The Languages of Archaeology Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing

The Languages of Archaeology Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing Rosemary A. Joyce with Robert W. Preucel, Jeanne Lopiparo, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce Blackwell Publishers THE LANGUAGES OF ARCHAEOLOGY Social Archaeology General Editor: Ian Hodder, Stanford University Advisory Editors Margaret Conkey, University of California at Berkeley Mark Leone, University of Maryland Alain Schnapp, UER d’Art et d’Archéologie, Paris Stephen Shennan, University of Southampton Bruce Trigger, McGill University, Montreal Titles in Print ARCHAEOLOGIES OF LANDSCAPE Edited by Wendy Ashmore and A. Bernard Knapp TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL AGENCY Marcia-Anne Dobres ENGENDERING ARCHAEOLOGY Edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey SOCIAL BEING AND TIME Christopher Gosden THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ISLAM Timothy Insoll AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF CAPITALISM Matthew Johnson THE LANGUAGES OF ARCHAEOLOGY Rosemary A. Joyce with Robert W. Preucel, Jeanne Lopiparo, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce ARCHAEOLOGIES OF SOCIAL LIFE Lynn Meskell ARCHAEOLOGY AS CULTURAL HISTORY Ian Morris CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY IN THEORY Robert W. Preucel and Ian Hodder BEREAVEMENT AND COMMEMORATION Sarah Tarlow METAPHOR AND MATERIAL CULTURE Christopher W. Tilley In preparation THE RISE OF MESO-AMERICA Elizabeth Brumfiel COMPANION TO SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel ARCHAEOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS Robert W. Preucel The Languages of Archaeology Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing Rosemary A. Joyce with Robert W. Preucel, Jeanne Lopiparo, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce Blackwell Publishers Chapters 1, 3, 6, and 7 © Rosemary A. Joyce 2002. Chapter 2 © Rosemary A. Joyce and Robert W. Preucel 2002. Chapter 4 © Jeanne Lopiparo 2002. Chapter 5 © Rosemary A. Joyce, Carolyn Guyer and Michael Joyce 2002. Editorial Offices: 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Tel: +44 (0)1865 791100 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA Tel: +1 781 388 8250 The right of Rosemary A. Joyce to be identified as the author of chapters 1, 3, 6, 7, and co-author of chapters 2 and 5 of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right of Robert W. Preucel to be identified as the co-author of chapter 2 of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right of Jeanne Lopiparo to be identified as the author of chapter 4 of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right of Carolyn Guyer and Michael Joyce to be identified as the co-authors of chapter 5 of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, a Blackwell Publishing company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joyce, Rosemary A., 1956– The languages of archaeology : dialogue, narrative, and writing / Rosemary A. Joyce, with Robert W. Preucel, Jeanne Lopiparo, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce. p. cm. – (The languages of archaeology) ISBN 0-631-22178-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-631-221794 - (bk)p 1. Archaeology – Methodology. 2. Rhetoric. 3. Technical writing. 4. Narration (Rhetoric) 5. Discourse analysis. I. Preucel, Robert W. II. Lopiparo, Jeanne. III. Guyer, Carolyn. IV. Title. V. Series. CC75.7 .J69 2002 930.1 – dc21 2002001347 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in Garamond by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishers, visit our website: www.blackwellpublisher.co.uk Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Introducing the First Voice 4 2 Writing the Field of Archaeology 18 Rosemary A. Joyce with Robert W. Preucel 3 Dialogues Heard and Unheard, Seen and Unseen 39 4 A Second Voice: Crafting Cosmos 68 Jeanne Lopiparo 5 Voices Carry Outside the Discipline 100 Rosemary A. Joyce with Carolyn Guyer and Michael Joyce 6 The Return of the First Voice 133 7 Final Dialogues 145 Notes 151 Bibliography 153 Index 171 Figures 2.1 Distribution over time of introductory texts consulted in the survey 20 4.1–4.4 A sample reading of Crafting Cosmos. The pointing hand shows the links selected by the reader (in this case, Jeanne Lopiparo). These screens demonstrate navigation using the world tree metaphor 90–1 4.5–4.15 This section of the reading explores the juxtapositions of revoiced utterances in heteroglossic dialogues 92–7 4.16–4.20 Crafting Cosmos grows from the household archaeology of the roots of Classic Maya Society 97–9 5.1 The original opening screen of Sister Stories, showing the original iconic layout of the top level of spaces 102 Acknowledgments Parts of chapters 1 and 5 were originally written and presented at the conference “Doing Archaeology as a Feminist” at the School of