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Archaeology into the 1990sMichael Shanks a & Christopher Tilley ba Dept. of Archaeology, Cambridge University, Englandb Dept. of Anthropology, University College London, EnglandVersion of record first published: 19 May 2010.

To cite this article: Michael Shanks & Christopher Tilley (1989): Archaeology into the 1990s, Norwegian ArchaeologicalReview, 22:1, 1-12

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00293652.1989.9965480

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DISCUSSIONS Norw. Arch. Rev., Vol. 22, No. 1,1989

EDITOR'S NOTEDuring the 1980s the theoretical basis of the New Archaeology, or the processual archaeology, of the1960s and the 1970s has been strongly debated. The challenge has come especially from a group ofCambridge archaeologists who tried to establish another archaeological discipline, a structuralisticarchaeology in the early 1980s, a contextual or a post-processual archaeology in recent years. BesidesIan Hodder, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley have played an important part in this discussion.In particular, their two recent books Re-Constructing Archaeology and Social Theory and Archaeologyare impressive attempts to sum up much of the latest theoretical debate on the creation of a complexpost-structuralist archaeology.

The editors of NAR felt that many of the views presented in these two books will come to dominatemuch of the archaeological debate during the coming years, and found it reasonable to ask Shanks andTilley to write an introduction to a discussion on 'Archaeology into the 1990s'. A number of distin-guished archaeologists were asked to comment on either the introductory paper or on one of theauthor's two books. This section is concluded with a reply by Shanks and Tilley.

Archaeology into the 1990sMICHAEL SHANKS and CHRISTOPHER TILLEY

Dept. of Archaeology, Cambridge University, England

Dept. of Anthropology, University College London, England

CRITIQUE AND THE NEWARCHAEOLOGY

Our work together in Re-ConstructingArchaeology (RCA) and Social Theory andArchaeology (STA) began because of a feel-ing of unease and dissatisfaction witharchaeological theory and practice as it haddeveloped during the 1960s and 1970s. Thedevelopment of theory and new orientationsin archaeology during this period was stimu-lating and arousing, yet after an initial periodof intense debate, archaeology appeared tobe slumbering once more, even regressing,with the advocacy of so-called 'middle rangetheory', back to the kinds of asocial explana-tory frameworks and disciplinary nihilism ithad so desperately tried to escape. (RCA:Chapter 2). We perceived much of the newarchaeology as an uncritical proliferation ofeclectic borrowings from other socialsciences, sometimes based on a rather nar-row and superficial reading of secondaryliterature. Despite these borrowings the

aim was paradoxically to reinstate the disci-plinary independence and autonomy ofarchaeology. Meanwhile the traditionalarchaeology of sceptical empiricism re-mained firm in institutional structures,adopting only cosmetic changes such asproblem orientation. New archaeologyreinforced the deep-rooted empiricism oftraditional archaeology, while in a contra-dictory way its emphasis on theory was a rad-ical challenge. All too often, however,theory became identified with the provisionof new methodologies (STA: Chapter 1).

We took as our first object the articulationof criticisms of basic orientations and philo-sophical positions present but not exploredin new and processual archaeologies. Thesewere naturalism and scientism, phenomen-alism and empiricism (RCA: Chapters 2 and5). We criticized naturalism as reducing thesocial world to a second nature, assimilatingsocial practices to simple material behav-iours. This reduction involved an unaccept-

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2 Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley

able rejection of meaning and agency insocial analysis. It is also associated with theaccreditation of 'scientific' method andexplanation: scientism. While questioningthe definition of scientific method as basedon procedures of quantification, testing, andfalsification of hypotheses, we were con-cerned to raise the issue of value freedomand to show the notion of an impartial, value-free observer and scientist to be a dangerousmyth RCA : Chapter 3 ; STA : Chapter 7). Westrongly attacked phenomenalism — thedoctrine that certainly lies in the physicalsenses — and the associated emphasis onunmediated experience of material fact asthe guarantor of truth. Instead, we stressedthe creation of facts and the necessary inter-play of theory with the practice of archaeo-logical analysis.

In both books we used various philo-sophical positions and theoretical frame-works to counter the technicist emphasesarising in the new archaeology in particular,in order to develop a critique of empiricistmethod. Rather than emphasizing theory asa contemplative refinement of method weintended to rearticulate it as somethingactive and critical, a practice that was notmerely incidental or in a 'superstructural'relationship to the real business of archae-ology. Part of this process was to break downa divide erected in the new archaeologybetween theory and practice: the presen-tation of a theoretical position followed by aseries of 'applications' aimed either atdemonstrating the validity of the positionadopted or at 'testing' its worth and rel-evance. We attempted to emphasize theoryay a practice, as a process indelibly linkingthe archaeologist and that which he or sheconstructs and re-constructs. Such a positionputs an end to theory viewed as somethingessentially divorced from and standingbeyond the practice of actually doing archae-ology. What we were working towards was atheory o/and in practice, the notion that allarchaeology is theoretical practice.

