Hodder, Ian

English

Apollo (Cambridge)

86 multiple interpretations of the past is certainly valuable, but giving up on methodological guidelines by which to exploit t~em f~r understanding and insight is harmful. It would be_unfortu~ate indeed 1f such muddle were allowed to compromise the promise of his contextual approach which, I suspect, will be realised in direct relation to use of individualistic method. In closin~ I will add that Reading the Past is a difficult book to interpret. On ?~umerous issues, one finds Dr. Hodder's viewpoints accom- · oanied bv qualifiers that amount to counterviews. It is not easy to know where he stands. Even his position on relativism, perhaps the most crucial in the entire book, is not clear: An open re lativi sm aooears at first to be the only solution , wherebv 'anythinit goes.' Certainly there a re some attractive aspects of this solution, if it allows greater debate between different viewpoints and a fuller involvement of archaeology in contem-porarv social and political issues. Yet most archaeoloitists feel that this solution is too extreme. Most feel that some interpretations of the past are not as good as others, that not everything can be said with equal integrity. (p. 169) have shot the best of my arsenal at Dr. Hodder, and deli berately forged the ammunition to expose its sharpest edges. I strongly recormiend reading on , where Dr. Hodder will fire in return. Notes 1. Reading the Past: Curr~£! ~2!£aC~~! !£ !~~!2!~!~!.l.£~ l~ Archae~logy • .Ian Hodder, Cambridge University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-521-33960-X, £6.95 (Pacer); ISBN 0-521-32743-I, £20.50 (Hard). T r r r r f r r r r r I' I J t l l f 1 I I I j I r f READING BELL READING 'READING THE PAST' Ian Hodder I would like to start by considering some of the hard objective evidence that Jim Bell uses against me. At the end of his review article he quotes from o.169 of Reading the ~~. Bell uses this evidence to show that my position on relativism is not clear and that on numerous issues · I provide confusing sets of qualifiers and counterviews. .4.Iso, in the context of Bell's overall review, the quote, referring as it does to relativism, aooears to substantiate his assertion that my position on relativism is oerhaps the most crucial in the entire book. My book is a real thing (in the same way that archaeological data are real). And yet in readin~ Bell's reading of my book I realise that he often did not see what I wrote or what I thought I wrote. The book is real but different readers give it different realities. For example, I think that it is unambiguouslv clear in the context of adjacent paragraphs in the book that the phrase in the first part of the quote , "an open relativism aopears at first to be the only solution", is not my position. Indeed, in the context of the book as a whole; relativism is one '-ism' that I do not directly discuss at all! If the 'evidence' of the index is anything to go by, p.169 is the only place in the book where the word relativism is used. Far from being central to my account, relativism is entirely peripheral. On the other hand, I think it is unambiguously clear in the context of the book that I agree with the last sentence in the quote Bel 1 provides: "Most feel that some interpretations of the past are not as good as others, that not everything can be said with equal integrity". Indeed, the sentence which follows this on p.169 of Reading lli Past suggests that "the contemoorary social basis of our reconstructions of the past does not necessitate a lack of validity for those reconstructions~ At the top of the following page, I say that "in my view it is poss ible critically to evaluate past and present contexts in r el ation to each other, so as to achieve a better understanding of both". These statements certainly do not read like relativism as defined bv Bell. For him, relativi sm is the view that any interoretation is as plausible as any other , that there a r e no rational guidelines for assessing theories. It is seen as an irrational view of theory. He accepts that the second (and cen tral) part of my book is not relativi s t , but goes on to claim that I am a relativist despite the above quotes, despite the fac t that I only use the word once and desp ite the fact that when I do use the word it i s clearly disapproved of. Why doe s Bell claim that I am relativi s t in the face of all the evidence? I think the answer is that when we read a book (or archaeological evidence) it is not a passive process of absorbing information. Rather, we read in a creative way, putting meaning on and into the data. (Archaeological Review from Cambridge 6:1 (1987]) 88 A further example clarifies the ooint. Bell divides my book into three sections. I certainly did not write the book in three sections and I never conceived of it in that way. There is no 'objective' evidence of three sections. Indeed I had the rather naive hope that the book had an overall unity, or that it )lloUld be seen as having a continuous flow , building up from beginning to end. If forced to divide it into sections I would have said that each chapter was a section or that the book had two overall sections -- a critical review of existing