American Research (April, 1998), organized by Alison Wylie and Meg Conkey. A revised version of the portions of that paper incorporated here was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (Chicago, 1999), in a session organized by Kevin Bartoy. Rosemary Joyce would like to thank these organizers, the other participants at the SAR conference, and members of the audience at SAA who offered specific comments on these presentations. She is especially indebted to Julia Hendon, Carol McDavid, Lynn Meskell, Stephanie Moser, and Alison Wylie for their encouragement of her engagement with issues raised in these papers. The original version of the first dialogue, in chapter 2, was written for and presented in the session “Doing Archaeology As if it Mat- tered” at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (Atlanta, 1994), organized by Meg Conkey and Ruth Tringham. Rosemary Joyce would like thank Bob Preucel for extend- ing the invitation to collaborate on this paper. Preucel and Joyce thank the organizers for the invitation to participate and Alison Wylie, dis- cussant for the session, for her comments. They also gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of Meredith Chesson and Erika Evas- dottir on the survey of textbooks cited in this dialogue. Leslie Atik provided the alternative metaphor of fieldwork-as-cultivation, for which we are indebted to her. Joyce’s analysis of burials from Tlatilco, Mexico, in chapter 6 was originally presented in the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposium “Social Patterns in Pre-Classic Mesoamerica” (1993). She would like to thank David C. Grove for the opportunity to co- organize and participate in this conference, and Elizabeth Boone, then Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, for her encouragement. The first viii acknowledgments version of the reanalysis of these burials incorporated in chapter 7 was presented at the Third Archaeology and Gender Conference held at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina in 1994, organized by Cheryl Claassen. A reworked version was presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1997, in the session “New Perspectives on Mortuary Ritual” organized by Meredith Chesson and Ian Kuijt. Joyce thanks the organizers of both conferences, and the discussants of the AAA session, Susan Kus, Ken George, and Tom Dillehay, for their comments. Part of the introductory discussion in chapter 6 is based on material first published in “Women’s Work: Images of Production and Reproduction in Prehispanic Southern Central America”, by Rosemary A. Joyce, which appeared in Current Anthropology 34: 255–74 (1993). Finally, the risks taken by the many experimental writers whose works are discussed here should be acknowledged; without them, there would be no material for this book. In the pages that follow, I attempt to treat their work seriously, meaning that I question what the unintended effects of those works are, as well as seeking to understand the intentional goals of the writers. While, as a participant in experimental writing, self-reflection is one of my own goals, I can predict that I am less aware of my own production of unintended, and potentially problematic, effects. The advantage of critically consider- ing the work of scholars whose attempts to innovate I admire is that I can see more clearly what they have accomplished. I hope the authors of these works will appreciate the sincerity of my regard for their work, and I urge every reader of this book to see for themselves what innovative archaeological writers discussed herein have done. Disagreement is only contradiction unless there are two different sub- jects to make it into a dialogue (Bakhtin 1984: 183). “We only come to know what we have written by understanding the choices of others ...We understand from the third person what we have written in the first person, but only in the process of reading the second person” (M. Joyce 1995: 237). R.A.J. November 2001 The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: photographs of Maya pottery, copyright Justin Kerr, were used with permission as sources for images in Crafting Cosmos featured in chapter 4. Introduction This book examines the nature of archaeological writing. In it, I employ concepts from literary theory to examine practices through which archaeologists create representations of the past while simul- taneously reproducing the discipline itself. I argue that a process of creating narratives permeates archaeology from the initial moments of investigation of sites through to the production of texts, a term which should be understood to include far more than written mate- rials like this book. My emphasis is less on the specific structures employed in such archaeological narratives than on the event of nar- rativization, an event which is, I suggest, always an act of social com- munication.

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