Contemporary Archaeology in Theory E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1899

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The second edition of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism, has been thoroughly updated and revised, and features top scholars who redefine the theoretical and political agendas of the field, and challenge the usual distinctions between time, space, processes, and people.

• Defines the relevance of archaeology and the social sciences more generally to the modern world
• Challenges the traditional boundaries between prehistoric and historical archaeologies
• Discusses how archaeology articulates such contemporary topics and issues as landscape and natures; agency, meaning and practice; sexuality, embodiment and personhood; race, class, and ethnicity; materiality, memory, and historical silence; colonialism, nationalism, and empire; heritage, patrimony, and social justice; media, museums, and publics
• Examines the influence of American pragmatism on archaeology
• Offers 32 new chapters by leading archaeologists and cultural anthropologists

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

List of Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I The New Pragmatism

Part II Landscapes, Spaces, and Natures

1 The Temporality of the LandscapeTim Ingold

Prologue

Landscape

Temporality

Temporalizing the Landscape

Epilogue

References

2 Identifying Ancient Sacred Landscapes in Australia: From Physical to SocialPaul S. C. Ta¸con

Introduction

Sacred Landscapes, Sacred Sites

Dreaming Tracks

The Oldest Surviving Rock Art

Landscapes, Art, and Meaning

References

3 Landscapes of Punishment and Resistance: A Female Convict Settlement in Tasmania, AustraliaEleanor Conlin Casella

Introduction

The Administration of Female Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land

The Ross Female Factory

Doing Trade: A Landscape of Resistance

Subversion: The Convict Landscape

Conclusion

References

4 Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated LandscapeClark L. Erickson

Introduction

Biodiversity

Historical Ecology

The New Ecology

Landscapes

Amazonia: Wilderness or Cultural Landscape?

Amazonia: A Counterfeit Paradise or Anthropogenic Cornucopia?

Native Amazonian People: With or Against Nature?

Amazonian People: Adaptation to or Creation of Environments?

Elements of a Domesticated Landscape

Conclusions: Lessons from the Past?

References

Part III Agency, Meaning, and Practice

5 Practice and History in Archaeology: An Emerging ParadigmTimothy R. Pauketat

Neo-Darwinism, Cognitive Processualism, and Agency Theory

Shell Temper, Cahokia, and Historical Processes

Toward a New Paradigm

Notes

References

6 Technology’s Links and Chaˆınes: The Processual Unfolding of Technique and TechnicianMarcia-Anne Dobres

The Chaîne Opératoire and What’s Hidden in Black Boxes

The Dialectics of Gender and Technology

Politics, Identity, and Technology in the Communal Mode of Production

The Politics of Social Agency in Prehistoric Technology: Two Archaeological Examples

Discussion

Notes

References

7 Structure and Practice in the Archaic SoutheastKenneth E. Sassaman

Assertions of Identity

Shell Mound Archaic

Mound Complexes in the Lower Mississippi Valley

Coastal Shell Rings

Circular Village Plaza Complexes

Genesis of the “Powerless”

Discussion and Conclusion

References

8 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, CaliforniaKent G. Lightfoot, Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff

Study of Culture Change and Persistence

Daily Practices and Material Culture

Interethnic Households at Fort Ross

Archaeological Study of Social Identities at Fort Ross

Daily Practices of Interethnic Households

Summary

Conclusion

References

Part IV Sexuality, Embodiment, and Personhood

9 Good Science, Bad Science, or Science as Usual? Feminist Critiques of ScienceAlison Wylie

Introduction

What is Feminism?

So Why Are (Some) Feminists Concerned about Science?

Equity Issues in Science

Implications for Science: Content Critiques

Conclusions

Notes

References

10 On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from AfricaJohn L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

Prolegomenon

Personhood and Society in the Interiors of South Africa

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Encounter

Notes

References

11 Girling the Girl and Boying the Boy: The Production of Adulthood in Ancient MesoamericaRosemary A. Joyce

Introduction

Aztec Sources and Their Limits

The Existential Status of Aztec Children

Making Aztec Adults

Bodily Discipline and the Achievement of Adult Status

Discussion

References

12 Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of EmpireBarbara L. Voss

The Household in Archaeologies of Empire

Intermarriage and Cultural Brokers

Sexuality beyond the Household

Case Study: El Presidio de San Francisco

Conclusion

References

Part V Race, Class, and Ethnicity

13 The Politics of Ethnicity in Prehistoric KoreaSarah M. Nelson

I The Siberian Connection

II The Chinese Connection

III The Japanese Connection

IV Conclusion

References

14 Historical Categories and the Praxis of Identity: The Interpretation of Ethnicity in Historical ArchaeologySiaˆn Jones

The Problem: The Interplay of Text and Material Culture in the Interpretation of Ethnic Groups

Historical Archaeology: ‘Handservant’ of History or Objective Science?

A Theoretical Approach to Ethnicity

Practice and Representation

Conclusions

References

15 Beyond Racism: Some Opinions about Racialism and American ArchaeologyRoger Echo-Hawk and Larry J. Zimmerman

A Dialogue on Race and American Archaeology

The Quagmire of Race

The Epic Battlegrounds of Race

Race Is Dead; Long Live Race?

Notes

16 A Class All Its Own: Explorations of Class Formation and ConflictLouAnn Wurst

Introduction

Class as a Thing: Various Approaches

Class as a Formation: The Rhetoric of Social Relations

Class as Relations in Historical Archaeology

The One of Class

References

Part VI Materiality, Memory, and Historical Silence

17 Money Is No Object: Materiality, Desire, and Modernity in an Indonesian SocietyWebb Keane

Meaning and the Motion of Things

Ambiguous Attachments

Enter Money

The Value of Renunciation

Alienation

Production

The State of Desire

Notes

References

18 Remembering while Forgetting: Depositional Practices and Social Memory at ChacoBarbara J. Mills

Forgetting as Part of Memory Work

Depositional Practices and Social Memory at Chaco

Dedicating and Dressing the House

The Memorialization of People and Places

Remembering while Forgetting in the Pueblo World

Notes

References

19 Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical ArchaeologyPaul A. Shackel

An Exclusionary Past

Case Study: The Remaking of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial

Commemoration and the Making of a Patriotic Past

Case Study: The Civil War Centennial and the Battle at Manassas

Nostalgia and the Legitimation of American Heritage

Case Study: The Heyward Shepherd Memorial

Conclusion

References

20 Re-Representing African Pasts through Historical ArchaeologyPeter R. Schmidt and Jonathan R. Walz

Inclusive or Exclusive Historical Archaeologies?