On the one hand we concerned ourselves

with epistemology — how we might gainknowledge of the past — and this resulted inthe critique, via hermeneutics and dialecticalthought, of grounding philosophies such aspositivism (RCA: Chapter 5). Here a deci-sive point of departure was a move awayfrom the mechanistic procedures of so-calledscientific or objective analysis to a discussionof the interplay or dialectic between the sub-ject and object of an interpretative practice.Our consideration of epistemology led usaway from it to consider the grounding ofinterpretative practice in subjectivity and themanner in which subjects of different kindsare created within a determinate social fieldof interpretative practices (STA: Chapter 3).An emphasis on hermeneutics or the processof interpretation leads us to understand thatthe entire world is always already a vast fieldof interpretative networks. We cannotescape interpretation via some application ofmethod, but what we can do is to makechoices and insert ourselves within a par-ticular interpretative field while underminingand challenging other interpretative prac-tices which appear to be inadequate orunhelpful. In relation to this last point wedrew (RCA: Chapters 3 and 5) on the dev-astating attacks on positivist empiricism andscientism delivered by Critical Theory —Marxists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, andHabermas (in his early work) who produceda sophisticated cultural critique of capital-ism. We conceived both RCA and STA aspart of an assault on a whole system of socialand cultural and academic values embeddedwithin both traditional and new archaeology.

It was Critical Theory in particular, butconjoined with aspects of post-structuralistcritical practice, that brought us to considermatters which we might term meta-theor-etical: the problem of theory itself and itsrelation to the practice of archaeology (STA:Chapter 1); the idea of value freedom in aca-demic work (RCA: Chapters 1 and 3); thepolitics of theory (STA: Chapter 7) and itsrelation with the present as well as the past.Here we emphasized the insertion of archae-

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Archaeology into the 1990s 3

ology as a cultural practice within late capi-talism in the West. This required reflexivelylooking at the social conditions, interests,and structures within which archaeologicalpractices, meanings, and explanations arise.

MATERIAL CULTURE

On the other hand we found stimulatingthose bodies of thought which we felt helpedus focus on what we saw as the object of anyarchaeology — the relationship betweencontextually situated social practices andmaterial culture. We considered this missingin its essentials from the predominantly func-tionalist social archaeologies {STA: Chapter2) of the 1970s and early 1980s. Structuralismcrucially provided a different ontologicalbasis for understanding both material cultureand social practices and their relations. Abasic premise here, running counter to allforms of empiricism, is that what cannot beobserved determines the world of appear-ances, that which we do see. Consequently,any analysis needs to go beyond the surfacesof the empirical world to uncover underlyingstructures constituted by rules and principleswhich help to constitute meaning and sig-nificance. Analysis shifts from the thingsthemselves (axes, pots, and so on) torelations between them. We also viewed astructuralist perspective as important inasserting the mediation of nature by culture(hence no simple environmental determin-ism is possible) and the individual by society(STA: Chapters 3 and 4, RCA: Chapters 6and 7). Perhaps more important was that anunderstanding of structuralism opened theway to an understanding of material cultureas being in some senses analogous to a text,a meaningful signifying system to be 'read'and interpreted. Semiology provided a par-allel source of inspiration with its emphasison the endowment of all social practices withpatterns of signification. There can be noinnocent fact or sign. 'Facts' speak to theirculturally conditioned audiences in deter-minate ways. Culture becomes viewed as a

kind of speech with underlying codes. Thejob of the investigator is to decode the vari-ous cultural messages. The general point isthat the whole of human culture can beviewed as a vast web of messages which com-municate. This helps to create the culturalconstruction of reality. Material culture, inwhich archaeologists have their main inter-est, becomes part of the way in which socialreality becomes constituted. It must there-fore be seen as an active element in society,not as a passive reflection of social process.

Our consideration of structuralism wasinformed and modified by two major lines ofcritical influence. Progressive Marxist socio-logies and anthropologies laid importantemphasis on totality — the context of a par-ticular social practice or artefact; on theubiquity of the political and relations ofpower; on society having no pre-ordainedhierarchy of determination (such as economyover religion); on the importance andmateriality of ideology; on the need for agenuine theory of history, with no artificialsplit between the synchronie and the diach-ronic, between static analysis and thedynamics of social change.

