Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Shanks and Tilly argued that "American Archaeology is Anthropology or it is nothing'. A catalyst for the American processual movement and its key reader for over a decade.
By the 1960's we have seen the emergence of American 'Processualist' Archaeology. Can you tell us a bit about these so called 'New Archaologists' and your next book, "Method and Theory in American Archaeology" by Gordon Willey and Phillip Phillips?
Willy and Phillips said: “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing. It was a huge breakthrough in archaeology, it was really breaking out of a narrow field and saying archaeology is about people. The archaeological purpose is to answer questions about humans and human society, not just to build up artifact classifications.
The thing about these New Archaeologists, Lewis Binford most prominently, is that they were cultural evolutionists. Binford was an American processulist, and was keen on something called ‘ethno-historical’ information, and went to live with Inuits to try to more deeply understand what life in upper Palaeolithic France was like, what mattered to them, and he considered that you can only do this by living a life that was similar, in some ways, to the European Palaeolithic.
They were interested in cultural evolution, the process by which human groups advanced from one stage of development, technologically and through the mastery of their environment, to another. But the processualists were always fairly definite that environment set limits to what humans could do. They liked to discover environmental reasons for the success or failure of particular groups. It's a very deterministic way of looking at things.
Read full interview
The history of archeology is a surprising bloody affair. Neal Ascherson, journalist, author and editor of the journal Public Archeology, explains why.
