach as a major theoretical initiative in archaeology, I
am therefore not only aiming to help us catch up on trends visible some
years ago in related disciplines, which were at that time facing the same
intellectual problems that we are just becoming aware of, but also
offering the Annales' paradigm as a powerful argument for a closer
merging of sister disciplines (archaeology, history, social anthropology,
sociology, geography, psychology, and so on), since the Annales' way of
approaching the past blends all these subjects into a single, elaborate
methodology for understanding pre-modern societies.
The 'crisis' in archaeological theory
Several prominent authorities since the early 1980s have identified a
growing dissatisfaction with the rate of progress in our understanding of
^
Annaliste/structural history approach to archaeology 3
past communities (Barrett 1983, Trigger 1984, and most eloquently, Ian
Hodder 1986). Without rejecting the very clear achievements of the New
Archaeology movement of the 1960s and 1970s, many scholars feel that
this particular major initiative of disciplinary renewal has done its job
and is rapidly running out of the potential to create new ideas and
approaches. Moreover, there have arisen an impressive number of
problems and limitations to our knowledge with which New Archae-
ology offers little help.
Careful study of several sister disciplines (Bintliff 1986) has shown a
dominant trend where such dissatisfaction can be derived. History and
geography both passed through a phase, beginning some ten years
before New Archaeology (that of the New History and the New Geogra-
phy), but likewise characterized by the urge to quantify, to emulate the
hard sciences, to discover general laws or functions for human activity
and the natural world. Generalizing and positivistic attitudes typified
these movements of the 1960s to the mid-1970s. At the time the impact
of the 'new' formats was overwhelmingly favourable in disciplines
where all too often research work had atrophied into descriptive and
particularizing approaches, occasionally enlivened by imaginative but
poorly documented and unverifiable flights of literary insight that pas-
sed for interpretation.
However, by the late 1970s in most of our sister disciplines the
demand began to be voiced for a new generation of theory to tackle the
growing body of research problems beyond the scope of the 'New'
format approaches. In particular we might mention:
1. That the typical models and processes that had proved so innovative
in the 'New' subjects worked well at the level of the society and
regional community, but had little to say about the individual in the
present or the past
2. Likewise, that the 'New' subjects had been successful at analysing
major trends and developments occurring over generations or cen-
turies or even longer, but had shied away from dealing with short-
lived events
3· That positivistic, pro-hard science 'new' format subjects assumed
that data collection and interpretation were objective and 'for all time'
rather than reflecting the personal, time-conditioned, subjective
needs of individual researchers.
This package of criticisms forms a recognizable intellectual movement in
our sister disciplines, and has belatedly been introduced into archaeol-
ogy in the last few years under the terms 'post-positivism' or 'post-
Processualism' (Hodder 1986).
The special relevance of this brief profile of developments in the
human sciences rests on the growing recognition in several of the
relevant disciplines that the Annales' paradigm may offer a methodology
4 John Bintliff
to tackle the critical agenda just listed, yet at the same time the Annales'
methodology can be seen as complementary, rather than contradictory,
to the central concepts and approaches of the 'New' format subjects (cf.
for example, Hobsbawm 1980).l
It certainly can be said that although the traditional descriptive and
narrative approaches, such as characterized archaeology, history and
geography before the 1960s renewal programme, were limited in their
theoretical underpinnings and offered little to each other in a broader
understanding of the human species, yet they presented a view of the
real world that was familiar and compatible with our experience of it. In
contrast the 'New' format subjects revealed a whole new world of
processual dynamics yet somehow failed to recreate a world as a
'participant/observer' would experience it. The Annales' paradigm suc-
ceeds in its best work precisely through its explicit combination of
experienced life and externally analysed life.
The Annales paradigm: Part I (Figure 1.1)
Stoianovitch, in his book (1976) on the growth of the Annales' school,
employs the Kuhnian paradigm model, with the approval of that central
figure in the movement, Fernand Braudel. The pre-paradigmatic stage is
typified by disruptive activity by the younger generation, unhappy with
traditional French history, geography and social science. What is being
rejected is the nineteenth-century German tradition of scholarship, with
its emphasis on great men and the development of national character, or
the determining influence of the physical environment on human
Pre-Paradigm: Annales de Géographie (1891-)
(Vidal de la Blache)
L'Année Sociologique (1896/8)
(Emile Durkheim)
Revue de Synthèse Historique (1900-)
(Henri Berr) —» Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre
Paradigm Coheres: Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale (1929-)
Feudal Society (Bloch) (1939-40)
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth
Century (Febvre (1942)
Paradigm Triumphant: La Méditerranée (Fernand Braudel) (1949)
—» Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie The Peasants of
Languedoc (1966)
Montaillou (1975)
Carnival (1979)
Figure 1.1 The Annales paradigm.