The First Excavations

In the eighteenth century more adventurous researchers initiated excavation of some of the most prominent sites. Pompeii in Italy was one of the first of these, with its striking Roman finds, although proper excavation did not begin there until the nineteenth century (see box overleaf). And in 1765, at the Huaca de Tantalluc on the coast of Peru, a mound was excavated and an offering discovered in a hollow; the mound’s stratigraphy was well described. Nevertheless, the credit for conducting what has been called “the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology” traditionally goes to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), later in his career third President of the United States, who in 1784 dug a trench or section across a burial mound on his property in Virginia. Jefferson’s work marks the beginning of the end of the Speculative Phase.

In Jefferson’s time people were speculating that the hundreds of unexplained mounds known east of the Mississippi River had been built not by the indigenous Native Americans, but by a mythical and vanished race of Moundbuilders. Jefferson adopted what today we should call a scientific approach, that is, he tested ideas about the mounds against hard evidence—by excavating one of them. His methods were careful enough to allow him to recognize different layers in his trench, and to see that the many human bones present were less well preserved in the lower layers. From this he deduced that the mound had been reused as a place of burial on many separate occasions. Although Jefferson admitted, rightly, that more evidence was needed to resolve the Moundbuilder question, he saw no reason why ancestors of the present-day Native Americans themselves could not have raised the mounds.

Jefferson was ahead of his time. His sound approach—logical deduction from carefully excavated evidence, in many ways the basis of modern archaeology—was not taken up by any of his immediate successors in North America. In Europe, meanwhile, extensive excavations were being conducted, for instance by the Englishman Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838), who dug into hundreds of burial mounds in southern Britain during the first decade of the nineteenth century. He successfully divided field monuments into different categories, such as “bell barrow,” which are still in use today. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Christian Maclagan (1811–1901) carried out the first scientific excavations of prehistoric sites in Scotland, including the distinctive type of Iron Age round tower known as a “broch” at Coldoch, though she did not receive credit for much of her work and was denied full membership of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. None of these excavations did much to advance the cause of knowledge about the distant past, since their interpretation was still within the biblical framework, which insisted on a short span for human existence.

The Antiquity of Humankind

These ideas did much to lay the groundwork for what was one of the significant events in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century (and an indispensable one for the discipline of archaeology): the establishment of the antiquity of humankind. It was a French customs inspector, Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868), working in the gravel quarries of the Somme River, who in 1841 published convincing evidence for the association there of human artifacts (of chipped stone, what we would today call hand-axes or “bifaces”) and the bones of extinct animals. Boucher de Perthes argued that this indicated human existence for a long time before the biblical Flood. His view did not at first win wide acceptance, but in 1859 two leading British scholars, John Evans (1823–1908) and Joseph Prestwich (1812–1896), visited him in France and were persuaded of the validity of his findings.

It was now widely agreed that human origins extended far back into a remote past, so that the biblical notion of the creation of the world just a few thousand years before our own time could no longer be accepted. The possibility of a prehistory of humankind, indeed the need for one, was established; the term itself came into general use after the publication by John Lubbock (1834–1913) of his book Prehistoric Times in 1865, which went on to become a bestseller.

The Concept of Evolution

These ideas harmonized well with the findings of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), whose fundamental work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, established the concept of evolution by natural selection as the best explanation for the origin and development of all plants and animals. The idea of evolution itself was not new—earlier scholars had suggested that living things must have changed or evolved through the ages. What Darwin demonstrated was how this change occurred. In the struggle for existence, environmentally better-adapted individuals of a particular species would survive (or be “naturally selected”), whereas less well-adapted ones would die. The surviving individuals would pass on their advantageous traits by heredity to their offspring and gradually the characteristics of a species would change to such an extent that a new species emerged. This was the process of evolution. Darwin’s other great work, The Descent of Man, was not published until 1871, but already the implications were clear: that the human species had emerged as part of this same process. The search for human origins in the material record, by the techniques of archaeology, could begin.

The Three Age System

As we have seen, some archaeological techniques, notably in the field of excavation, were already being developed. So too was another conceptual device which proved very useful for the progress of European prehistory: the Three Age System. As early as 1808, Colt Hoare had recognized a sequence of stone, brass, and iron artifacts within the barrows he excavated, but this was first systematically studied when, in 1836, the Danish scholar C. J. Thomsen (1788–1865) published his guidebook to the National Museum of Copenhagen. This appeared in English in 1848 as the Guide to Northern Archaeology. Thomsen proposed that the collections could be divided into those coming from a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. This system was soon found useful by scholars throughout Europe. A division in the Stone Age was later established between the Paleolithic (“Old Stone Age”) and the Neolithic (“New Stone Age”). These terms were less applicable to Africa, where bronze was not used south of the Sahara, or to the Americas, where bronze was less important and iron was not used before the European conquest. But it was conceptually significant. The Three Age System established the principle that by studying and classifying prehistoric artifacts one could produce a chronological ordering, and say something of the periods in question. Archaeology was moving beyond mere speculation about the past, becoming instead a discipline involving careful excavation and systematic study of the artifacts unearthed. Although superseded by chronometric dating methods (see Chapter 4), the Three Age System remains one of the fundamental divisions of archaeological materials today.