Second, there were various forms of post-structuralist critique. On the one hand therewas the attempt by Bourdieu, Giddens, andothers to link a theory of structure to oneof social action involving considerations ofagency, power, ideology, material praxis,and the symbolic. On the other hand therewere the various discourse perspectivesadvocated principally by Barthes, Derrida,and Foucault (RCA: Chapters 6 and 7; STA:Chapters 3 and 4). Rather than advocatinga search for universal structures in materialculture in a Lévi-Straussian manner we stres-sed that it should be regarded as having thefollowing general characteristics:

(1) being subject to multiple transform-ations in form and meaning content;

(2) that its meaning must be regarded ascontingent and contextually (i.e. his-torically and socially) dependent;

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4 Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley

(3) that it does not necessarily reflect socialreality. There may be various relationsof ideological inversion. Material cul-ture is charged with power relations;

(4) that it forms a framing and communi-cative medium in, for, and of socialpractice;

(5) that like a text it requires interpretationbut that such an interpretative processcan never end: there are no finalanswers;

(6) that it forms a channel of reified andobjectified 'expression', both beingstructured and structuring in a manner

. analogous to a language;(7) that it is a social, not an individual pro-

duction. The individual agent should beregarded as being structured throughlanguage and material culture;

(8) that the meaning of the archaeologicalrecord is irreducible to the elements thatgo to make it up;

(9) that the primary importance of materialculture is not so much its practical func-tions (to say that a chair is for sitting ontells us virtually nothing about it) but itssymbolic exchange values as part of thesocial construction of reality; and

(10) that it is polysemous: the meaning of anartefact alters according to (i) who usesit; (ii) where it is used, its social andmaterial location; (iii) where and inwhat circumstances the interpretationtakes place; (iv) who does the inter-pretation; (v) why they are bothering tointerpret in the first place and in relationto what expected audience.

FROM READING TO WRITING THEPAST

The above perspective on material cultureleads us significantly away from any kind ofanalysis which claims that it is a simple matterof reading off the way the past really wasfrom its present traces occurring in thearchaeological record. Any attempt to mir-ror a real past is insufficiently self-reflexive.

In RCA (Chapters 1 and 5) and STA (Chap-ter 4) we questioned the notion of a real pastand set out to demonstrate that any attemptto recover or reconstruct such a past was bothimpossible (we would never know when wewere there) and suspect in view of the poly-semous nature of material culture, which wecharacterized as consisting of a series ofmetacritical rather than diacritical signs. Inthe latter notion (advocated by Saussure),meaning is fixed through the differencebetween signs in an overall system; in theformer, meaning is regarded as slippery, assliding through shifting frames of reference,something which cannot be pinned downonce and for all (Derrida). The effects ofthese critiques of the notion of a real past andmeaning as stable was to emphasize inter-pretation as a contemporary act which doesnot attempt to recover original meaning. Theconsequences, some of which we havealready touched upon above, are that study-ing the past must be regarded as an actrequiring self-reflexive discourse. The mean-ing of the past does not belong to the pastbut to the present. A corollary is that theprimary event of archaeology is not the eventof the past but the event of archaeologyitself: discourse, writing, excavation.Archaeology is not, then, so much a readingof the signs of the past, but a process in whichthese signs are written into the present. Andwriting, of course, transforms. There is a fun-damental gap between words and things. Wemove from a material culture 'text' to anarchaeological text backing up our argu-ments and statements by 'quoting' withartefacts. This is a process involving bothresistance (the material record does con-strain what we can write in various ways) andtransformation (the movement from thingsto words) (see Fig. 1).

Such a process of writing and analysis is inprinciple no different from reading works ofliterature and backing up interpretativeargumentative structures by quoting thewords of authors. Archaeology.may then besaid to bear a far closer resemblance to lit-

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Archaeology into the 1990s 5

MATERIAL CULTURE (a multidimensional'text' with a plurality

of meaning)

• resistance. transformation

ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEXT (argumentativestructure with material 'quotations')

Fig. 1. Relations between artefact and text.

erary criticism than, say, to nineteenth-cen-tury conceptions of physics usually referredto, or implied in the arguments used to sug-gest it is, or should become, a 'hard' science.

POLITICS AND THE NEW RIGHT

Our project crystallized in political experi-ence of the early 1980s. We witnessed a mas-terful display of the mobilization of the pastin the ideological service of the present, withassumptions and basic outlooks of new andtraditional archaeologies easily written intoa new hegemonic culture of the right. In Brit-ain the Thatcher solution involved a populistinvocation of common-sense understandingproviding simple remedies to a Britain indecline and their mechanical and resoluteapplication. Fundamentally anti-intellectualand irrational, it raised mythical and dema-gogic imageries of heritage, lost transcendantvalues, national collective identities, and tra-ditions. And at the heart was a consumeristindividualism — free wills exercising freechoice in the market of history.