Addressing Questions that Count

Reflections and Conclusions

Notes

References

Part VII Colonialism, Empire, and Nationalism

21 Archaeology and Nationalism in SpainMargarita D´ıaz-Andreu

I Spanish Nationalism and Archacology

II Catalan Nationalism and Archaeology

III Basque Nationalism and Archaeology

IV Galician Nationalism and Archaeology

V Conclusions

Notes

References

22 Echoes of Empire: Vijayanagara and Historical Memory, Vijayanagara as Historical MemoryCarla M. Sinopoli

Introduction

Vijayanagara and Historical Memory

Vijayanagara as Memory

Conclusions

References

23 Conjuring Mesopotamia: Imaginative Geography and a World PastZainab Bahrani

Introduction

Space and Despotic Time

Name and Being

Time of the Despots

The Extraterrestrial Orient

Notes

References

24 Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke Peoples and UsRussell G. Handsman and Trudie Lamb Richmond

“And We’re Going to Get Our Bibles Back”

“After the Chuh-ko-thuk, or White People, Settled Amongst Them”

Illuminating the Hidden Histories of Homelands

“According to Our Law and Custom”

“That’s why it Means so Much to be a Part of Schaghticoke”

Notes

References

Part VIII Heritage, Patrimony, and Social Justice

25 The Globalization of Archaeology and HeritageA Discussion with Arjun Appadurai

Note

References

26 Sites of Violence: Terrorism, Tourism, and Heritage in the Archaeological PresentLynn Meskell

Heritage and Modernity in Ethical Context

Touring Places and the Spaces of Resistance

Dead Subjects and Living Communities

Tourism and Terrorism on the West Bank

Performing Ancient Egypt

Conclusions

References

27 An Ethical Epistemology of Publicly Engaged Biocultural ResearchMichael L. Blakey

Critical Theory

Public Engagement

Multiple Data Sets

Diasporic Scope

Final Comment

References

28 Cultures of Contact, Cultures of Conflict? Identity Construction, Colonialist Discourse, and the Ethics of Archaeological Practice in Northern IrelandAudrey Horning

Introduction

Background

Ireland as Postcolonial?

Education, Memory, and Multiple Histories

Towards Ethical Engagement in Uncomfortable Histories

Postcolonialism and the Presentation of Heritage in the Republic of Ireland

Heritage as Social Action in Northern Ireland

Conclusion

References

Part IX Media, Museums, and Publics

29 No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAISonya Atalay

The NMAI’s Mission

Agency and Victimization

Guns and Bibles

Context for Survivance

Public Audiences

Notes

30 The Past as Commodity: Archaeological Images in Modern AdvertisingLauren E. Talalay

Introduction

The Origins of Advertising

Advertising, Social Identity and Visual Communication

Advertising and the Identities of Ancient Culture

Past and Present in Archaeoadverts

Some Implications of Modern Advertising for Archaeology

Conclusion

Note

References

31 The Past as Passion and Play: C¸ atalho¨yu¨k as a Site of Conflict in the Construction of Multiple PastsIan Hodder

Introduction

The Archaeological Discourse

The Global and the Local

A Reflexive Moment

Conclusion

References

32 Copyrighting the Past? Emerging Intellectual Property Rights Issues in ArchaeologyGeorge P. Nicholas and Kelly P. Bannister

The Products of Archaeological Research and Their Protection

Archaeological Research Products as Cultural and Intellectual Property

Appropriation and Commodification of the Past

Who Owns the Future?

Notes

References

Index

This second edition first published 2010

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization

© Robert W. Preucel and Stephen A. Mrozowski

Edition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 1996)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contemporary archaeology in theory: the new pragmatism /[edited by] Robert W. Preucel andStephen A. Mrozowski. – 2nd ed.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-5832-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-5853-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Archaeology. I. Preucel, Robert W. II. Mrozowski, Stephen A.CC173.C66 2010930.1–dc22

2009054212

For Leslie and Ammie

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

3.1Ross Factory Archaeology Project3.2Distribution and frequency of button assemblage3.3Distribution of illicit objects18.1Contents of niches in Chetro Ketl Great Kiva II18.2Ritual deposits in Chacoan great kivas18.3Objects from Kiva Q (great kiva) at Pueblo Bonito18.4Ritual deposits in great kivas18.5Contents of offerings in pilasters, Kiva C (great kiva), Pueblo del Arroyo