These three great conceptual advances—the antiquity of humankind, Darwin’s principle of evolution, and the Three Age System—offered a framework for studying the past, and for asking intelligent questions about it. Darwin’s ideas were influential also in another way. They suggested that human cultures might have evolved in a manner analogous to plant and animal species. Soon after 1859, British scholars such as General Pitt-Rivers (whom we shall meet again) and John Evans were devising schemes for the evolution of artifact forms which gave rise to the method of “typology”—the arrangement of artifacts in chronological or developmental sequence—later greatly elaborated by the Swedish scholar Oscar Montelius (1843–1921).

Ethnography and Archaeology

Another important strand in the thought of the time was the realization that the study by ethnographers of living communities in different parts of the world could be a useful starting point for archaeologists seeking to understand something of the lifestyles of their own early native inhabitants who clearly had comparably simple tools and crafts. For example, colonialist thinking meant that contact with indigenous communities in North America provided antiquarians and historians with models for tattooed images of Celts and Britons.

And at the same time ethnographers and anthropologists were themselves producing schemes of human progress. Strongly influenced by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, the British anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and his American counterpart Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) both published important works in the 1870s arguing that human societies had evolved from a state of savagery (primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society). The ideas in Morgan’s book Ancient Society (1877)—particularly the notion that people had once lived in a state of primitive communism, sharing resources equally—strongly influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who drew on them in their writings about pre-capitalist societies, thus influencing many later Marxist archaeologists. The paradigm of social progression was couched in colonialism, assuming Western civilization as the apex of the human story, and is a legacy that many archaeologists continue to struggle with in their interpretations of past societies.

Discovering the Early Civilizations

By the 1880s, then, many of the ideas underlying modern archaeology had been developed. But these ideas themselves took shape against a background of major nineteenth-century discoveries of ancient civilizations in the Old World and the New World.

The splendors of ancient Egyptian civilization had already been brought to the attention of an avid public after Napoleon’s military expedition of 1798–99. It was the discovery by one of his soldiers of the Rosetta Stone that eventually provided the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Inscribed on the stone are identical texts written in both Egyptian and Greek scripts. The Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) used this bilingual inscription to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822, after fourteen years’ work. A similar piece of brilliant scholarly detection helped unlock the secrets of cuneiform writing, the script used for many languages in ancient Mesopotamia. It was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson (1810–1895), who spent twenty years studying a sixth-century BCE trilingual inscription located on an inaccessible cliff-face between Baghdad and Tehran before cracking the cuneiform code. Other ancient scripts would only be deciphered well into the twentieth century: for example, Linear B was only deciphered in 1952, after more than two decades’ work on the Mycenaean Greek script by Alice Kober (1906–1950), Michael Ventris (1922–1956), and John Chadwick (1920–1998). Meanwhile, the ancient Indus, or Harappan, script has yet to be deciphered.

Egypt and the Near East also held a fascination for the American lawyer and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852), but it was in the New World that he was to make his name. His travels in Yucatán, Mexico, with the English artist Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), and the superbly illustrated books they produced together in the early 1840s, revealed for the first time to an enthusiastic public the ruined cities of the ancient Maya. Unlike contemporary researchers in North America, who continued to argue for a vanished white race of Moundbuilders as the architects of the earthworks there, Stephens rightly believed that the Maya monuments were created by the ancestors of the indigenous Maya still living in the area. Stephens also noted that there were similar hieroglyphic inscriptions at the different sites, which led him to argue for Maya cultural unity—but the glyphs would not be deciphered until the 1960s, by Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909–1985).

If readings of the Bible inspired the search for lost civilizations in Egypt and the Near East, it was readings of Homer’s account of the Trojan Wars in his narrative poem the Iliad that fired the imagination of the German banker Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), and sent him on a quest for the city of Troy. With remarkable luck and good judgment he successfully identified it in a series of field campaigns at Hissarlik, western Turkey, in the 1870s and 1880s. Not content with that achievement, he then also dug at Mycenae in Greece and revealed—as at Troy—a hitherto unknown prehistoric civilization. Schliemann’s methods of excavation have been criticized as crude and cavalier, but few were rigorous in his day, and he demonstrated how interpretation of the stratigraphy of a mound site could be used to reconstruct the remote past. Nevertheless, it fell to the next generation of archaeologists, led by General Pitt-Rivers and William Flinders Petrie, to establish the true basis of modern field techniques (see box, pp. 30–33).

