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Material Evidence MATERIAL EVIDENCE How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence: Learning from archaeological practice takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent trans- formation of landscapes over the long term. The contributors to Material Evidence identify particular types of evidence with which they grapple and consider, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields. Bob Chapman is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, UK. His research focuses on archaeological theory, Mediterranean later prehistory, the development of human inequality, and the means by which this can be studied with archaeological data. He has pursued these interests in fieldwork projects in southeast Spain and the Balearic Islands, as well as in books such as The Archaeology of Death (1981), Emerging Complexity (1990) and Archaeologies of Complexity (2003). In recent years his research has turned increasingly to the use of historical materialism in archaeological interpretation, especially in relation to inequality and human exploitation. Running through this research activity has been a strong concern for the nature of archaeological interpretation, working with the complementary evidence of how people lived (e.g. what they produced, exchanged, and consumed, centred on settlement evidence) and how they were treated in death (e.g. their disposal, centred on burial evidence). Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Washington, and Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. She is a philosopher of the social and historical sciences who works on questions about objectivity, evidence, and research ethics raised by archaeological practice and by feminist research in the social sciences. Her longstanding interest in evidential reasoning is represented by her book Thinking from Things (2002) and by her contributions to Evidence, Inference and Enquiry (ed. Dawid, Twining and Vasilaki, 2011), How Well do ‘Facts’ Travel? (ed. Morgan 2010), and Agnatology (ed. Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). In recent work she focuses on the role of contextual values in science and on how research can be improved by internal diversity and by collaborations that extend beyond the research community. These interests are reflected in Value-free Science? (co-edited with Kincaid and Dupré 2007) and Epistemic Diversity and Dissent (edited for Episteme 2006), as well as in essays on stewardship and feminist standpoint theory. MATERIAL EVIDENCE Learning from archaeological practice Edited by Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie for selection and editorial matter; individual contributions, the contributors. The right of Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, 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. Cover image: Rock and rock art – an example of material evidence in context, photographed by Andrew Cochrane and Aaron Watson (copyright Andrew Jones). 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 Material evidence : learning from archaeological practice/edited by Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie. pages cm Includes index. 1. Archaeology—Philosophy. 2. Archaeology—Methodology. 3. Material culture. I. Chapman, Robert, 1949– editor. II. Wylie, Alison, editor. CC72.M39 2014 930.1028—dc23 2014029219 ISBN: 978-0-415-83745-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-83746-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73927-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton CONTENTS List of figures ix List of maps xiii List of tables xv List of contributors xvii 1 Material evidence: learning from archaeological practice1 Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman PART I Fieldwork and recording conventions 21 2 Repeating the unrepeatable experiment 23 Richard Bradley 3 Experimental archaeology at the crossroads: a contribution to interpretation or evidence of ‘xeroxing’? 42 Martin Bell 4 ‘Proportional representation’: multiple voices in archaeological interpretation at Çatalhöyük 59 Shahina Farid 5 Integrating database design and use into recording methodologies 79 Michael J. Rains vi Contents 6 The tyranny of typologies: evidential reasoning in Romano-Egyptian domestic archaeology 92 Anna Lucille Boozer PART II Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies 111 7 The archaeological bazaar: scientific methods for sale? Or: ‘putting the “arch-” back into archaeometry’ 113 Mark Pollard and Peter Bray 8 Radiocarbon dating and archaeology: history,progress and present status 128 Sturt W.Manning 9 Using evidence from natural sciences in archaeology 159 David Killick 10 Working the digital: some thoughts from landscape archaeology 173 Marcos Llobera 11 Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology 189 Sara Perry PART III Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation 211 12 Uncertain on principle: combining lines of archaeological evidence to create chronologies 213 Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle 13 Lessons from modelling Neolithic farming practice: methods of elimination 243 Amy Bogaard 14 Evidence, archaeology and law: an initial exploration 255 Roger M.Thomas Contents vii 15 Law and archaeology: Modified Wigmorean Analysis 271 Terence J.Anderson and William Twining 16 Traditional knowledge, archaeological evidence, and other ways of knowing 287 George Nicholas and Nola Markey PART IV Broader perspectives: material culture as object and evidence 309 17 Evidence of what? On the possibilities of archaeological interpretation 311 Gavin Lucas 18 Meeting pasts halfway: a consideration of the ontology of material evidence in archaeology 324 Andrew Meirion Jones 19 Matter and facts: material culture and the history of science 339 Simon Werrett Index 353 This page intentionally left blank FIGURES 2.1 Outline plan of South Lodge Camp 28 2.2 Outline plan of the later excavation of South Lodge Camp 30 2.3 A nineteenth-century photograph of the ‘Yak’s Quarter’ 32 2.4 Croftmoraig stone circle: (a) proposed structural sequence in 1971; (b) revised in 2012 34 2.5 (a) General view of Croftmoraig stone circle. (b) View towards the summit of Schiehallion 38 2.6 Midsummer sunset at Schiehallion viewed from the raised ground behind the stone circle 39 3.1 The experimental earthwork at Overton, Wiltshire, excavated 1992 48 3.2 The Moel-y-Gerddi roundhouse at Butser 49 3.3 Excavation of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse at St Fagans, 2009 50 3.4 Plan of artefact distributions in the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse 51 3.5 (a) The wall line of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse. (b) The wattle-and-daub wall of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse with a decayed wood stake in the ground 54 4.1 Composite of single context plans of North Area, Çatalhöyük 62 4.2 Harris matrix of temporal succession of archaeological contexts at Çatalhöyük 62 4.3 Hodder’s 12-point plan towards reflexive methods 64 4.4 Priority tour of the foundation trench excavations, North Area, Çatalhöyük, 2007 68 4.5 Proforma recording forms in use in Building 77, North Area, Çatalhöyük, 2011 73 4.6 Team seminar in preparation for publication, Çatalhöyük, 2010 75 5.1 IADB – part of a stratigraphic matrix and a composite plan 81 5.2 A facsimile context record in the IADB 86 x List of figures 6.1 Karanis insula 100 6.2 House B2, Trimithis (Roman period Amheida) 103 6.3 House B2, reconstruction, Trimithis (Roman period Amheida) 105 7.1 Distribution of type 2 copper during the Early Bronze Age 120 7.2 Lead isotope ratio values
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