Figures

1.1The Harvesters (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder2.1Cupule, Jinmium, Northern Territory2.2Map of Australia showing places mentioned in the text2.3Rainbow Valley, central Australia2.4Waterfall, Kakadu National Park2.5Geological feature said to mark the spot where a Rainbow Serpent turned to stone, near Mann River2.6Meredith Wilson records rock paintings at a site that has magnificent panoramic views2.7Tiwi burial grounds2.8Thompson Yulidjirri painting Yingarna, the most powerful Rainbow Serpent, in her human female form2.9The main Jinmium, N.T., cupule panels2.10Rock painting site, Kakadu National Park3.1Site surface plan of the Ross Female Factory, Van Diemen’s Land4.1Savanna management using fire in the Bolivian Amazon. Baures in 19994.2Amazonian house, clearing, work areas, and house garden. Fatima in 20064.3The Amazonian settlement and adjacent landscape of gardens, fields, agroforestry, roads, paths, orchards, garbage middens, and forest regrowth at various stages4.4Forest island in the savanna, Machupo River, in 20064.5Pre-Columbian ring ditch site4.6An octagon-shaped ring ditch site in the Bolivian Amazon4.7Pre-Columbian raised fields, canals, and causeways in the Bolivian Amazon4.8Four pre-Columbian causeways and canals connecting forest islands in the Bolivian Amazon4.9A network of pre-Columbian fish weirs in the Bolivian Amazon4.10Pre-Columbian domesticated landscape of settlements, mounds, forest islands, raised fields, causeways, canals, and agroforestry4.11Pre-Columbian raised fields under forest7.1Examples of typical Dalton points and oversized Dalton and Sloan points from the Sloan site in Arkansas7.2Examples of Southern Ovate and Notched Southern Ovate bannerstones, including several preforms, the largest from Stallings Island7.3Topographic maps of the three known Archaic mound complexes and a sketch map of one suspected Archaic mound complex (Insley) in northeast Louisiana, with inset map showing locations of mound complexes in relation to Poverty Point7.4Plan drawings of Late Archaic coastal shell rings and related sites in the southeastern United States7.5Topographic map of the Fig Island shell-ring complex, Charleston County, South Carolina7.6Plan schematic of the 1929 block excavation of Stallings Island, showing locations of pit features, burials, and projected domestic structures arrayed in circular fashion around a central plaza8.1Spatial Layout of Fort Ross, including the Ross Stockade, the Russian Village, the Native Californian Neighborhood, the Ross Cemetery, and the Native Alaskan Neighborhood8.2The Native Alaskan Village Site and Fort Ross Beach site, illustrating surface features and excavated structures (East Central Pit feature, South Pit feature, and Bathhouse)8.3Excavation plan and profile of the East Central Bone Bed and East Central Pit feature8.4Excavation plan and profile of the South Bone Bed, South Pit feature, Abalone Dump, rock rubble, and redwood fence line12.1Alta California presidio districts12.2Spanish-colonial settlements in the San Francisco Bay region12.3Schematic diagram showing relationship between El Presidio de San Francisco’s earlier quadrangle (ca. 1792) and the later quadrangle expansion (ca. 1815)13.1Northeast Asia and the Korean peninsula18.1Chaco Canyon sites18.2Great Kiva II (below Great Kiva I), Chetro Ketl18.3Contents of wall niches, Great Kiva II18.4Contents of niche in Kiva Q, a great kiva at Pueblo Bonito18.5Wooden sticks from Room 32, Pueblo Bonito18.6Cache of cylinder jars in Room 28, Pueblo Bonito20.1Map of sites associated with Cwezi oral traditions: Rugomora Mahe (Katuruka) in Tanzania; Bigo and Mubende [Hill] in Uganda20.2Map of Africa: countries discussed in the text are shaded22.1Vijayanagara urban core and key locations in the region’s sacred geography22.2The Ramachandra temple22.3Hanuman sculpture in Vijayanagara metropolitan region22.4Sixteenth-century temple gopuram (Kalahasti, Tamil Nadu)22.5Vijayanagara courtly architecture: Pavilion in the Royal Center24.1Some of the traditional Native American homelands along the upper Housatonic River24.2Early nineteenth-century wood-splint baskets made by Jacob Mauwee, Schaghticoke, and Molly Hatchet, a Paugussett from farther south on the Housatonic River24.3Eunice Mauwee, Schaghticoke (1756–1860)26.1The Luxor area, showing the location of the 1997 attack26.2Ancient agricultural enactment from the Pharaonic Village, Cairo26.3Tour guide with tourists and performer at the Pharaonic Village, Cairo28.1Deserted Village, Slievemore, Achill Island, Co. Mayo28.2Loyalist graffiti (Ulster Volunteer Force, a paramilitary organization) on a gatehouse door lintel of the 17th-century Castle Caulfield, Co. Tyrone28.3Rag tree and holy well at Dungiven Priory and Bawn, Co. Derry/Londonderry29.1Guns display in the Our Peoples gallery29.2Showing t-shirts, “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492”29.3Religion case in the Our Peoples gallery30.1Palmolive – Colgate Palmolive ad (1910)30.2Johnnie Walker and Son ad (1985)32.1Reconstructed pit house, Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park, Kamloops, B.C.32.2Example of stylized pit house used as the logo of the Secwepemc Museum, Kamloops, B.C.

List of Contributors

Arjun Appadurai is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, NY

Sonya Atalay is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York

Kelly P. Bannister is Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, BC

Michael L. Blakey is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA

Eleanor Conlin Casella is Lecturer in the School of Arts, Histories, and Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK

Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, IL

John L. Comaroff is Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, IL

Margarita Díaz-Andreu is a Reader in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, UK

Marcia-Anne Dobres is Adjunct Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Maine at Orono, ME

Roger Echo-Hawk is a historian, writer, and composer based in Longmont, CO

Clark L. Erickson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Curator of South America at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Russell G. Handsman is Project Consulant at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, CT

Ian Hodder is the Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Audrey Horning is a Reader in Historical Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, UK

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK

Siân Jones is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK

Rosemary A. Joyce is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, CA

Webb Keane is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Trudie Lamb Richmond is Director of Public Programs at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, CT

Kent G. Lightfoot Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, CA

Antoinette Martinez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, California State University, Chico, CA

Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Barbara J. Mills is Director of the School of Anthropology and Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona and Curator of Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum, Tucson, AZ

Sarah M. Nelson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Denver, CO

George P. Nicholas is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC

Timothy R. Pauketat is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL

Kenneth E. Sassaman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Ann M. Schiff is a retired member of the Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA

Peter R. Schmidt is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Paul A. Shackel is Director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Carla M. Sinopoli is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Paul S. C. Tac¸on is Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology in the School of Arts at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Lauren E. Talalay is Curator of Education at the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Barbara L. Voss is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Jonathan R. Walz is a Lecturer in the Honors Program at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

LouAnn Wurst is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Michigan at Kalamazoo, MI

Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Larry J. Zimmerman is Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, IN

Preface

If edited books are collaborative projects, edited Readers are even more so. Throughout the process of organizing and writing this Reader, we have explored our own deeply held commitments and challenged each other to broaden our horizons. Given our backgrounds in prehistoric and historical archaeologies, we were particularly intrigued by the idea of breaking down these categories and exploring the implications of deep time and the search for a deeper history. In addition, we both have considerable experience working with Native American communities and are strong advocates of indigenous archaeologies. We are both committed to increasing the numbers of Native American archaeologists as well as transforming our profession in ways that acknowledge the rights and interests of Native American peoples. In many ways, our collaboration has been and continues to be a transformative process. We would be remiss, however, if we didn’t thank the person who brought us together, namely Craig Cipolla. Craig was a Masters student with Steve at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and is currently a doctoral candidate with Bob at the University of Pennsylvania. Craig’s interest and enthusiasm for all things theoretical helped to spark discussions between us that led to our collaboration on this book.

We are especially grateful to the individual authors who have agreed to allow their publications to be reprinted in our book. They have been extremely supportive and generous without any knowledge of exactly how we would represent their work. We have chosen to use their writings to provide a context for exploring the articulation of different theories and their real-world applications and consequences. But, in the end, these chapters must stand on their own. They were not produced for this Reader, but rather for different contexts – a specific book, a given journal article, a particular interview. We have extracted them for our purposes and used them to make specific points about what we are calling “the new pragmatism,” the increasing professional commitment to the practice of socially relevant archaeology. But because of their preexistence, they retain the ability to “talk back” and actively resist the interpretations we offer. This quality can be understood as their partial objectivity.

We thank Rosalie Roberston at Wiley-Blackwell for her strong commitment to this project. Rosalie has been extremely patient, and always understanding with several unavoidable delays. We thank Julia Kirk for skillfully steering us through the various stages of the production process. Finally, we thank Justin Dyer, our copy-editor, for his superb attention to detail.