The Ecological Approach

From the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most influential new thinkers in North America was the anthropologist Julian Steward (1902–1972). Similarly to Childe, he was interested in explaining cultural change, but he brought to the question an anthropologist’s understanding of how living cultures work. He highlighted the fact that cultures interact not only with one another but with the environment as well. The study of ways in which adaptation to the environment could cause cultural change Steward christened cultural ecology. Perhaps the most direct archaeological impact of these ideas can be seen in the work of Gordon Willey (1913–2002), one of Steward’s graduate associates, who carried out a pioneering investigation in the Virú Valley, Peru, in the late 1940s. This study of 1,500 years of pre-Columbian occupation involved a combination of observation from detailed maps and aerial photographs (see box, pp. 84–85), survey at ground level, and excavation and surface potsherd collection to establish dates for the hundreds of prehistoric sites identified. Willey then plotted the geographical distribution of these sites in the valley at different periods—one of the first settlement-pattern studies in archaeology (see Chapter 3)—and set them against the changing local environment.

Independently of Steward, the British archaeologist Grahame Clark (1907–1995) developed an ecological approach with even more direct relevance for archaeological fieldwork. Breaking away from the artifact-dominated culture-historical approach of his contemporaries, he argued that by studying how human populations adapted to their environments we can understand many aspects of ancient society. Collaboration with new kinds of specialists was essential: specialists who could identify animal bones or plant remains in the archaeological record could help build up a picture not only of what prehistoric environments were like but also of what foods prehistoric peoples ate. Clark’s landmark excavation at Star Carr in northeast England in 1949–51 demonstrated just how much information could be gleaned from what appeared to be an unpromising site without stone structures, dating to just after the end of the Ice Age. Careful environmental analysis and recovery of organic remains showed that this had been a camp on the edge of a lake, where people had hunted red deer and eaten a wide variety of wild plant foods. The insights from an ecological approach need not be confined to individual sites or groups of sites: in a remarkable work of synthesis, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952), Clark provided a panoramic view of the varying human adaptations to the European landscape over thousands of years.

Out of this early ecological research has grown the whole field of environmental and dietary reconstruction discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.

The Rise of Archaeological Science

The other striking development of the period immediately after World War II was the rapid development of scientific aids for archaeology. We have already seen how pioneers of the ecological approach forged an alliance with specialists from the environmental sciences. Even more important, however, was the application to archaeology of the physical and chemical sciences.

The greatest breakthrough came in the field of dating. In 1949 the American chemist Willard Libby (1908–1980) announced his invention of radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dating. It was not until well over a decade later that the full impact of this momentous technical achievement began to be felt (see below), but the implications were clear: here at last archaeologists might have a means of directly determining the age of undated sites and finds anywhere in the world without recourse to complicated cross-cultural comparisons with areas already dated by historical methods (usually written records).

Traditionally, prehistoric Europe had been dated by virtue of supposed contacts with early Greece and hence (indirectly) with ancient Egypt, which could itself be dated historically. The radiocarbon method now held the prospect of providing a completely independent chronology for ancient Europe. Chapter 4 discusses radiocarbon in detail, alongside dating methods in general.

The growth in archaeological applications for scientific techniques was such that by 1963 a volume entitled Science in Archaeology, edited by Don Brothwell (1933–2016) and Eric Higgs (1908–1976), could be published which ran to nearly 600 pages, with contributions from fifty-five experts, not merely on dating techniques and plant and animal studies, but also on methods for analyzing human remains (see Chapter 11) and artifacts (Chapters 8 and 9).

Artifact studies, for instance, could contribute to an understanding of early trade: it proved possible to identify the raw materials of certain artifacts and the sources from which they had come through the technique of trace-element analysis (the measurement of elements present in the material only in very small amounts; see pp. 366–70). As with many of the new methods, research in this field stretched back to the 1930s, when the Austrian archaeologist Richard Pittioni (1906–1985) had begun to apply trace-element analysis to early copper and bronze artifacts. Nevertheless, it was not until the post-war years that this and a number of other newly developed scientific techniques really began to make an impact on archaeology; and the increasing power of computers and software has made them indispensable for many aspects of data handling.