So we saw archaeology's adherence to asupposed objectivity of fact as irrational,ignoring the basic nature of such a claim: sub-jective idealism, i.e. an idealism arising outof a contradiction between objective essencereceived by attuned subjectivities. What this

amounted to was an irrational acceptance ofvalues such as efficiency and optimizationregarded as transcendent, but which were inreality the values of capitalist economic prac-tices projected back into the past. The originof these abstract values in the present waslost. The mechanistic logics of culture pro-cess and evolutionary sequences involved aloss of socio-cultural specificity in themomentum of generalities. Above all, scien-tific archaeology was formulaic and auth-oritarian, applying general methodologiesand algorithms, universal remedies for worldhistories.

Traditional archaeology is at its roots anti-intellectual, sceptical of 'new' approaches,celebrating its common-sense categories,home-spun truths. Its object-based andunique pasts fitted well with the modern pastof traditional customs, folk museums, andcraft shops. There was also a sceptical com-placency and resignation providing noserious answers to challenges made either toits past or to its practices. It remains appar-ently sure of itself with a belief in anenshrined and unexamined conservationethic, and in a sacred past.

We considered that this was a loss of thepast. The past was becoming alien and unin-telligible. Scientific and traditional archae-ology and the culture of the new right offeredno vital lifeworld for a past. The present wasinstantaneity, available to instant experi-ence, consumption; the past was every-where, a palimpsest of 'heritage', and simi-larly instantaneous, locked into itsimmediate present. The past through cul-tural resource management had becomemarketable, open to the 'public'. Historicity,our historical agency, was being purposefullyforgotten.

RECONSTITUTING ARCHAEOLOGY

In the context of this experience our aimbecame wider: to institute an investigation ofthe basics of any genuine social archaeology;to supercede the fixed categories, pre-

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6 Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley

defined social schemes and universal his-tories of established archaeologies.

We considered that essentialism andreductionism, two disabling orientations,permeated the social archaeologies of the1970s and 1980s. Essentialism is the notionthat there is an essential meaning or sub-stance to the past: the archaeological recordbecomes the manifestation of pre-definedentities or units and their interaction (RCA:Chapter 6). Social typologies (band, tribe,chiefdom, state, and so on) and the mechan-ics of functionalist social archaeology (econ-omy-environment-population-technology,and so on, in interaction) are clearly essen-tialist. Reductionism is closely linked toessentialism. This is the notion that the par-ticularity of the archaeological record can bereduced to overaching generalizations, sub-suming social or other processes. A mil-lenium of particularity may be reduced to theanalytical process 'prestige-goods economy'.It was in the light of essentialism and reduc-tionism that we undertook a substantial crit-ique of social and cultural evolution (STA:Chapter 6).

We were concerned not to substitute analternative definition of 'society' or what-ever, a new and better essential object ofarchaeology. We wished to avoid hierarchiesof determination with the relegation of sub-stantial and substantive areas of socialexperience to irrelevancy. We aimed insteadto elucidate a set of concepts which wouldenable a grasp of aspects or fragments of thepast in their particularity within a flexiblemediatory totality; a set of concepts whichwould make no pretence to being a rep-resentation of a complete past, but wouldenable fertile interpretation of material cul-ture in a non-deterministic and dynamicengagement between past and present(RCA: Chapters 5-7; STA: Chapters 2-5,Chapter 6; 176-186).

In particular we aimed to overcome theocclusion of the individual in conventionalsocial archaeologies, to overcome the splitbetween individual and society. Our focus

was the decentered subject: a subject locatedwithin structures conceived as both themedium and outcome of intentional practice.As will be clear from the above discussion,the concept of structure carries a heavytheoretical burden. We linked structure topractice through power, focusing on stra-tegies and technologies of domination andsubordination. The dynamic of structure andpractice thus involves issues of legitimationand ideology, contradiction and historicalconjuncture: the politics of social repro-duction and change. Our consideration ofthe event of change related to a theorizationof time in archaeology; time too is struc-tured, and is not a neutral context or back-ground dimension to 'measure' change. Likespace it forms a medium and outcome ofhuman praxis. Abstract date and chronologyare subordinate to our historical plot and topolitical conjuncture.

A PROGRAMME FOR THE 1990s

The aims of any progressive archaeologymust now contain the following:

— The refinement and extension of a reflex-ive and mediatory conceptual apparatussuch as that mentioned above. Particularattention needs to be paid to a fresh con-sideration of ecological context and econ-omic practices, areas largely omitted fromRCA and STA.

— A continuing investigation of the relationof theory to practice.

— The development of a democratic politicsof archaeology: a questioning of insti-tutions, decision-making, and values.

— A rediscovery and refinement of the sub-jective, rooting archaeology in an exam-ination of basic and ordinary experiencesof the past: the development of a politicsof subjective identity and its relation tothe past.

— Experimentation with fresh ways of pro-ducing the past and relating it to thepresent, in the contexts of excavation

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Archaeology into the 1990s 7

strategies, museum displays, and writingtexts.