Each of us has had a deep interest in theoretical questions during the course of our careers. Throughout that journey we have been influenced by our peers, our students, and our mentors. Each of us has incurred special debts we would like to acknowledge. Bob would like to thank Asif

Agha, Herman Agoyo, Woody Aguilar, Wendy Ashmore, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Alex Bauer, Alexis Boutin, K. C. Chang, Christopher Chippindale, Craig Cipolla, Meg Conkey, Linda Cordell, Ann Dapice, Terry Deacon, Harold Dibble, Tim Earle, Roger Echo-Hawk, Clark Erickson, T. J. Ferguson, Kathy Fine-Dare, Richard Ford, John Fritz, Yosef Garfinkle, Pamela Geller, Joan Gero, Chris Gosden, Richard Grounds, Suzan Harjo, Julie Hendon, Michael Herzfeld, Jim Hill, Ian Hodder, Mark Johnson, Matthew Johnson, Rosemary Joyce, Sergei Kan, Webb Keane, Mark Leone, Richard Leventhal, Matt Liebmann, Randy McGuire, Desirée Martinez, Randy Mason, Frank Matero, Lynn Meskell, Barbara Mills, Koji Mizoguchi, Melissa Murphy, Simon Ortiz, Tom Patterson, Tim Pauketat, Robert Paynter, Steve Pendery, Bernie Perley, Colin Renfrew, Uzma Rizvi, Diego Romero, Mateo Romero, David Rudner, Jeremy Sabloff, Dean Saitta, Bob Schuyler, Rus Sheptak, Tad Shurr, Michael Silverstein, Daniel Smail, Monica Smith, Laurajane Smith, James Snead, Edward Soja, Matthew Spriggs, Miranda Stockett, Joseph Suina, Greg Urban, Joe Watkins, Mike Wilcox, Gordon Willey, Lucy Williams, Alison Wylie, and Larry Zimmerman.

Steve wishes to thank Ping-Ann Addo, Susan Alcock, Douglas Armstrong, Christa Baranek, Mary Beaudry, William Beeman, Douglas Bolender, Joanne Bowen, Kathleen Bragdon, Marley Brown, Eleanor Casella, Craig Cipolla, Meg Conkey, Christopher DeCorse, Jim Deetz, James Delle, Amy Den Ouden, Roger Echo-Hawk, Arturo Escobar, Maria Franklin, Jack Gary, Rae Gould, Richard Gould, Martin Hall, David Harvey, Kat Hayes, Ian Hodder, Audrey Horning, Dan Hicks, Matthew Johnson, Martin Jones, Rosemary Joyce, Kenneth Kvamme, David Landon, Heather Law, Henri Lefebvre, Mark Leone, Kent Lightfoot, Lynn Meskell, Barbara Little, Kevin McBride, Thomas McGovern, Randy McGuire, Richard McNeish, Jose Martinez-Reyes, Christopher Matthews, Kathleen Morrison, Daniel Mouer, Paul Mullins, Michael Nassaney, Charles Orser, Marilyn Palmer, Gisli Palsson, Tom Patterson, Tim Pauketat, Robert Paynter, Guido Pezzarossi, Virginia Popper, Colon Renfrew, Krysta Ryzewski, Dean Saitta, Ken Sassman, Peter Schmidt, Bob Schuyler, Paul Shackel, Stephen Silliman, Theresa Singleton, James Snead, Edward Soja, John Steinberg, Christopher Tilley, Heather Trigg, Bruce Trigger, Diana Wall, Joe Watkins, Michael Way, Laurie Wilkie, Christopher Witmore, LouAnn Wurst, and Judith Zeitlin.

As our work on this book has unfolded, the individuals we have turned to most often for advice and feedback were our spouses. Leslie Atik and Anne Lang Mrozowski have provided invaluable editorial input as well as forthright critiques that have been instrumental in maintaining the project’s momentum and direction. As a small measure of our appreciation for their enthusiastic encouragement and unfailing support, we dedicate this book to them.

Acknowledgments

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Chapter 1: Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” pp. 152–74 from World Archaeology 25:2 (1993). Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Group and the author.

Chapter 2: Paul S. C. Ta¸on, “Identifying Ancient Sacred Landscapes in Australia: From Physical to Social,” pp. 33–57 from Archaeologies of Landscapes: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Wendy Ashmore and A. Bernard Knapp (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishers.

Chapter 3: Eleanor Conlin Casella, “Landscapes of Punishment and Resistance: A Female Convict Settlement in Tasmania, Australia,” pp. 103–30 from Contested Landscapes of Movement and Exile, ed. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001). Reprinted with permission of Berg Publishers Oxford via A C Black.

Chapter 4: Clark L. Erickson, “Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape,” pp. 157– 83 in The Handbook of South American Archaeology, ed. Helaine Silverman and William Isbell (New York: Springer, 2008). Reprinted with permission of Springer.

Chapter 5: Timothy R. Pauketat, “Practice and History in Archaeology: An Emerging Paradigm,” pp. 73–98 from Anthropological Theory 1 (2001). Reprinted with permission of Sage.

Chapter 6: Marcia-Anne Dobres, “Technology’s Links and Chaînes: The Processual Unfolding of Technique and Technician,” pp. 124–45 from Marcia-Anne Dobres and Christopher R. Hoffman (eds) The Social Dynamics of Technology: Practice, Politics, and Worldviews (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Copyright © Marcia-Anne Dobres, 1999. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Chapter 7: Kenneth E. Sassaman, “Structure and Practice in the Archaic Southeast,” pp. 79–107 from Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren (eds) North American Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 8: Kent G. Lightfoot, Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff, “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California,” pp. 199–222 from American Antiquity 63:2 (1998). Reprinted with permission of the Society for American Archaeology and the author.

Chapter 9: Alison Wylie, “Good Science, Bad Science, or Science as Usual? Feminist Critiques of Science,” pp. 29–55 from Lori D. Hager (ed.) Women in Human Evolution (London: Routledge, 1997). Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

Chapter 10: John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, “On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from Africa,” pp. 267–83 from Social Identities 7:2 (2001). Reprinted with permission of the publisher (Taylor and Francis Group http://www.informaworld.com).

Chapter 11: Rosemary Joyce “Girling the Girl and Boying the Boy: The Production of Adulthood in Ancient Mesoamerica,” pp. 473–83 from World Archaeology 31 (2000). Reprinted with permission of the publisher (Taylor and Francis Group http://www.informaworld.com).

Chapter 12: Barbara L. Voss, “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire,” pp. 191–203 from American Anthropologist 110:2 (2008). Reprinted with permission of the American Anthropological Association and the author.

Chapter 13: Sarah M. Nelson, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Prehistoric Korea,” pp. 218–31 from Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds) Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press and the author.

Chapter 14: Siân Jones, “Historical Categories and the Praxis of Identity: The Interpretation of Ethnicity in Historical Archaeology,” pp. 219–32 from Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall, and Siaân Jones (eds) Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge (London: Routledge, 1999). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 15: Roger Echo-Hawk and Larry J. Zimmerman, “Beyond Race: Some Opinions about Racialism and American Archaeology,” pp. 461–85 from The American Indian Quarterly 30:3–4 (2006). Reprinted with permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

Chapter 16: LouAnn Wurst, “A Class All Its Own: Explorations of Class Formation and Conflict,” pp. 190–206 from Martin Hall and Stephen Silliman (eds) Historical Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 17: Webb Keane, “Money Is No Object: Materiality, Desire, and Modernity in an Indonesian Society,” pp. 65–90 from Fred Myers (ed.) The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001). Reprinted with permission of SAR Press.