Over recent decades developments in biochemistry and molecular genetics have led to the emergence of the major disciplines of molecular archaeology and archaeogenetics. Sensitive techniques in the field of organic chemistry are allowing the precise identification of organic residues, while isotopic studies are giving fresh insights into diet and nutrition. The first sequencing of ancient DNA was of a museum specimen of the quagga, an extinct subspecies of Zebra, and was published in 1984 by a team led by Allan Wilson from the University of California, Berkeley. Archaeogenetics captured the public eye in 1997, when Svante Pääbo and his colleagues reported the first successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (DNA found in mitochrondria, outside the nucleus; also called mtDNA), originating from a specimen found in Germany’s Neander Valley. This was followed by the publishing of the full sequence of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, where Pääbo and his team concluded there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and Eurasian humans.

The study of DNA, both modern and ancient, has offered exciting and promising approaches to the study of human evolution, and is now also contributing to the study of plant and animal domestication on a systematic, molecular basis. Ancient DNA studies have recently helped address the question of whether changes in material culture are due to innovations within a society, or the migration of new populations (see Chapter 12).

The Birth of the New Archaeology

In the United States the answer was provided, at least in part, by a group of younger archaeologists led by Lewis Binford (1931–2011). They set out to offer a new approach to the problems of archaeological interpretation, which was soon dubbed by its critics and then by its supporters the New Archaeology. In a series of articles, and later in an edited volume, New Perspectives in Archaeology (1968), Lewis Binford, Sally Binford, and their colleagues argued against the approach that tried to use archaeological data to write a kind of “counterfeit history.” They maintained that the potential of the archaeological evidence was much greater than had been realized for the investigation of social and economic aspects of past societies. Their view of archaeology was more optimistic than that of many of their predecessors.

They also argued that archaeological reasoning should be made explicit. Conclusions should be based not simply on the personal authority of the scholar making the interpretation, but on an explicit framework of logical argument. In this they relied on current ideas within the philosophy of science, where conclusions, if they are to be considered valid, must be open to testing.

Within the spirit of processual archaeology advocated by Willey and Phillips, they sought to explain rather than simply to describe, and to do so, as in all sciences, by seeking to make valid generalizations.

In doing this they sought to avoid the rather vague talk of the “influences” of one culture upon another, and instead to analyze a culture as a system that could be broken down into subsystems. This led them to study subsistence in its own right, and technology, and the social subsystem, and the ideological subsystem, and trade and demography, and so forth, with much less emphasis on artifact typology and classification. In this way they had been partly anticipated by the ecological approach of the 1950s, which was already studying what one might call “the subsistence subsystem” in very much these terms.

In order to fulfill these aims, the New Archaeologists to a large extent turned away from the approaches of history toward those of the sciences. Very similar developments were under way in Britain at the same time, exemplified by the work of David L. Clarke (1937–1976), particularly in his book Analytical Archaeology (1968), which reflected the great willingness of the New Archaeologists to employ more sophisticated quantitative techniques, computer-aided where possible (computers were first used for the storage, organization, and analysis of data in the 1960s), and to draw on ideas from other disciplines, notably geography.

It must be admitted that, in their enthusiasm to seize on and utilize a battery of new techniques, the New Archaeologists drew also on a range of previously unfamiliar vocabularies (drawn from systems theory, cybernetics, etc.), which their critics tended to dismiss as jargon. Indeed, in recent years, several critics have reacted against some of those aspirations to be scientific, which they have categorized as “scientistic” or “functionalist.” Much of the emphasis of early processual archaeology was indeed upon functional or ecological explanation, and it is now possible to regard its first decade as representing a functional-processual phase, which has been followed by a cognitive-processual phase, which seeks more actively to include the consideration of symbolic and cognitive aspects of early societies into the program of research. Many of these points are considered in Chapter 12. But there can be no doubt that archaeology will never be the same again. Most workers today, even the critics of the early New Archaeology, implicitly recognize its influence when they agree that it is indeed the goal of archaeology to explain what happened in the past as well as to describe it. Most of them agree too that in order to do good archaeology it is necessary to make explicit, and then to examine, our underlying assumptions. That was what David Clarke meant when he wrote in a 1973 article of “the loss of innocence” in archaeology.

World Archaeology

The questioning approach of the New Archaeology and the demand for explicit and quantitative procedures led to new developments in field research, many of which built on or coincided with the programs of fieldwork already being conducted by archaeologists who would not necessarily have thought of themselves as followers of the new school of thought.

In the first place, there was a much greater emphasis on field projects with well-defined research objectives—projects that set out to answer specific questions about the past. Second, the new insights yielded by the ecological approach made it clear that satisfactory answers to many major questions would only be forthcoming if whole regions and their environments were studied, rather than single sites in isolation. And the third development, very much linked to the first and second, was the realization that, in order to carry out these objectives effectively, new techniques needed to be introduced of intensive field survey and selective excavation, coupled with statistically based sampling procedures and improved recovery methods, including screening (sieving) of excavated material.

