Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Hodder's disciples, Shanks and Tilly's contribution to post-processual and post-modernist archaeological theory. An attempt to integrate new theory's and perspectives on the meaning of archaeology with the practical business of digging.
Your fifth book, Shanks and Tilly's ‘'Reconstructing Archeology” is also part of this post-processual movement. Can you tell us a bit about what they brought to the field?
Well Shanks and Tilly learnt a lot from Hodder. Maybe he learnt a lot from them as well. They are excavating archaeologists as well as theoreticians. Tilly is associated with the Institute of Archeology at University College London and he and Shanks wrote "Reconstructing Archeology" in 1987 which was again a strongly post processionalist approach. The same team produced "Social Archaeological Theory" and that carries it on. Some of it is very Frenchified and theoretical - impenetrable playing with words rather than ideas. But some of it is extremely interesting. All through it runs this thread of relativism which is typical of post modernist thought.
Some of these ideas have developed into a movement known as World Archeology. Is this a mission statement for Archaeologists today?
The emergence of World Archaeology is something that happened in parallel, quite suddenly and has roots in a lot of things we’ve been talking about. It’s actually a group of theories - in part a reaction to traditional colonial archeology, an attempt to de-colonialise archeology and produce a post-colonial approach to the past. But it’s more interesting than just being politically correct about imperialism. It has a vision, which comes quite close to post processualism, about the validity of many contesting interpretations. It started particularly with Peter Ucko, a Brit who worked for a long time in Australia in the institute of Aboriginal studies, an experience which really scarred him as it was just a bunch of whites telling Aboriginals what their past was. When Ucko finally left in a rage, he appointed an Aboriginal as his successor.
Ucko's basic perception was that archeology is not just about the past its about now. Archeology is not just about the dead it is equally about the living. It is highly political. The idea you can put archeology in an ivory tower of academia , totally unpolitical and in complete scientific detachment, is crap. It is hugely political. It always has been.
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.