Chapter 18: Barbara Mills, “Remembering while Forgetting: Depositional Practices and Social Memory at Chaco,” pp. 81–108 from Barbara J. Mills and William Walker (eds) Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practices (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2008). Reprinted with permission of SAR Press.

Chapter 19: Paul A. Shackel, “Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical Archaeology,” pp. 655–70 from American Anthropologist 103:3 (2001). Reprinted with permission of the American Anthropological Association and the author.

Chapter 20: Peter R. Schmidt and Jonathan R. Walz, “Re-Representing African Pasts through Historical Archaeology’’, pp. 53–70 from American Antiquity 72:1 (2007). Copyright © 2007 by the Society for American Archaeology. Reprinted with permission of the Society for American Archaeology and the authors.

Chapter 21: Margarita Dı´az-Andreu, “Archaeology and Nationalism in Spain,” pp. 39–56 from Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds) Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 22: Carla M. Sinopoli, “Echoes of Empire: Vijayanagara and Historical Memory, Vijayanagara as Historical Memory,” pp. 17–33 in Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock (eds) Archaeologies of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 23: Zainab Bahrani, “Conjuring Mesopotamia: Imaginative Geography and a World Past,” pp. 159–74 from Lynn Meskell (ed.) Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (London: Routledge, 1998). Reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis (UK) Books.

Chapter 24: Russell G. Handsman and Trudie Lamb Richmond, “Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke Peoples and Us,” pp. 87–118 from Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson (eds) Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1995). Reprinted with permission of SAR Press.

Chapter 25: Arjun Appadurai, “The Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage: A Discussion with Arjun Appadurai,” pp. 35–49 from Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2002). Reprinted with permission of Sage.

Chapter 26: Lynn Meskell, “Sites of Violence: Terrorism, Tourism, and Heritage in the Archaeological Present,” pp. 123–46 from Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels (eds) Embedding Ethics (OxfSevalord: Berg, 2005). Reprinted with permission of Berg Publishers c/o A C Black.

Chapter 27: Michael L. Blakey, “An Ethical Epistemology of Publicly Engaged Biocultural Research,” pp. 17–28 from Junko Habu, Clare Fawcett, and John M. Matsunaga (eds) Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies (New York: Springer, 2008). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 28: Audrey Horning, “Cultures of Contact, Cultures of Conflict? Identity Construction, Colonialist Discourse, and the Ethics of Archaeological Practice in Northern Ireland,” pp. 107–33 from Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5 (2007). Copyright © Audrey Horning 2007. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.

Chapter 29: Sonya Atalay, “No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI,” pp. 597–618 from The American Indian Quarterly 30:3–4 (2006). Reprinted with permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

Chapter 30: Lauren Talalay, “The Past as Commodity: Archaeological Images in Modern Advertising,” pp. 205–216 from Public Archaeology 3 (2004). Reprinted with permission of Maney Publishing.

Chapter 31: Ian Hodder, “The Past as Passion and Play: Çatalhöyük as a Site of Conflict in the Construction of Multiple Pasts,” pp. 124–39 from Lynn Meskell (ed.) Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (London: Routledge, 1998). Reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis UK.

Chapter 32: George P. Nicholas and Kelly P. Bannister, “Copyrighting the Past? Emerging Intellectual Property Rights Issues in Archaeology,” pp. 327–50 from Current Anthropology 45:3 (2004). Reprinted with permission of the University of Chicago Press.

Part I

The New Pragmatism

NEW EDITIONS OF TEXTBOOKS OR READERS are generally of two kinds. Typically, they stay close to the structure of the first edition and add in new material to acknowledge the ways in which the field has changed since its original publication date. Less frequently do they represent a complete rewrite or a new engagement with the field. This second edition of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory is of this latter kind and, indeed, it is why we have chosen to add the subtitle The New Pragmatism.

The first edition, edited by Robert Preucel, an American Southwesternist, and Ian Hodder, a British prehistorian, was an attempt to review the landscape of archaeological theory circa 1995 (Preucel and Hodder 1996). We began by acknowledging the challenges and risks of the project. Readers are a distinctive publication genre. They bind together a group of essays written by diverse scholars for different purposes into a single volume where their common threads are highlighted by the editors. There is a sense of authority and completeness about them that is exciting when they first come out, but that quickly fades with passage of time. Because each reader brings his or her own experience and knowledge to bear in the process of reading, we wished our Reader to be fluid and open to multiple interpretations. We were aware that our introductory essays and our essay selections could be perceived as an attempt to establish a canon, even though this was certainly not our intention.

We then discussed possible ways of organizing the Reader to emphasize the point that organizational decisions are not neutral and they have an effect upon interpretation. Some of the possible organizational structures we reviewed included dividing the book by historical periods (antiquarianism, culture-historical archaeology, processual archaeology, postprocessual archaeology), by types of societies (band, tribe, chief-dom, state), or by subject and national origin (Paleolithic archaeology, Roman archaeology, Chinese archaeology). We then raised the question of whether it was possible to develop an organizational schema that does not suffer from an evolutionary or imperialist bias. We concluded that while there can be no definitive account of theory in archaeology, there can nonetheless be productive engagements that are forged through a process of discourse and dialogue. This perspective requires a commitment to a more democratic archaeology where all views and positionalities have the right to be included in the discourse (which is, of course, not the same thing as saying that all views are equally valid). This is the basis for doing applied anthropology as well as a socially committed or action archaeology.

This second edition, edited by Preucel and Stephen Mrozowski, an American historical archaeologist, adopts a somewhat different approach. It is not so much a review of the field as it is an investigation of a particular movement or spirit in the human sciences. We have called this investigation the “new pragmatism.” This spirit does not refer to the dominance of any one theory, but rather to the more explicit integration of archaeology and its social context in ways that serve contemporary needs. While it is true that archaeology has always had a social purpose, it is becoming clear that archaeology and the social are inextricably intertwined. It is no longer possible to hold that archaeology is an objective science first and a social practice second. Archaeology is irreducibly both at the same time. Archaeologists are increasingly asking the following questions: How can archaeology better contribute to broader dialogues concerning the myriad social challenges humanity faces at this point in its history? What is archaeology’s role in the development of social theory? What are the practical consequences of holding a particular theory? Does archaeology matter?