— Detailed critical analyses of the nature ofarchaeological discourses and theirrelations to a capitalist present.

— the full realization of archaeology as astrategic intervention in the presentthrough a focus on (i) archaeology itselfas constituting a micropolitical field; (ii)an adequate theorization of the relationbetween material culture and social struc-tures both within contemporary societyand in the past; (iii) using the differenceof the past to challenge established econ-omic and social strategies, categoriza-tions, epistemologies, rationalities,modes of living, and relating to others.

Our work continues (see Shanks and Til-ley, n.d.) with the following issues.

Making sense of historicityArchaeology is a making of a past in apresent. In order to forge an acceptable prac-tive of archaeology this means that we needto take history seriously. Taking the pastseriously involves recognizing its othernessnot as a matter of exoticism but as a meansof undercutting and relativizing the legit-imacy of the present. The new archaeologyand various forms of evolutionary theory failprecisely because of the attempt to reducehistory to a set of ahistorical processes, ahis-torical because these generalities are sup-posedly always present. Taking historyseriously also requires that we recognize theimportance of discontinuity. Such a rec-ognition implies that representations of thesocial, in material or other forms, simply can-not be the same across time. A renewedsense of historicity also demands inclusionand consideration of ourselves. The past isnot a fetish in the mud; it is not simply foundor observed in an arresting backward glance.As archaeologists we engage the past in sub-jective experience. For too long this sub-jectivity has been occluded — and thatmeans ourselves — in a valorization of

rationalized experience and a systematicanalytics. Instead we seek a re-enchantmentof the past, not in the sense of a mysticismcentered on a new subjectivism, but as aserious examination of the relation ofarchaeologist to the material past, an exam-ination of ourselves as positioned and decen-tered subjects.

At the root of all this is our relation totime: personal and social (STA: Chapter 5).We need to think of time and its meaning tous, its social valuation in capitalism. If we areto rediscover historicity — our involvementin past and future, our social agency (and thisis to talk of democratic values — then timemust be «associated with lifeworld, realizedas substantial, not abstract. So we do notlook back into the past and hope to find itstruths — truth is not to be found in history;history is to be found in the truth. Archae-ology thus loses its dependency on an objectpast, becomes our involvement in a materialworld (and in a 'post-modern' world of styleand signification archaeology is ever-morerelevant). Archaeology becomes futureorientated, a project.

A poetics of archaeologyIn RCA and STA we abandoned any attemptto create a privileged or foundationaldiscourse which would suggest that it is 'inthe true' by virtue of internal logical coher-ency or by means of reference to, or cor-respondence with, realities standing outsidediscourse (as in the phenomenalist premissthat we must take our theories to an externalphysical reality of 'hard' data which will thenpass judgement on (test) their validity).

Language use does not merely imitatereality; rather, it helps to constitute it. Thismeans that we must shift attention away fromthe notion that we gain knowledge throughsupposedly objective testing to a positionwhich suggests that an epistemological andontological basis for gaining knowledge andtruth resides within the confines of differentand competing language games which playwith and represent 'reality' in different

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8 Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley

forms. What we are proposing is a com-municative epistemology stressing the pro-duction of the past and present as a dialoguetaking place between persons, groups, anddifferent interpretative communities. Such aposition embraces the importance of bothempirical description and observation; it isdeeply empirical while being hostile toempiricism.

Our project must of necessity include apoetics of archaeology. If we are to considerarchaeology as a social practice, a mediationbetween past and present, a translation, thenwe must look to the media of the past's cre-ation and transformation. We must ask thequestions of an archaeological stylistics andrhetoric: what is the adequacy of an inven-tory of finds; what is the meaning of an'objective' account; what is the use of ameasured floor plan in a historical narrative?

It is important to experiment with ways ofwriting, ways of seeing, ways of presenting.It is equally important to resist appropriationand incorporation into the sterility of anhegemonic culture which translates every-thing into its own terms and makes otherexpression unintelligible. Consequently ourstrategies should be those of polemic andprovocation, challenging orthodoxy, work-ing with the unfamiliar. In this we are noterecting an alternative authority on the past,seeking ultimate truths. For the archaeo-logical past such truths do not exist. We aimat a pluralist and democratic explorationof the past, fragmented, provisional, nego-tiated. Here we must express dissatisfactionwith the conventions of archaeologicaldiscourse. The canons of third-person nar-rative, informative and unambiguous cata-loguing in a site report, for example, are onlyvalid in terms of an authoritarian pronounce-ment on the past and only have relevance interms of power structures in the disciplineincluding funding opportunities and so on.