These are the key elements of modern field research, discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Their widespread application began to create for the first time a truly global discipline: an archaeology with worldwide reach, and an archaeology that reaches back in time to the beginnings of human existence and right up to the modern period.

The increasing involvement of archaeologists with living societies, and the simultaneous rise among such societies of an awareness of their own heritage and their claims to it, has raised the question of who should have access to, or ownership of, the past. It is clear, for example, that the only inhabitants of Australia before European settlement were the Aborigines. To what extent should Aboriginal people control archaeological work on their forebears, even those dating back 20,000 years or more? This important issue is explored further in Chapter 14.

Such archaeologists as Isabel McBryde, John Mulvaney, and Rhys Jones (1941–2001) have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Aborigines in the fight to prevent destruction by developers of parts of Australia’s precious ancient heritage, for instance in Tasmania. Increasing tensions resulted in the Swedish-born Australian archaeologist Laila Haglund becoming a leader in the establishment of commercial archaeology in Australia. As the pace of worldwide economic development has quickened, archaeologists everywhere have had to adapt and learn to salvage what they can about the past in advance of the bulldozer or plow. Indeed, the massive upsurge of this salvage or rescue archaeology, much of it government-funded, has given a new impetus to the archaeology of our towns and cities—to what in Europe is known as “medieval or postmedieval archaeology,” and what in the United States and elsewhere is called “historical archaeology.”

Interpretive Approaches in the 1980s and 1990s

While the New Archaeology rolled on, in the 1980s and 1990s a diverse range of new approaches to the past was developed and pursued. Collectively termed postprocessual, these approaches dealt with interesting and difficult questions on the objectivity of archaeological interpretations, and the possible pluralities of voices and pasts. Influential arguments, some first advanced by Ian Hodder (excavator at Çatalhöyük; see box on pp. 44–45), have stressed that there is no single, correct way to undertake archaeological inference, and that the goal of objectivity is unattainable. Even the archaeological data are “theory laden,” and many interpretations are possible. The various interpretive archaeologies often reject the tendency toward cross-cultural comparison and the modes of explanation relying upon generalization characteristic of processual archaeology. These approaches challenged archaeologists to be more aware of their own assumptions, especially their own political and social biases which they bring to any research question or design.

In their more extreme forms, these arguments led to charges of “relativism,” or a research style where “anything goes,” and where the borders between archaeological research and fiction may be difficult to define. One of the strengths of the interpretive approach is to bring into central focus the actions and thoughts of individuals in the past, which is also the goal of cognitive archaeology (see Chapter 12). But it goes beyond the methodological individualism of the latter, arguing that in order to understand and interpret the past it is necessary to employ empathy, to “get inside the minds” and think the thoughts of ancient people. This might seem a logical goal when examining symbolic systems such as figurative works (e.g. paintings) employing a complex iconography, but it presents problems when no iconographic data exist.

The earlier writings of Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley initially provoked reactions of this kind (see Chapter 12). But in their later writings they, and indeed the majority of postprocessual archaeologists, have taken a less aggressively anti-scientific tone, and the emphasis has instead been upon the use of a variety of personal and often humanistic insights to develop a range of different fields and interests, recognizing the varied perspectives of different social groups, and accepting the consequent “multivocality” of the postmodern world. These are old debates now, and in recent years there has been some convergence of views, where the distinction between processual and postprocessual is no longer clear, or even useful. New terms, such as “processual plus,” coined by Michelle Hegmon in 2003, have helped to bridge this divide. Currently, archaeological research commonly includes a tendency toward a more holistic approach where different perspectives can be brought together.

Archaeology and Gender

The archaeology of gender originated in feminist archaeology, which often had the explicit objective of exposing and correcting the androcentrism (male bias) of archaeology. There is no doubt that in the modern world the role of women professionals, including archaeologists, has often been a difficult one. For instance, Dorothy Garrod, the first woman professor of archaeology in Britain (see p. 32), was appointed to a chair in 1937, at a time when female undergraduates in her university (Cambridge) were not allowed to take a degree at the end of their course, but only a diploma. There was—and still is—an imbalance to be rectified in the academic world, and that was one of the early objectives of feminist archaeology. A second was to illuminate the roles of women in the past more clearly, where often they had been overlooked, and to rectify the male bias in so much archaeological writing. In an article published in 1984, Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector (1944–2011) drew attention to the androcentrism of the discipline of archaeology. As Margaret Conkey pointed out, there existed a need “to reclaim women’s experience as valid, to theorize this experience, and to use this to build a program of political action.” The questions they raised, however, were not widely explored until the 1990s because it was not until then that a suitable critical climate existed in archaeology. In Britain this was provided by the theoretical development of postprocessual archaeology and much feminist research has been conducted within this framework.