In the past 15 years, there has been a growing emphasis on the social and an interest more generally in establishing the relevance of social sciences to the modern world. In philosophy, this has meant the reemergence of pragmatism and the importance it places on self-referential knowledge and its practical application to contemporary social issues (Baert 2005). In archaeology, this is perhaps exemplified by the emergence of postprocessual archaeologies and the gradual incorporation of questions of identity, meaning, agency, and practice alongside those of system, process, and structure. This development, of course, should not be interpreted to mean that process or structure has been superseded. The social must always be positioned within a longterm trajectory and linked to the cognitive. Rather, it means that in terms of the doing of archaeology, there are increasingly more studies deploying social categories in pursuit of a past that holds relevance in today’s world. It is no longer possible to justify archaeology on some abstract terms; rather, the ethics of archaeology now require that we join diverse interest groups in the common project of understanding the multiple meanings of the past for the present. The obvious question to ask is why is this happening now? This Reader is an attempt to interrogate this question from several different, but interrelated, directions.

Disciplinary Anxieties

All fields and disciplines undergo periodic reevaluations when they take stock of their current situation and chart possible courses for the future. This is a healthy thing since knowledge grows and interests shift. In anthropological archaeology, one such reevaluation took place in the 1960s and early 1970s and turned on the degree to which positivism was an appropriate epistemology for the scientific investigation of past cultures and societies (Fritz and Plog 1970; Watson et al. 1971; Flannery 1973, Renfrew 1982). Ironically, this reevaluation came precisely at the moment that philosophers of science were moving away from positivism and advocating alternative approaches, some of which came to be called postpositivism (Rorty 1979, 1982; Wylie 1981, 2002). This “epistemic delay” is typical of those social sciences, like archaeology, that have attempted to emulate the physical sciences. There is now a growing sense that there are multiple legitimate ways of knowing the world. Indeed, science studies scholars have concluded that, as important as it is, science cannot be claimed on philosophical grounds to be a privileged enterprise (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Pickering 1995; Barnes et al. 1996; Knorr Cetina 1999). Rather, science is but one among many ways of knowing, each of which serves particular social purposes. This is not a statement in favor of relativism, since all forms of knowledge acquisition are manifestly not equivalent. It simply means that knowledge claims must be continually justified against one another in discourse and dialogue. This conclusion is central to a pragmatic archaeology.

In the 1960s, Lewis Binford and his students at the University of Chicago introduced an explicitly scientific approach to explaining the past known as the “new archaeology.” What was new was the placement of theory building, particularly systems theory, ecological theory, and evolutionary theory, at the core of the archaeological agenda (Binford 1962; Flannery 1972). The ultimate goal was for archaeology to take its place along other empirical, lawgenerating sciences and apply itself to explaining the past as a predictable trajectory. This new focus contrasted with the particularistic nature of standard traditional or culture-historical archaeology and had the advantage of directly linking archaeology to other newly reformulated sciences, such as evolutionary ecology, sociology, and human geography. David Clarke (1968) at Cambridge University offered a somewhat different, but largely congruent, version of the new archaeology that emphasized quantitative and analytic methods borrowed from many of these same sciences. Enthusiasm among archaeologists was high and some even touted this movement as a “paradigm shift” in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1962) because it was perceived as marking a radical break with the approaches and methods of culture-historical archaeology (Sterud 1973).

The excitement of the new archaeology, however, was short-lived and internal critiques quickly came to the surface. Although occasionally forgotten, these early critiques would, in some instances, presage changes that would shape the field as a whole. One area of dispute was the nature of scientific explanation. John Fritz and Fred Plog (1970) promoted the hypothetico-deductive method as devised by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948) in their classic account of the logic of scientific explanation. Patty Jo Watson, Steven LeBlanc, and Charles Redman (1971) observed that this method would bring archaeology in line with other sciences. Colin Renfrew (1982), however, questioned the appropriateness of a strict allegiance to positivism, and Merrilee and Wesley Salmon proposed the statistical-relevance model in place of the covering-law model (Salmon and Salmon 1979; Salmon 1982).

A second topic of debate was the integrity of the archaeological record and the impact of “site formation processes.” Michael Schiffer (1976) critiqued the new archaeologists who had naively assumed that the archaeological record was a “fossil record” of past behavior. He introduced a discussion of post-depositional processes, pointing out that they often introduced patterns of their own which “distorted” the record. A proper explanation of a given problem must thus proceed first by identifying natural and cultural transforms and then factoring them out to reveal the underlying behavior of interest. Binford (1980) quickly took issue with Schiffer, arguing that he assumed the “Pompeii premise,” namely the existence of some real past waiting to be discovered. For Binford, the record is the normal consequence of the operation of dynamic living systems and is generated continuously. This important insight challenged the standard opposition of past and present and foreshadowed the dialectical arguments by postprocessualists (Shanks and Tilley 1987a, 1987b).

Schiffer and his University of Arizona colleagues, J. Jefferson Reid and William Rathje, responded to this intellectual fragmentation by offering “behavioral archaeology” to unify the field into a coherent program (Reid et al. 1975; Schiffer 1995). The basic premise of behavioral archaeology is the belief that the proper goal of archaeology is the study of the relations between people and material culture at all times and places. The unification of archaeology was to be accomplished through the integration of four distinct research strategies (Reid et al. 1975). Strategy 1 was devoted to using material culture produced in the past to answer specific questions about past human behavior. Strategy 2 focused on contemporary material culture to derive laws of human behavior useful for explaining the past. Strategy 3 was the use of past material culture to generate laws of human behavior. Strategy 4 was the use of present material culture to explain present human behavior. According to this framework, Strategies 2 and 3 were the nomothetic or law-generating strategies and Strategies 1 and 4 were the idiographic or lawusing ones. This approach, with some modifications, is still influential today (Schiffer 1995, 1999; Skibo and Schiffer 2008).

Yet another debate turned on the proper role of analogy (see Wylie 1985). Binford (1967) argued that analogy was to be used not for explanation, but rather for the construction of hypotheses about the past that could then be tested against the archaeological record. Explanation was thus a two-step process involving hypothesis generation and hypothesis testing. Left unresolved, however, was the stopping point, the stage of testing at which an analogy might be considered validated. In the late 1970s, Richard Gould offered a pessimistic view on the use of analogy. He felt that archaeology could never hope to address more than a “limited and rather unimportant part of the story of the human species” because of its reliance on material culture (Gould 1980:3). For Gould (1980), symbolic behavior, the most important and interesting aspects of human behavior, could only be understood in contemporary human societies. This meant that ethnography could only be used negatively to identify anomalies, the so-called “spoiler approach.” Patty Jo Watson (1982), on the other hand, took the more positive view that the archaeological record could be used to confront scientific hypotheses. Binford (1985) critiqued Gould, claiming that he ignored the role of theory, specifically how it provides a context for interpretation. Gould (1985) responded by arguing that theory alone was not sufficient and that empirical research was essential for the building of middle-range theory, of what he called operational theory (Gould 1990). This debate is particularly interesting in that it contains elements of a social constructivist position. While arguing for greater objectivity, Binford explicitly acknowledged that our theories and assumptions fundamentally condition what we accept as fact.

