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Processualism and After Patty Jo Watson

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Processualism and After Patty Jo Watson C H A P T E R 3 Processualism and After Patty Jo Watson The history of ideas is concerned with all that dispute the ultimate goals or purposes of archaeologi- insidious thought, that whole interplay of rep- cal endeavor. resentations that flow anonymously between In a technical, philosophy of science sense, none of men. the above is properly theory because a theory is a for- —Michel Foucault, mal, axiomatized system, the likes of which are present The Archaeology of Knowledge only in formal logic, abstract mathematics, and the theoretical realms of some other sciences. According For the purposes of this chapter, processualism is to one philosopher of science who has taken an in- taken to be more or less synonymous with proces- terest in archaeology, what archaeologists call theory sual archaeology, and with what came to be called might be more precisely termed “meta-archaeology” New Archaeology in the United States. Processual- (Embree 1992). ism dominated North American and west European archaeology from the 1960s to the 1980s and is still Process, Culture Process, and Processualism central to Americanist archaeology, but more periph- In 1967, Kent Flannery reviewed Gordon Willey’s ma- eral in Europe. In this chapter, I discuss processualism jor synthesis of North American archaeology, Intro- and what came after it in North America. A somewhat duction to American archaeology, vol. 1, North America parallel development took place in post–World War (Willey 1966). The review is entitled “Culture History II England, especially prominent at Cambridge Uni- vs. Culture Process: A Debate in American Archaeol- versity under the leadership of Grahame Clark, Eric ogy” (Flannery 1967). The phrase “culture process” in Higgs, David Clarke (whose productive and influential Flannery’s title was popular in anthropological jargon career was abruptly and tragically cut short in 1976), of the time as an abbreviated reference to the search and Colin Renfrew. I do not address that Old World for regularities and generalizable developments in cul- development here because of space constraints, and tural dynamics across space and through time. Flan- because I am not qualified to do so, but see the other nery’s title conveys the notion of opposition between chapters by Gill (chapter 5), Bintliff (chapter 10), an overt emphasis on cultural processes (generalizing and Koerner and Price (chapter 21) for alternative or research) and one on cultural history (particularizing complementary geographical and topical accounts. research). Although both generalizing and particular- izing (nomothetic and idiographic) foci are always ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY AND intertwined in any kind of investigative scholarship, META-ARCHAEOLOGY, PROCESS, processualist archaeologists insisted on the primacy of CULTURE PROCESS, AND PROCESSUALISM generalizing approaches to the human past. Particu- Archaeological Theory and Meta-Archaeology lars about specific times, places, artifacts, sites, and so When archaeologists say “archaeological theory,” they on, were to be sought only in the service of delineating are usually referring to some aspect or level of ar- broad generalizations about how culture (past or pres- chaeological interpretation, such as the plausibility of ent) works (Binford 1965, 1968a). or justification for knowledge claims about a discrete In Americanist archaeology during the 1960s and piece of the archaeological record, or about a part of a 1970s, “culture” had a meaning different from the broader explanatory formulation concerning the hu- connotations conveyed by that word in the 2000s. man past. They may be referring to the nature and sta- Culture meant all the characteristics of human be- tus of a particular research problem, or of the research havior—technological, sociological, ideological—that design selected for solving such a problem. Finally, distinguished humankind from other primates and under the rubric of “archaeological theory” they may other animals. During the 1970s, anthropological 29 concerns with and about culture shifted to the now Although the whole of past human cultures was prevalent view in which “culture” refers only to the the avowed subject matter of New Archaeology (Bin- cognitive universes constructed and maintained by ford 1962, 1965), in practice processual archaeology human groups. Human ideational systems in general became a materialist, functionalist pursuit of paleo- and symbolic systems characterizing specific human economy, paleoenvironment, and paleoecology with groups are emphasized, with techno-economic sys- subsistence systems occupying center stage. Relations tems and functions being of less interest. between cultures or societies and their