A central idea of feminist archaeology soon became the distinction between sex and gender. It was argued that sex—female or male—may be regarded as biologically determined and can be established archaeologically from skeletal remains. But gender—at its simplest, woman or man—is a social construct, involving the sex-related roles of individuals in society. Gender roles vary greatly both from place to place and through time. Systems of kinship, of marriage (including polygamy, polyandry, etc.), inheritance, and the division of labor are all related to biological sex but not determined by it (see box, pp. 194–95).

In addition to her contribution to the history of migration in Eurasia (Chapter 12), Marija Gimbutas is also well known for her study of female figurines in southeastern Europe and Anatolia, for instance in her Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974). She argued that the principally female figurines seen in the Neolithic and Copper Age of those regions demonstrate the important status of women. She argued for an old Europe influenced by feminine values that disappeared under the dominance of an eastern Indo-European male warrior hierarchy in the ensuing Bronze Age.

Marija Gimbutas supported the concept of a great fertility “Mother Goddess,” embraced by some public enthusiasts. Current excavations at Early Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Turkey, where female figurines of baked clay have indeed been found (see box, pp. 44–45), are now visited regularly by Goddess devotees whose views are respectfully entertained by the excavators, even though they do not share them. But there are skeptical voices. Ian Hodder has argued instead that “the elaborate female symbolism in the earlier Neolithic expressed the objectification and subordination of women.…Perhaps women rather than men were shown as objects because they, unlike men, had become objects of ownership and male desires.” The careful study by Peter Ucko (1938–2007) of comparable material from the Aegean showed that many of these figurines lacked features diagnostic of sex or gender, a view supported by more recent Maltese evidence. Studies of comparable baked clay figurines from the Formative period in Oaxaca, Mexico (c. 1800–500 BCE), have reached very different conclusions, suggesting that the figurines were made by women for use in rituals where they often represented ancestors not deities. And Lynn Meskell, in an avowedly feminist critique, has written of “pseudo-feminism” in relation to the “Mother Goddess,” seeing the work of Gimbutas as:

steeped within the ‘establishment’ epistemological framework of polar opposites, rigid gender roles, barbarian invaders and culture stages which are now regarded as outmoded. It is unfortunate that many archaeologists interested in gender are drawn to historical fiction and emotional narratives.…At this juncture sound feminist scholarship needs to be divorced from methodological shortcomings, reverse sexism, conflated data and pure fantasy. (Meskell 1995, 83)

In her seminal book Gender Archaeology (2000), Marie Louise Stig Sørensen explores the relationships between social roles and gender, and goes beyond theory to put these ideas into practice. More recently, in 2013, the organization TrowelBlazers was founded by archaeologists and earth scientists in order to highlight the contributions of women in archaeology. It has made strides in improving the recognition of women in the history of the discipline, and in particular has emphasized the importance of networks between women through time in furthering archaeological discovery.

Recent Currents of Thought

From the 1990s onward, the fading theoretical conflict between processual and interpretive standpoints allowed space for other approaches in archaeology. Some archaeologists explored ways to include both the individual and social structures in interpretations. A notable example of this is “agency and practice theory,” which stems from the work of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) and has greatly influenced archaeological thinking. Giddens argued that human agents act with intentionality and both structure and are structured by social institutions and their material surroundings. Human agents may choose either to maintain a social convention by following the understood rules or to act against it. Large-scale social systems and structures are therefore created by human intention and have the potential to change. According to Bourdieu, however, the behavior of the actors arises from what practice theorists refer to as habitus—unthinking, tacit acts and basic knowledge. People often act by following social cues (for example, material objects, the built environment, gestures from other people), and this is often done with very little conscious effort. When these social cues are challenged or misinterpreted, the conventions and culture can change. The individual is therefore understood by comprehending the connections that make action possible and change achievable.

One of the most influential theories in current archaeology is around identity and the body. Archaeologists had been exploring issues of identity at least since the emergence of Marxist archaeologies, but more intense discussions began in the 1970s as gender archaeology became more influential. Archaeologists drew from theorists such as Judith Butler, whose work challenges modern assumptions of how genders, gender roles, and sexualities are natural or universal. Butler argues that many identities are not inherent in an individual but performed, through ritual, dress, and actions of everyday life. Such perspectives now inform the work of many archaeologists: for example, Rosemary Joyce has investigated how ceremonial activities gendered children in ancient Mesoamerica, and Anthony Harding has explored how bronze razors in Bronze Age Scandinavia were used to construct male identity. Research into the ways that identity has been constructed in the past has also led to innovative examinations of the human body and the ways it has been viewed, conceptualized, and represented by different societies.