aoproaches and then my contextual and post-proc~ssual ~chem~. I_ think the reason for Bell's perception of three sections lies 1n his own interests and academic strategy. He clearly believes that it is oossible to separate theory from data and to test/refute theory against data. Thus he separates my contextual method which appears to him to be hard , refutationist and scientific, from what he sees as my 'fall from grace' in the 'third' section where I examine the social basis of archaeohri cal theory, method and data. Be 11 's own description of the 'data' in my book demonstrates the theory-laden nature of data . New Archaeologists were distinctive in that they were not concerned with self-critical , reflexive analysis . They did not consider it necessarv to exmaine the social basis of their ideas. This was not because they thought that their ideas did not have a contemporary social basis . Rather it was because they took the view that Bell retains that, wherever one's ideas came from, they can be tested objectively against 1 the data . The link between their view and the study of process within New Archaeology is very strong and needs to be re-asserted in view of Bell's claims to the contrary. It is no accident that Binford scornfully used the term 'palaeopsychology' and that he and other orocessual archaeologists always refused to admit interpretive, emic approaches in archaeology. The study of behavioural, materialist aoproaches was intimately linked to the belief that science should progress through testing theory against hard data. It was only the behavioural and material world that allowed theories to be tested against the obs ervable, measurable data. The New Archaeologists forged a log ical and necessary link be tween pos i tivi sm and the s tudy of systemic proces ses. "The meaning which explanation has within a scientific frame of r e ference is s imply the demonstration of a cons tant articulation of var iables with i n a s ystem and the measur ement of the concomitant variability among the variables within the sys t em. Process ua l change in one variabl e can thus be shown to relate in a oredict abl e and quantifiabl e way to chan ges in othe r variable s " (Binford 1972, o.21). As a r esult , New Archaeolog i s t s we re blind to their own s ocial and oolitical pos itions. Since Bell's philosophica l position is in my vi ew close to that of many New Ar chaeologists (although not the ex treme law-and- order brigade), he al so oresents political views a s if they were ~oolitical. For example, in a number of places he di s cusse s structurali sm and Marx ism as if they ar e overly ideological, but he does not turn the same criticism on systems theory, oositivism and r e futationism. He talk s of s ome views o f the oast a s abuses or ;r,---1 ' .1 ., I i I 1 · f r· I l r 89 miscarriages of science and rationality . Certainly there are many examples. But on what grounds can it be claimed that systems theory and philosoohical oositions are not oolitical? For a Critical Theorist, systems theory is certainly an ideology. I have discussed it as an 'ideologv of control' - - a means by which a liberal intellectual world can set itself uo as providing a politically neutral method of social control (Hodder 1984). The claimed seoaration of fact from theory has exactly the same social and ool i tical consequences. It places the scientist outside, vet necessary for, society. Bell claims that in European prehistory the classical diffusionist theory was refuted by radiocarbon dating, thus leading to systems theory: old theory was refuted and new theory was introduced as part of the scientific proces s. In my view this is simply wrong. Certainly some asoects of t he old diffusionist theories were shown (for many , but not all, archaeo-logists) to be invalid when confronted with radiocarbon. But in f a ct diffusion remains, and is a valid explanation for cultural similarities in prehistoric Europe. The diffusion may now go in other directions, and it may now have different names (peer polity inter-action, or world systems mode l). But the concept of diffusion was not itself refuted at all. Rather, archaeologists began to be unhappy with the concept of diffusion. This change of attitude was much more closely associated with wider social and cultural changes than it was with any particular confrontation with the data. In the post-colonial era in Europe, indigenous development became increasing ly emphasised and more highly regarded, Perhaps more important , the expansion of science and high technology, the development of comouters and systems terminology could hardly have passed archaeology by. For cultural, social and funding purooses it was important to appear scientific. Systems theory was introduced and diffusionism declined. The science of radiocarbon was brought in to orove the point. Refusal to explore the social and political dimensions of archaeological enquiry in New Archaeological and in Bell's accounts is clear. It is associated with a belief in the separation of fact from theory. I do not mind whe ther one call s this separati on positi v i s m, refutationism or wha tever. In arguing over whe ther the New Archaeology wa s positivi s t or refutationi