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Dialectical Archaeology
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... One strand of critique drew on Hegelian ideas about the dialectical nature of the relationship between humans and their environments; this trans-temporal approach was particularly infl uential in shaping early historical ecology (e.g. Crumley 1987 ; Marquardt 1992 ). Studies inspired by Marx and Engels also offered alternative perspectives on human-environment relations (e.g . ...
... In contrast, Marquardt (1986Marquardt ( , 1987Marquardt ( , 1988Marquardt ( , 2004, though acknowledging the emergence of a simple chiefdom by A.D. 800 (Marquardt 2004, p. 210), has critiqued Widmer's model as ''a highly-orthodox cultural materialistic model in which internal socio-historical processes play few or no causative role'' (Marquardt 1988, p. 186). Approaching the problem from a dialectical perspective, Marquardt (1992c) hypothesizes that the hypercomplexity witnessed by Spanish chroniclers may have emerged only during the first decades after European contact as a multiregional response to the external Spanish threat. Prior to that time, Calusa complexity may have manifested itself on a smaller scale, with a more complex and extensive chiefly polity emerging during the 16th century (Marquardt 1987, pp. ...
This comparative synthesis examines archaeological and ethnohistoric data pertaining to Native American coastal adaptations
along the southern coasts of the eastern United States. We consider the totality of experiences of people living along coasts,
examining such issues as technological innovation, environmental variability and change as it relates to site visibility,
the built environment, the use of coastal food resources, the nature of complex coastal Calusa and Guale polities, and European
contact. We link our topical discussions to broader issues in anthropology, arguing that the archaeology of southern coasts
has much to contribute to our understanding of worldwide adaptations to coastal environments and broad-scale shifts in the
trajectories of human societies.
KeywordsArchaeology–Ethnohistory–Coastal–Southeastern U.S.
Philosopher and physicist Karen Barad (2003; 2007; 2012) has brought a new understanding of causality to the academic discourse (agential realism theory). Inspired by this new take on causality, I problematize the argument that archaeologists ‘follow’ materials. I begin by challenging the act of ‘following’ on two counts (causality and universalism), and then consider the work of Malafouris (2008a) – a thinker whose ideas have the potential to remediate this issue through his examination of the ‘in-between’ humans and matter. I argue that, despite offering an inspirational approach to mind–matter relationships, the dialectical relationship he evokes remains problematic from a Baradian perspective as it is still rooted in ‘following’. I suggest that Barad’s agential realism offers a valuable conceptual framework for researchers who are weary of ‘unilateral’ linear causality and keen to move beyond dialectical thinking (Barad 2007, 214).
Geoglyphs are widely seen as an expression of past sacred landscapes. In this article, I offer a new theoretical approach to geoglyphs, interpreting them as a distinctly anarchic and decentralized medium for ritual activity. When we define geoglyphs as large-scale images, and exclude other phenomena such as earthworks, it is clear that their occurrence is actually quite limited in space and time. Almost all known examples of geoglyphs are located in the Americas, and they are particularly associated with ‘middle-range’ societies, rather than states or empires. Geoglyphs produced by hunter-gatherer communities are also comparatively rare. I regard this pattern as a direct consequence of the anarchist affordances of the geoglyph medium. In agricultural societies where regional integration and incipient centralization were taking place (e.g. the ancient Nasca), geoglyphs provided a decentralizing counterbalance. I therefore theorize the incorporation of geoglyph-based ritual practices as a historically situated process of constitutional reform, whereby ancient peoples consciously sought to redistribute power and authority.
This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.
Historical Materialism is a common term for the theoretical ideas of Karl Marx. Marxism is not a unified theoretical framework, although there are several principles and concepts that define the core of historical materialism for most of these theorists. The features or aspects that are the hallmark of a dialectical Marxist approach include an emphasis on real, socially and historically conditioned contexts; a focus on issues and questions of the production and reproduction of everyday life; emphasis on the web of social relations that exist within the larger social totality; abstracting from that totality only for analytical purposes; examining multiple lines of evidence (material and historical) at multiple scales to identify contradictory messages; interpreting how these relate to the internal dynamics of society; and using these understandings to engage in praxis in the modern world in which we work.
Archaeologists have largely embraced the idea that our discipline is political; that from its inception it has been intimately linked to capitalism and implicated with nationalist, colonialist, imperialist, sexist and racist agendas. Archaeologists have always validated our existence by the social relevance of our work, often with varying success. We believe that the best method may be to study history backward: to begin with the present result and look to the past to consider its preconditions. Bringing these understandings forward again allows us to project this potential into the future and examine the present complete with its ties to the past. This dialectical connection of past, present and future provides an important perspective on the long-term historical study of the social relations of capitalism. In this paper, we provide the larger theoretical context to elucidate these issues that form the foundation for this issue.
This paper discusses the relationship between history and archaeology in general, their common concerns and links with historical archaeology. It deals with the development of historical archaeology in three related South American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and pays attention to recent trends in the theory and practice of the discipline in the area.
Considers two approaches orientated towards the study of sociocultural change, systems theory and structural-Marxism. An attempt is made to evaluate these conceptual frameworks in terms of their utility for an understanding and explanation of change. - Author
Prominent in the new literature of a ‘post-processual’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology are a pair of books, conveniently colour-coded as one black and one red, written by Michael Shanks 6. Christopher Tilley, and both published in 1987. The ‘black book’, from Cambridge University Press, has a stark cover mostly of solid black; the cover of the ‘red book’, from Polity Press, is a more cheerful crimson, though its picture, a 19th-century Comedy of death, is a despairing image of dismal decay.
Kristian Kristiansen, of the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, reviews here the black and the red, and the post-modern vision of archaeology they amount to.
Archaeologists have tried to reconstruct patterns of thought, meaning, and ideas, using theories of structuralism, cognition, and ideology. Case studies involving each of the theories are described, and the strengths and weakness of their application to archaeological data are presented. Structuralism is found to yield substantial examples with well-worked treatments of archaeological data. These examples tend to ignore economic context, however. Materialism, especially neo-Marxism, contains thorough definitions of ideology that may be useful to archaeology because they preserve economic context. However, such definitions are new to the field and presently offer few well-worked examples of how to handle archaeological data.
In Re-Constructing Archaeology (1987a) and Social Theory and Archaeology (1987b), Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley argue for an antiscience radical archaeology as critique. They use deconstructionist sceptical arguments to conclude that there is no objective past and that our representations of the past are only texts that we produce on the basis of our sociopolitical standpoints. In effect, they contend that there is no objective world, that the world itself is a text that human beings write. This is a form of subjective idealism. Their critique is a nihilistic attack on all objective knowledge.
This volume presents a searching critique of the more traditional archaeological methodologies and interpretation strategies and lays down a firm philosophical and theoretical basis for symbolist and structuralist studies in archaeology. A variety of procedures, ranging from ethnoarchaeological studies and computing techniques to formal studies of artefact design variability, are utilized to provide models for archaeologists within the proposed framework and the theory and models are then applied to a range of archaeological analyses. This particular approach sees all human actions as being meaningfully constituted within a social and cultural framework. Material culture is not simply an adaptive tool, but is structured according to sets of underlying principles which give meaning to, and derive meanings from, the social world. Thus structural regularities are shown to link seemingly disparate aspects of material culture, from funerary monuments to artefact design, from the use of space in settlements, to the form of economic practices.