We need to recognize the difficulty of lan-guage use and deny the validity of empiricistnotions. Within archaeology one hegemonyreigns based on an empiricist theory of read-

ing and writing. Discourse becomes a meremedium, a mode in which the non-discur-sive, the ideas or mental conceptions of theindividual archaeologist, become realized; oralternatively, the ways in which knowledgesof the 'real' (archaeological data) are setdown and recorded. Discourse becomesreduced to either a record of the thought pat-terns of the thinker or as the manner in whichthe real may be reproduced in a text. Read-ing an archaeological text is thereforedeemed (ideally) to be a kind of activityas obvious as eating, drinking, or sleeping.The call is to make the text as simple, clear,concise, and transparently obvious (thusinstantly available for consumption) as inhu-manly possible. Any text which mightrequire interpretation or uses 'difficult' lan-guage is really quite shameful. 'Why can theynot say it more simply' is the usual cry fromthe empiricist reader who wishes implicitly toseparate out statements, concepts, and posi-tions from their conditions of textual pro-duction; the demand to read 'simple' ratherthan 'complex' texts is merely a valorizationof anti-intellectualism. Any notion that the'complex' can be translated or put into the'simple' is immediately deconstructive. If thecomplex could be put into the simple then ofcourse it could not have been very complexin the first place. On the other hand if thesimple is to perform the requirement to bean adequate medium of complexity it cannotbe simple any longer. A 'simple' form ofexpression or writing cannot but destroy anycomplexity and vice versa. One does notsimply translate back into the other. We arenot calling for all texts to be 'complex'; whatwe are suggesting is that a plurality of discur-sive forms needs to be recognized withoutany necessary possibility of mutual trans-ference or passage from one to the other.

As an illustration consider the essay 'ThePresent Past' (RCA: Chapter 1). Anyarchaeological writing is immediately ironicand metaphorical. The traces of the past areobliterated in their moment of supposedpreservation. They must be recreated in dif-

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Archaeology into the 1990s 9

ferent form, in text: identity in difference.The chapter in question attempted to workwith these basic notions. Interrogating ourexperience of archaeology, it superimposedimages and metaphors: tense and time; dis-tance and the past; memory and rhetoric;narrative truth and time; destruction andpreservation; judgement and loss; obser-vation and experience. These were relatedto complex cultural images of an emergentWestern rationalism in Archaic and ClassicalGreece. The purpose of the essay was kal-eidoscopic and suggestive, recovering todiscussion diffuse background issues. Weattempted to employ similar textual stra-tegies in other contexts, for example, thediscussion of subjectivity in STA whilst else-where deliberately conforming to accepted(or rather unquestioned, unchallenged)modes of writing.

We are now focusing on the meaning ofnarrative; on illustration and images of thepast, developing an expanded visual vocabu-lary; on more creative use of technology; onstretching language into different directions,looking into the potential of control overwriting and presentation as well as more con-ventional data manipulation and processing.

A basic tenet underlying this work is thatarchaeology, instead of seeking to efface itsown discursivity, needs to consider itself as aset of strategies for establishing interventionsin our present, interventions which willprove their validity through their effectsrather than relying on prior epistemologicalgrounding. We cannot any more secure thevalidity of what we say by attempting tolocate our discourse as a knowledge relationto the past involving correspondence, coher-ence, or whatever. We aim to dispel suchnineteenth-century theologies, philosophiesand ideologies of science. We are seekinginstead to disrupt and to render dishevelledprevailing contemporary archaeological dis-courses in order to foster fresh discoursesand new pasts, socially and politically rel-evant pasts.

Discourse and powerThis brings us to the question of the con-

nection between discourse and power. Fou-cault has taught the lesson well thatdiscourse — structures enabling the pro-duction of knowledges — is permeated withrelations of power. We intend to developfurther (RCA Chapter 4; STA Chapter 7) acritical sociology of archaeology examiningpower and discourse, examining structuresof oligarchic orthodoxy with its centralizedprovision of public pasts and marginalizationof others. Central questions to be asked hereare: Who produces the past and why? Forwhom exactly is this production takingplace? In what circumstances? Who has theright to speak and expect to have their state-ments considered as worthy of attention andcomment? In developing such an archae-ology we intend to destroy the myth thatarchaeological practices and archaeologicalcommunities are essentially benign andapolitical, 'only' having a serious and disin-terested interest in the past. We must exam-ine corridor and coffee-room talk (theunpublished as well as the published); net-working of references, acknowledgements,citations, who gets grants and for what andwho does not; who gets employed and whodoes not; who gets promotion and who doesnot; who gets read and who gets ignored. Nodoubt we can expect such work to beextremely unpopular and particularly dif-ficult, especially in Britain with its labyrinthof secret committees accountable to no oneexcept themselves. Such an analysis will alsochallenge the cult of professionalism inarchaeology which is growing daily instrength and which threatens drastically torestrict our scope of thought and action sothat what is deemed to be properly archaeo-logical becomes more and more severelyrestricted. This is a matter of dissolvingrather than reinforcing disciplinary bound-aries by constantly asking the question: justwhat is archaeological about archaeology?