s t, it seems to me tha t there is a danger of following Bell into a philosophi ca l debate over terms rather than di s cus s ing issues, What i s important i s that the separii.tion between fa C? t and theory was made (whatever one call s it), As a result archaeology refused to be s elf-r eflective and it ther e for e r emained an immature discipline. Also it became more and more concerned with method. The 'bi g questions' were less f requentl y asked a s archaeologi s ts became more and more concerned with rigorous method that would es tabli sh their scientific status. In my vi ew the r esults of the New Archaeology have become increas ingly negative . We are now in a per i od of mindl ess methodology. You only have to look at the pages of American Antiquity over recent years , or at the sessions of the Society for American Archaeology to see this. The dominant centre of the discioline i s absorbed in site formation proces ses , middle range theory , methods for distinguishing foraging and collecting systems and so on. 90 The response to this situation should not be a retreat into total historical subjectivity. Bell reads my book from a position that rigidly separates subjective and objective approaches. It is from that position that his difficulties and the general impasse in archaeology derive. In Reading the Past I tried to argue that the data are both subjective and objective. It has always seemed t o me that two contradictory views are equally true. On the one hand it clearly is the case that archaeological data constrain what we can say about the past, There is a hard reality there and we have to fit our theories and oerceotions around it. On the other hand, it is equally clear that we cannot perceive or measure the oast without giving meaning to it. These meanings are oartly constructed in the social present. I therefore argued that archaeology involves evaluating data in relation to two contexts -- the past and the present. The data are both obiective and subjective but unlike the claims of New Archaeo-logists, I argued that these two components cannot be separated. The data can be carefully studied in relation to Past and present contextual relationships . Bell is incorrect to think that I separate contextual archaeology (the second of his three sections) from a consideration of contemporary social contexts and from the 'power' of science (the third section). The definition of past contexts is itself a theoretical enterprise. My doing of contextual archaeology is closely linked to my political views about the nature of society. We can see the total integration of the subjective and the objective in all aspects of daily life. We cannot think except through objective categories . We learn to understand the world through experience of it . The views that 'matter precedes thought' and that 'thought precedes matter' are equally viable. Can archaeologists not transcend the fixed dichotomy between objective and subjective, and the related dichotomies between positivism and relativism, materialism and idealism? The archaeological past is just another realm of experience by which we come to define ourselves in the pr esent. If we simply / imoose the oresent on the past uncritically, as was done by New Ar chaeo logists and traditional archaeologists, we can never learn about ) ourselves. All that information on library shelves quietly becomes useless. But if we inte rpret the oast critically in relation to the oresent, then archaeological knowledge contributes directly to the oresent. It is by ooening UP a dialogue between the past and the oresent that we come to know ourselves better. In this response to Bell's criticisms I have argued that he has read my text through tinted glasses. This is unavoidable and it is what ar~haeologists do in interpreting the past . In arguing with him about his r eview, our different social perceptions of the world are clarified and objectified. Such debate and cont r oversy should be the stuff of archaeological enquiry, since it is through that debate that we come to have a fuller understanding of our and others' viewpoints. And it is through that understanding, as long as it is critically developed, that we can play a fuller part in socie ty. r r l l I l r I I I I I f l I I l l T '{ 1 1 91 do not want to argue that my interpretation of 'my own' book is right and that Bell is wrong. The book is di vor~ed fr_om me. Its meaning does not deoend on the author but on the reading of 1t that is given. I do not wish for any authority in relation to the text. To control its meaning would be to control readin~s of it. That is not my concern. But neither am I slioping back into subjectivity and relativism. To read the book is to give an objective reality to one's thoughts, perceptions and assumptions. It is only through that objectivity that our subjectivities can be argued, fought over or transformed, References Binford, L.R. 1972. An archaeological perspective. Seminar Press, New York. Hodder, I. 1984. Archaeology in 1984. Antiquity 58, 25-32. 

Reading Bell reading 'Reading the Past'

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Reading Bell reading 'Reading the Past'

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