What underlay processual archaeology, and its variants, was the view that archaeology could be divorced from its social context. One does archaeology first and then attends to its social contexts and consequences. The implication here is that the doing of archaeology can be separated off from its social uses and that only the former was true archaeology. Some prescient archaeologists did challenge aspects of this view and raised issues of relevance. As John Fritz and Fred Plog (1970:411–412) put it, “We suspect that unless archaeologists find ways to make their research increasingly relevant to the modern world, the modern world will find itself increasingly capable of getting along without archaeologists.” Their justification for this statement was that archaeology is largely funded by the public in the form of federal grants and programs. Fritz (1973) later drew attention to how archaeology had the potential to help provide a deeper understanding of poorly assimilated technological change, unchecked population growth, environmental mismanagement, and social disintegration. Similarly, Richard Ford (1973) held that a scientific archaeology had the potential to promote a universal humanism.

In the 1980s, “postprocessualism” emerged as a new and forceful critique of processual archaeology. Ian Hodder and his students at Cambridge University were the main leaders of this movement. Significantly, Hodder, a student of David Clarke, was an early advocate of the new archaeology, and was particularly interested in the spatial organization of human behavior (Hodder and Orton 1976; Hodder 1978). And like Binford, Hodder took up ethnoarchaeology to study the relationship between material culture patterning and behavior. However, unlike Binford, he drew the conclusion that social boundaries were dynamic and fluid, always in the process of negotiation (Hodder 1979, 1982c). He interpreted material culture as actively constituting social action and not merely passively reflecting it. This perspective drew support from the work of historical archaeologists working in both North America and Africa who stressed that the meaning attached to material culture could only be understood by examining material practices in their cultural-historical contexts (see Hodder 1982c:229). In 1984, Hodder introduced the term “postprocessual” to describe an archaeology that takes greater account of meaning, the individual, culture, and history (Hodder 1984). He later extended the term to encompass a variety of alternatives to processualism, including neo-Marxist, indigenous, and feminist perspectives (Hodder 1986). Christopher Tilley (1989a:185) has heralded this development and not the rise of the new archaeology as the true paradigm shift in archaeological theory.

At the same time, a group of scholars inspired by Marxist approaches developed their own critiques of processual archaeology. Some of these individuals identified with classical historical materialism and argued that class relations were the driving force for culture change (Spriggs 1984; Gilman 1989; McGuire and Paynter 1991; Muller 1997). Others were more interested in Althusser and Foucault and issues of ideology and power (Leone 1982, 1984; Miller and Tilley 1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987a, 1987b). Despite their common Marxist lineage, these two directions were not entirely congruent. Indeed, the classical Marxists possessed certain affinities with processualists and the neo-Marxists shared many interests with postprocessualists. There were tensions between the advocates of Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives, and these tended to be expressed over notions of agency, class, structure, and meaning. Bruce Trigger (1985), for example, critiqued the neo-Marxists for what he saw as tendencies toward relativism (see also Patterson 1989). The main area of overlap, however, was the common belief in an emancipatory archaeology, the idea that archaeology has a transformative role to play in the modern world.

Perhaps the most important development of this period was the archaeology of gender. Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector published the first widely read feminist piece in Anglo-American archaeology in 1984. Their review article was essentially a call to arms, an attempt to introduce gender as a legitimate topic of archaeological research and to draw attention to the status inequalities of women in the profession (Conkey and Spector 1984). Contemporaneous with this was Joan Gero’s (1983, 1985) work on how our Western ideological construction of womanhood affects the research and funding opportunities of women in archaeology and the sciences. Her results pointed to clear discrepancies in the funding of male and female scholars by the National Science Foundation. In 1988, Gero and Conkey (1991) organized the Wedge Conference at the Wedge Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, as the first group effort to explore different approaches to women and production in prehistory. They invited a range of women and men, some of whom had never before considered the implications of feminism and gender in archaeology. As an example of the fresh insights that this new approach could bring, Patty Jo Watson revisited the origins of agriculture in North America and exposed the logical contradictions between its standard presentation as the result of male bias and the general acceptance that women were gatherers (Watson and Kennedy 1991). A year later, the archaeology of gender was the theme of the annual Chacmool Conference in Calgary, drawing a large number of participants (Walde and Willows 1991). This conference helped legitimize gender as a research topic and united various strands of feminist theory.

Processual archaeology has now diversified broadly in response to both internal and external critiques. A good example of this is “cognitive processual archaeology,” an approach closely associated with the work of Colin Renfrew at Cambridge University. Renfrew (1994a:5) has characterized cognitive archaeology in general terms as the study of the “specially human ability to construct and use symbols” in order to understand how cognitive processes operated in specific contexts. It draws from palaeoanthropology, animal ethology, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. While there is, as yet, no clear theoretical consensus, it is heuristically useful to differentiate “evolutionary studies” from “cognitive processual studies.” The former encompasses the origins and evolution of human cognitive abilities, particularly consciousness, language, and tool using (Mellars 1991; Wynn 1991; de Beaune et al. 2009). The latter addresses the identification of cognitive processes of past modern peoples and their relationships to general cognitive principles (Flannery and Marcus 1993; Zubrow 1994). What unites these approaches, then, is their refutation of the standard processualist thesis that the mind is epiphenomenal and their methodological commitment to some form of positivism.

Gender studies have also proliferated, and exhibit a considerable range of diversity from empirical to idealist, from positivist to hermeneutic. These studies indicate the evolution of feminist thinking from dichotomous models of sex and gender to a concern for multivalent issues of identity, embodiment, and subjectivity. Here the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and her ideas of performativity have been particularly important (Perry and Joyce 2001). The categories of sex and sexuality have been interrogated and retheorized (Meskell 1999; Joyce 2000a, 2000b; Schmidt and Voss 2000; Wilkie and Hayes 2006). Women have been placed at the center of new models of human evolution (Zihlman 1989; Hagar 1997). Special symposia and sessions at professional meetings are routinely devoted to such topics as equity issues, career development, and historical struggles (see Siefert 1991; Claassen 1992; Claassen and Joyce 1994; Nelson et al. 1994; Geller and Stockett 2006). Special committees and workgroups have been established within the professional associations. There is now a journal devoted to women in archaeology (Kvinner in Archaeologi) and a handbook on gender in archaeology (Nelson 2006). This interest in feminism and gender research is now firmly established at the international level, most notably in England (Braithwaite 1982; Moore 1986, 1988, 2007; Gibbs 1987; Gilchrist 1994, 1999), Norway (Dommasnes 1992; Dommasnes et al. 1998; Englestad 1991, 2004), and Australia (du Cros and Smith 1993).