The aim is to establish a different socio-politics of archaeology, not one that willevade power but will use it in emancipatoryways. Established institutional frameworks

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10 Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley

must be challenged as the correct or onlyplaces to do serious archaeology; the notionthat archaeology is only concerned with thepast must be more seriously challenged thanat present; power hierarchies in academiaand without need to be impugned; above allwe need to escape from the cloistral seclusionof archaeology from real political processes.Archaeology as a disciplinary ghetto must bedestroyed.

Another important area that needs con-sideration is the widespread ideology of indi-vidual authorship that exists in academia.Genuine cooperation would, of course,strike at the heart of current academic hier-archies depending on signing and owningtexts. Almost the first question we get asked,often in a somewhat suspicious manner, is:who wrote what and how much? What we donot understand is why such a question shouldhave any importance or relevance. Whenwriting RCA and STA we considered pro-ducing them either as authorless texts or cre-ating pseudonyms. This is not to evaderesponsibility for having produced some-thing; it is to assert that it is ideas that matter,not the names proprietorially stamped overthem.

Democratic pluralismIn RCA and STA we were effectively arguingfor a radical pluralism in archaeological the-ory and practice and paid particular attentionto four major contemporary lines of thought:hermeneutics; structuralism and post-struc-turalism, Critical Theory, and dialecticalmaterialism. We do not seek for a final all-embracing theoretical structure that might,for example, attempt to integrate these dif-ferent perspectives into a totalizing frame-work. The very notion of a unified theorywith a place for everything, and everything inits place, is both essentialist and reductionist.Rather than a totalizing theoretical struc-ture, what we propose is one that is de-totalizing. A totalizing framework eitherignores that which it cannot subsume or mar-

ginalizes it either as an anomaly or as some-thing to be eventually incorporated at afuture date (RCA: Chapter 6; STA: Chapters1 and 2). The effects are either the coerciveinclusion of everything into a total order oran exclusionary strategy denying the rel-evance or validity of that which is left out. Itis important to recognize that many of thegrounding presuppositions involved in, say,hermeneutics and post-structuralist thoughtare incompatible. Rather than attempting to •develop a coherent unity out of these frame-works we suggest that their relationshipshould be seen as one of shifting frames ofreference that allow us in various ways todevelop a truly self-reflexive and maturesocial archaeology.

Now any advocacy of shifting frames ofreference, different ways of seeing and think-ing, entails that a static imagery of the pastis less than adequate. Predetermined socialschemes are at variance with our effort torefine a set of conceptual apparatuses capa-ble of producing a heterogeneous and com-plex past, an archaeology which does justiceto the particularity of material culture, and tothe fact that any archaeology always creates apresent-past.

We need to realize a genuine pluralism.Not different approaches, the latest intel-lectual fashion from the continent, but a criti-cal appreciation of different pasts. And thecritical element is to deny a disabling rela-tavism — not just anything goes.

It should be clear that we are not pro-posing a new particularism — objects lockedinto their particular cultural milieux. Thiswould beg the question of understanding andis a lapse into the ideology of the unique auraof an artefact. There are regularities in thepast, but these are not the simple schemesof social evolution or the static concepts ofconventional social analysis. They are, if youlike, plots or sequences charged with a con-temporary political purpose. We might saywith Adorno that there is no universal his-tory which leads from savagery to civiliz-ation, but there is one that leads from theslingshot to the plutonium bomb.

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Archaeology into the 1990s 11

Interpretative politicsIt is important that archaeology shifts from

. instituting a series of judgements on the past,attempting to locate a supposed inneressence or essential core of meaning and sig-nificance, to developing as a form of 'countermemory', aiming to challenge current modesof truth, justice, rationality, and social andeconomic organization. In other wordsarchaeology should be helping us to under-stand and change the present by inserting itin a new relation to the past. Those whoclaim that such a perspective is misguided orirrelevant are of course those who have nouse or need for it.

We inhabit the cellars of a crumblingarchaeological edifice which we wish to top-ple and reconstruct. This may entail beingburied and suffocated in the process butthere is an even greater danger — that ofbecoming simply archaeologists who writefor other archaeologists. We need to escapefrom the attitude that when all has been saidand done archaeology still remains justarchaeology, isolated by an immense gulffrom current social and political issues. Acounter memory aims at combating the onsetof such an archaeological amnesia and senseof hopelessness. We need to acknowledgearchaeology as a micropolitical practice andtake seriously its location as a cultural prac-tice in a capitalist society.