Another important development is the increased appreciation of the role played by artifacts themselves—material things—in the development of human relationships and the promotion of social and technological change. Central to this perspective is the term materiality, which can refer to the general quality of an object as well as to the relationships between things and humans. Anthropologists such as Daniel Miller explore how objects can have person-like qualities in the ways that they can generate human responses, extend a person’s influence, or define an identity. The notion that specific objects have active roles in social life makes it appropriate to speak of the “agency” of things. That is one of the innovations of “actor network theory” (see Chapter 5), which examines how the relationships between humans and objects create a network, the connections of which constitute society.

A final recent development in archaeology involves the challenge of Western conceptions and “commonsense” categories when interpreting the past. For instance, some anthropologists—such as Martin Holbraad—argue that, while exploring the active role of objects is useful for widening the range of possible interpretations of how people lived in the world, these analyses still tend to work within the debates and assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition. Archaeologists and anthropologists now propose an ontological turn, whereby any interpretation should be alert to the fact that the people whose lives are being studied, their relationships and activities, might exceed Western categories and realities in all sorts of ways. Ontologists attempt to understand this otherness on its own terms, rather than assume a Western perspective is superior or more ‘real’ than the people studied. This conceptual shift is part of a wider endeavor to “decolonize” the past, reversing the tendency to simplify and trivialize forms of activity that do not align with Western values.

Çatalhöyük: Interpretive Archaeologies in Action

The history of research at this important early farming site in Turkey illustrates the changing approaches to archaeology in the past six decades.

Original Excavations

The site was discovered by the archaeologist James Mellaart (1925–2012) in 1958, in the course of a survey of the fertile Konya Plain in south-central Turkey which began in 1951. He started excavating the site in 1961, and the dramatic nature of his discovery soon became clear. The 21-m (65-ft.) high mound cloaked the remains of an Early Neolithic (early farming) town 13 ha (32 acres) in extent with an “agglomerate” plan (see p. 409) and with deeply stratified levels going back to at least 7200 BCE. The well-preserved rooms had plastered walls, some with wall paintings and plaster decorations incorporating bull skulls, and the finds included terracotta figures, several of them female, suggesting to certain scholars a “Mother Goddess” cult. Remains of textiles, plants, and animals were recovered, and the obsidian of which the abundant tools were made proved on trace-element analysis (see pp. 363–69) to derive from local sources. In 1965 the excavation was interrupted, leaving many questions unanswered. In particular it was not clear whether Mellaart’s excavations at the southwest part of the site had revealed a “shrine quarter,” or whether the high frequency of rooms with painted walls and other symbolic materials would be repeated in other parts of the mound.

Aims of the Succeeding Researches

Ian Hodder, one of the most influential figures in the postprocessual movement of the 1980s and 1990s, has taken up the challenge offered by the site, beginning surface research in 1993 and excavation in 1995. One aim of the project was to use modern field techniques to investigate the structure of the site and the functioning of its buildings in order to answer some of the central questions left unresolved by Mellaart. A falling water table in the area made urgent the investigation of the lower, unexcavated parts of the site, which were known to have well-preserved organic remains, such as wood, baskets, and perhaps unfired clay tablets, necessitating a six-month excavation season in 1999.

But Hodder also set himself two yet more ambitious objectives appropriate to the “interpretive” approach arising from the postprocessual debate. The first was to develop a more flexible and open approach to stratigraphic excavation. This has involved encouraging interpretation “at the trowel’s edge.” The moment of excavation is surrounded with discussion between the excavator and a wide range of specialists. The different specialists then process material from the trench quickly so that they can feed information back to the excavator. The excavator is also asked to keep video records and to make diary entries about their interpretations as they dig, and all the data are made available on an interactive database.

The second objective was similarly to allow more open-ended and multivocal approaches to the interpretation of the site as a whole, allowing not only different specialists to have a voice but also the local inhabitants, and indeed visitors, not least those considering (with Marija Gimbutas) the site to be important for the emergence of a cult of the “Mother Goddess” (see pp. 42–43, and 419).

The decision to make data from the excavation available on the project’s website therefore goes beyond a simple intention to publish the findings promptly: it furthers the postprocessual wish for multiple and alternative interpretations by all those choosing to take part. While the excavators have a duty to use their specialist knowledge of the site to put forward interpretations, an inclusive approach is sought.

The accompanying anthropological project focuses on the community living in the surrounding villages (some of whom are hired at the site), on domestic and foreign tourists visiting the site, on Goddess groups and worshipers, on local and central government officials, and on artists and fashion designers interested in the site. This “multi-sited” ethnography is seen as an integral part of the “reflexive methodology” used at Çatalhöyük.