physical en- During the 1960s, however, and through the 1970s, vironments were of paramount interest, resulting in the goal of anthropological archaeologists was to the necessity for interdisciplinary teams of archaeolo- advance knowledge, not just about past lifeways at gists and natural scientists to undertake archaeological specific times and places, but also, and more impor- fieldwork. In addition, research design was supremely tantly, to aid social scientific understanding of culture, important, with the processual questions or problems broadly construed: to delineate specific cultural pro- to be attacked stated clearly, together with the methods cesses, as well as cultural process in general. Ideational chosen for obtaining data to answer the questions and matters were not a central concern for most proces- solve the problems (Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman sualists (among the very few exceptions are Fritz 1978; 1971; and 1984: chapter 4). Hall 1976, 1977), and was explicitly disavowed by at The Americanist archaeological scene in the 1960s, least one leading protagonist (Binford 1967). 1970s, and early 1980s was a lively affair with big, in- terdisciplinary projects funded by the National Science PROCESSUALISM IN AMERICANIST Foundation pursuing culture processual issues, not ARCHAEOLOGY, 1962–1982 just in the Americas but also in various portions of the Concern for something akin to what was called “cul- Old World. Machine-aided multivariate statistics— ture process” in the 1960s had been advocated by several electronic calculators, then microcomputers (personal Americanist archaeologists during the 1930s and 1940s computers) used in tandem with “canned” programs (Bennett 1943; Steward and Setzler 1938; Taylor 1943, such as SAS, SPSS, and BIOMED (O’Neil 1984; Wat- 1948), and by an influential sociocultural anthropolo- son, LeBlanc, and Redman 1984:chap. 5)—were freely gist (Kluckhohn 1940). But it was not until the advent of deployed, as were physico-chemical analyses and pro- New Archaeology that processualism became a central cedures. Processualist archaeology was highly influen- focus for the entire discipline. The movement was of- tial in the United States and around the world. Yet the ficially kicked off by Lewis Binford in a paper published scope of 1960s–1970s processualism was still narrowly in 1962, “Archaeology as Anthropology.” That article, construed, remaining within the boundaries noted in plus two others he published subsequently (Binford the previous paragraph and being largely what Hall 1964, 1965), Fritz and Plog’s “The Nature of Archaeo- (1977) concisely described as “econothink.” logical Explanation” (1970), and an edited volume, New A major debate internal to processual archaeol- Perspectives in Archeology (Binford and Binford 1968), ogy—but not about the appropriateness of econo- presented the New Archaeology party platform in a per- think—and emerging in the 1970s focused squarely suasive and enthusiastic manner (Leone 1972; Watson, on processualist assumptions concerning the nature LeBlanc, and Redman 1971). and integrity of the archaeological record. Lewis Bin- Old Archaeology was characterized as particular- ford (1976, 1978, 1981a, 1983:98–106) and Michael istic culture history obsessed with chronology and Schiffer (1972, 1976, 1985) problematized archaeolog- comparative typology (time-space systematics); it was ical interpretation by drawing attention to the fact that to be replaced by New Archaeology with emphasis on archaeological remains are never (with the exception culture process, to be approached via systems theory of extremely rare Pompeii-like situations) delivered and/or by an explicit search for general laws (Flan- intact and unaltered from a specific past time and nery 1973). The archaeological record was viewed by place to the archaeologist’s shovel, pick, or trowel. processualists as a vast laboratory for the eliciting and Because of his unsuccessful struggles to interpret establishing of generalizations, functional regularities, Mousterian lithic data from sites in southern France, and general laws about human cultural behavior. Ad- Binford succumbed to a skeptical crisis concerning vocates of New Archaeology sought not only to de- the nature of the archaeological record as a source scribe and explain the human past but also to predict of present knowledge about the real past (Binford the human future. 1983:98–106). He resolved that crisis by undertaking 30 patty jo watson ethnological research in a society whose subsistence was focusing on the physical nature of the archaeo- system he judged to be relevant to some aspects of logical record itself and urging archaeologists to give Middle Paleolithic life during the Late Pleistocene pe- careful thought to the myriad noncultural (e.g., wind, riod in southern France: the Alaskan Nunamiut.
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