Evolutionary approaches have also diversified. One of these, known as “selectionism” or “Darwinian archaeology,” is associated with Robert Dunnell (1980, 1989) and his students at the University of Washington. They have offered the controversial view that culture change can be modeled in Darwinian terms. More specifically, they claim that natural selection is responsible for functional variation in cultural traits. Neutral or stylistic traits are those traits that are conditioned only by the processes of cultural transmission. Robert Leonard and George Jones (1987) have expanded Dunnell’s approach by introducing the notion of “replicative fitness.” For them, there is an important distinction to be made between individuals, who have differential reproductive success, and the traits of those individuals, which have only replicative success. Each trait can thus be considered to have its own fitness value, which may or may not affect the fitness of the bearer of that trait. Michael O’Brien and R. Lee Lyman (2000, 2002) have developed this approach even further, arguing that artifacts are to be treated analytically as phenotypic manifestations of cultural traits and that their differential replicative fitness is probabilistic, not deterministic. Thus whether or not a human population evolves along with them is contextually specific. However, other scholars have offered sharp critiques of selectionism, arguing that it betrays a misunderstanding of the role of phenotypic variation and, in particular, behavioral variation in the evolutionary process (Boone and Smith 1998; Preucel 1999; Bamforth 2002; Gabora 2006).

Perhaps the most exciting area of evolutionary research is the evolution of mind. Several major syntheses have now been published by archaeologists or by scholars strongly influenced by archaeology. Merlin Donald (1991) has proposed the thesis that symbolic thought emerged from a pre-symbolic form through the gradual embedding of new representational systems. He writes that “the functional locus of ‘consciousness’ can shift, depending on the representational system currently in command” (Donald 1991:369). Terrence Deacon (1997) takes as his starting point the problem of reference. He holds that reference is fundamentally hierarchical in nature: more complex forms are built up from simpler ones. More specifically, symbolic reference depends upon indexical reference, which, in turn, depends upon iconic reference. This means that in order to understand symbolic reference one needs to start with icons and work upwards to indexes and then symbols. Steven Mithen (1994, 1996) has proposed that the key event in the evolution of the modern mind is the shift from specialized intelligence to “cognitive fluidity” during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition. As with Donald, he adopts a modified version of the developmental model as it is used in current psychology. He then introduces the analogy of a cathedral as a means of understanding the architecture of mind. He notes that just as it is impossible to separate out the influences of the architectural plan and the building environment on the cathedral, so, too, it is impossible to separate out the effects of genes and the developmental environment in the mind (Mithen 1996:66).

An important recent development is the rise of “postcolonial archaeologies.” Postcolonialism refers to the critique of the Western canon by such preeminent scholars as Frantz Fanon (1963, 1965), Edward Said (1978), Gayatri Spivak (1988), and Homi Bhabha (1994), among others. This critique has highlighted issues of representation in the fields of history and literary criticism and emphasized power differentials between colonists and the colonized, particularly in the context of Africa, the Caribbean, Palestine, and India. In archaeology, this critique is associated with the rise of postprocessual archaeologies, which singled out the colonial origins of archaeology and the unacknowledged biases underlying its practice in non-Western contexts (Gosden 2001; Shepherd 2002a). As Hodder (1986:157) puts it, “Western archaeologists working in non-industrialized societies, particularly in the post-colonial era, became increasingly confronted with the idea that the pasts they were reconstructing were ‘Western’ and with an articulate rejection of those pasts as being politically and ideologically motivated.” The relationships between postcolonial theory and archaeology are complex and nuanced and linked to indigenous rights movements worldwide (Dean and Levi 2003). Matthew Liebmann (2008:4) advocates postcolonial theory on the grounds that it has the potential to contribute to archaeology in three ways: (1) interpretively, in the investigation of past cases of colonization and colonialism; (2) historically, in the study of archaeology’s role in the construction and deconstruction of colonial discourses; and (3) methodologically, as an aid to the decolonization of the field as part of ethical practice.

Related to postcolonialism is the international movement championing indigenous knowledge and decolonizing methodologies that has come to be called “indigenous archaeology” (Nicholas and Andrews 1997; Watkins 2001; Smith and Wobst 2005; Atalay 2006; Silliman 2008). These indigenous archaeologies represent the interests of different indigenous communities and their multiple articulations with archaeology. They are now beginning to be expressed in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Bolivia, Canada, and the United States. Indigenous archaeologies are thus relatively new developments on the archaeological landscape and parallel the growing national and international acknowledgment of indigenous rights. Because of their newness, they are still in the process of establishing their agendas and priorities. Perhaps the most widely cited definition is due to George Nicholas and Thomas Andrews (1997:3), who state that indigenous archaeology is archaeology conducted “with, for, and by Indigenous peoples.” Indigenous archaeology is more than indigenous people learning the methods of Western archaeology or Western archaeologists collaborating with indigenous communities. It raises fundamental questions about Western ways of knowing and offers radically different ontologies grounded in indigenous conceptions of space, time, and social being (see Cajete 1999, 2004).

The theory debates, so prominent in the 1980s, have now become muted by the debates over archaeology’s disciplinary status. These debates are revisiting the distinctively American thesis that archaeology is a form of anthropology, as Phil Phillips (1955:246) and Robert Braidwood (1959:79) originally argued. They are intimately related to the current critiques of the “four-field approach,” which was an approach that was first outlined in 1904 by Franz Boas, who proposed that the discipline properly embraced “the biological history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written language; the ethnology of people without historic records; and prehistoric archeology” (Boas 1904:35). In the decades that followed, anthropology became institutionalized with the establishment of a national anthropological organization and the creation of anthropology departments at major universities. Although few scholars were ever fluent in all four fields, anthropologists nonetheless regarded their field as a holistic scientific enterprise, and argued for its place among other disciplines and its role in intellectual life and public discourse (Stocking 1995).

In some ways, anthropology has been a victim of its own success. Its steady growth has led to considerable subdisciplinary specialization and the attendant disputes and rivalries. In 1995, George Stocking observed that the American Anthropological Association consisted of 15 subsidiary societies (including the ethnological, humanistic, linguistic, medical, psychological, urban, visual, Latin American and European, as well as consciousness and work). There were ten associations (including Africanist, Black, feminist, political and legal, senior and student), as well as several regional associations and one devoted to the practice of anthropology. There are three “councils” (education, museum, nutrition). Finally, there were two sections (biology and archaeology). In addition, the circulation of the American Anthropologist, the official journal of the association, had declined from over 11,000 subscribers to fewer than 8,000 and was taken by less than half of the membership (Stocking 1995). Some anthropologists regard this situation as indicating the“fragmentation” of the field and have pointed to the increasing difficulty that scholars have in talking across their subdisciplinary specializations.