In the same spirit, several semi-independent excavation teams work in different areas of the site, including a team of Berkeley archaeologists, a team from Poznań in Poland, and three Turkish excavation teams. In the early 1990s Shahina Farid became the field director at Çatalhöyük, a position she held for nearly twenty years, managing more than 200 researchers and students, and constructing the stratigraphic sequence of the site.

Results

The “new” excavations have been underway now for more than twenty years and it is possible to assess the extent to which the use of a reflexive methodology gives insights that differ from those of over fifty years ago. Certainly a large number of publications have appeared, including a volume written by Sadrettin Dural, the site guard.

New insights from detailed micro-residue, and chemical studies of deposits on floors have shown that buildings such as Mellaart’s “Shrine VI.A.10” were houses used for a wide range of daily functions. The complex symbolism at Çatalhöyük was an integral part of daily life. The figurines of women, along with men and animals, have depositional contexts in middens which do not suggest gods and goddesses. Hodder’s approach at Çatalhöyük has its critics, yet it is an influential project where a coherent, alternative theoretical approach will have a significant impact on archaeological practice.

In fact, the experiment of Çatalhöyük builds on a strong tradition of archaeology in Turkey. In the mid-twentieth century, the archaeologist, activist, and former Olympic fencer Halet Çambel (1916–2014) excavated the Hittite fortress of Karatepe, where she uncovered a sort of Hittite “Rosetta Stone” with both Hittite and Phoenician scripts. Her student Ufuk Esin went on to lead excavations at Aşıklı Höyük, where she instituted the sort of multidisciplinary excavation practices that are now very well known from world-famous sites such as nearby Çatalhöyük itself. Mihriban Özbaşaran, who also once led an excavation team at Çatalhöyük and is now Director of the Aşıklı Höyük Research Project, has carried on the revolutionary legacy of that project, which also brought in modern theoretical approaches and analyses despite criticism.

Pluralizing Pasts and Indigenous Archaeology

Archaeologists are now more likely than ever to question the implicit assumptions and traditional histories that have determined the presentation of the past. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in indigenous archaeology, which is fundamental to the archaeological discipline today (Chapters 14 and 15). Groups that have been historically marginalized by colonialism, such as Native American and Australian Aboriginal peoples, often found their interests in relation to the treatment of objects and remains, and the ownership and use of cultural and intellectual property, overlooked and misunderstood. Now these groups are seeking to gain greater influence over the definition, interpretation, and management of their heritage. Such archaeologists as Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst argue that practitioners have a responsibility to facilitate indigenous voices and to ensure indigenous peoples are involved when asking such questions as who benefits from archaeological research, do archaeologists have a right to control the past of others, and is the Western archaeological theory and method necessarily the best way of interpreting the past in any specific context.

Many archaeological projects across the world now work in collaboration with indigenous groups right from the initial shaping of the research design. In South Africa, the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project is an example of a successful collaboration between archaeologists and local people. Launched in the 1990s, the community-based heritage and education project uses archaeology and the local landscape as a framework for learning and for reconnecting the descendants of indigenous people with a past from which colonialism has largely severed them.

Central to the increasing visibility of these issues has been the quadrennial World Archaeological Congress (WAC), founded in 1986 by the British archaeologist Peter Ucko. Having served as the Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Ucko perceived the need both to create a platform for indigenous voices and to heed what they had to say. Although the 1994 meeting in New Delhi was marred by internal Indian disagreements, and intending participants from Arab and developing countries were refused US entry visas for the 2003 congress in Washington, D.C., the WAC has succeeded in creating a forum where the archaeologies of different ethnic groups are respected and encouraged.

Questions have also arisen about the nature of “globalization,” itself the outcome of technological advances developed in the West. In particular, the Western-conceived notion of “cultural heritage management” has been seen by postcolonial thinkers as an imposition of Western values, with officially endorsed notions of “heritage” perhaps leading to homogenization and the undervaluation of cultural diversity. Even the UNESCO-sponsored listing of World Heritage Sites (Chapter 15), from the standpoint of this critique, is dominated by Western-formulated ideas of “heritage.”

Such questions are also raised by Western archaeologists much nearer to home. There is an increasing interest in the archaeology of recent centuries, right down to the present, to the point that “heritage” becomes a term the precise meanings of which are frequently contested. While some aspects of archaeology at the beginning of the new millennium were inevitably controversial, in many ways they were also very positive. They emphasized the value of the past to the contemporary world, and led to the realization that cultural heritage is an important part of the human environment and can be as fragile as the natural environment. This implies that the archaeologist has a crucial role to play in achieving a balanced view of our present world, which is inescapably the product of the worlds that have preceded it. The task of interpretation is now recognized as being much more complex than it once seemed—a “loss of innocence” that is perhaps the most lasting legacy of the New Archaeology.