Gramsci's analysis of hegemony has laidthe basis for understanding the field of cul-ture, and especially education (what isarchaeology if it does not have an educativegoal?) as not merely a superstructural reflec-tion of economic and social relations, but ameans through which those relations are cre-ated, reinforced, reproduced or challengedand transformed. Critical Theory has fur-thermore provided major insights into theculture industry as a means of social domin-ation and control. As archaeology clearlylacks any autonomy from society, the effectsof archaeological discourse pervade theentire cultural fabric of our times. It is impor-tant to analyse just what these effects are and

how they may be altered or enhanced. Thisentails analysis of the mass media, popularand fictional writing about the past, museumpresentations, and the rapidly growing heri-tage industry. It also means intervening in allthese sectors, taking power, taking control.An oppositional discourse will be less thanpointless until it begins to work in theseareas.

The current movement of archaeologyinto contemporary material culture studies(RCA: Chapter 8) is thus another vital com-ponent of developing a politics of inter-pretation and this also has to be regarded inthe light of a political challenge to the notionthat archaeology is only (hopelessly?) con-cerned with the past, and the more distantthis past the better. To work in the presentshould be to challenge that present eitherthrough an analysis of the material world weinhabit or through the presentation of thepast.

EVEN THE DEAD AREN'T SAFE

The culture of the new right and the heritageindustry that it has spawned hardly constitutea will to preserve a disinterested academicpast. Pluralism is only tolerated so long as itcreates no authentic opposition that cannotbe neutralized (in a diversity of equally 'true'views) or otherwise contained. Its populistimagery, slogans, and set formulae go handin hand with its attacks on research in thehumanities, silencing of informed debate,and creation of unaccountable committees.Market values meanwhile propagate anentrepreneurial past in the publishing andmedia industries.

The obviously political attempts we havewitnessed to provide a coherent critique tothis hegemonic success have been inade-quate. With others we feel a challenge to asocialist political imagination, a challengewhich while necessarily rooted in our experi-ence in Britain, applies to a Western world ofrenewed capitalism. Our aim is a pragmaticrethinking and exploration, a refusal to

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accept the past as a guarantee for a con-servative present. We embrace a contra-

dictory and fluid past which, even if notsimple, will be intelligible.

Comments on Archaeology into the 1990sBARBARA BENDER

Department of Anthropology, University College, London, England

There is something ironic about ourattempts, within the covers of a learnedScandinavian journal, to write critiques (orappreciations) of Shanks and Tilley's work.We — and they — are so clearly operatingwithin the institutionalized academic con-fines that they hope to undermine. So far atleast, they have not broken the mould inform of publication or in terms of audienceaddressed. What they certainly have done,however, is to break new ground in termsof style. The paper is partisan, passionate,polemic, and political. For these reasonsmany established archaeologists will be out-raged. Recently, at the Sheffield TAG con-ference, a whole day session entitled'Archaeological Theory — Who Sets theAgenda?' spent a lot of time attackingShanks and Tilley, and the attack, or so itseemed to me, focused not so much on con-tent as on style. At the time it seemed super-ficial — a form of bear-baiting. But perhapsnot. Perhaps what was upsetting was Shanksand Tilley's demand that archaeology bedragged into the political arena, their insist-ence that archaeologists should no^/could notseparate life from work, politics from aca-demic discourse, could not shelter behindnotions of 'scientific neutrality' or objectivemethodologies. Rather than bear-baiting,perhaps, the establishment was rising to thebait, for Shanks and Tilley seek to 'disruptand render dishevelled', to use 'strategies ofpolemic and provocation, challenging ortho-doxy, working with the unfamiliar'. If the

style is indicative of the message then thereis a logic in attacking the style. But, ofcourse, it does not get to the heart of thematter.

It is hard to distill the essential of twobooks in 12 pages, and the authors are notentirely successful. Nonetheless, despitetheir fulminations against the contemporarydemand for simplicity, they manage toexpress complex ideas simply and theirAgenda focuses our attention on a numberof vital issues. A more reflexive, critical, pol-itical, and democratic archaeological theoryand practice is, undoubtedly, 'a dispensationdevoutly to be wished (and worked) for'.

I do have some reservations: an importantone about what seem to be intellectual con-tradictions, a less important one about thevalue of attempting to criticize alternativeperspectives given the limited length of theirpaper.

Starting with the latter. The authors beginwith a critique of the new archaeologycouched in terms of 'isms' — naturalism, sci-entism, phenomenalism, and empiricism.They move to an attack on the underlyingpositivist epistemology via a combination ofhermeneutic and dialectical theory. Thisleads to a discussion of the Subject (and sub-jectivity): 'we make choices and insert our-selves into a particular interpretative field';both choice and field are dependent upon the'social conditions, interests, and structureswithin which archaeological practice, mean-ings, and explanation arise'. Later in the

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