hodder, i. postprocessual archaeology

Postprocessual IAN HODDER

This essay draws some outlines for theories of social change in which material culture is seen as actively and meaningfully produced, and in which the individual actor, culture, and history are central: It is not, therefore, intended to argue for an archaeology of the symbolic order. The importance of the work of, for example, Deetz (1977), Glassie (1 975), Wobst (1977), Leori-Gourhan (1967), and Hall (1977) to the development of symbolic archaeology has been outlined by Leone (1982). The concem in this essay, however, is more with the social and historical context of symbolic production and with an attempt to identify the implications of the notion of the unity of meaning (belief) and action. The sources for this latter interest are primarily outside archaeology, in particular Giddens (1979) and Bourdieu (1977). Other varied ideas taken from, for example, Piaget (1972), Geertz (1973), Tumer (1969), Sperber (1975), and Douglas (1966) underline the difficulty of writing a review in which an established approach or school is identified with its own archaeological tradition. Rather a number of emerging trends in archaeology and material culture studies are noted and their potential implications within archaeology assessed.

INTRODUCTION

The conception of humanity underlying the behaviorism that dominates the _ocial sciences, and archaeology to a greater extent than most, can be described as passive. The key words within this viewpoint are that people react to externa1

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2 IAN HODDER

stimuli such that their behavior reflects the rules and goals of the wider society to which the individual is subordinate so their culture serves the function of adaptation within and between systems. I attempt below to justify these statements in relation to archaeology by reference to particular authors, but for the moment it may be helpful to identify some contrasts, despite the oversimplification that is involved. The first characteristic of an alternative viewpoint is that people are seen as active. They actively negotiate social rules, creating and transforming the social structure that is constructed by the individual. These various contrasts (behavior/social action, reflection/transformation, reaction/construction, soci- etylindividual) are based on the passive/active distinction and are closely linked to another, that between function and meaning.

The attempt to break down the split made in archaeology and the social sciences between function and meaning, process and norm, system and culture is the second characteristic of an alternative viewpoint. In the behaviorist model, the reasons given by people for their actions often appear irrelevant and in archaeology a materialist bias at times emerges (see for example, Binford 1982; Gould 1978). What people think is disregarded because the search is for cross- cultural behavioral generalizations to which the individual is subordinate. The functions of social institutions with respect to their environments are discussed without reference to meaning and cultural context. The behavioral position appears to suggest that one can understand behavior, be it of humans or dogs, without going through any cognitive processes that are supposed to lie in the actors. Within the contextual altemative this split is denied because actions are seen as involving intentions and an everyday knowledgeability that may be tacit or unexpressed, but is nevertheless culturally constructed. The fact that an item or institution functions to achieve an end necessitates that an end exists (so involving human choice of goals), and necessitates monitoring and judgement of the suitability of the item or institution for its tasks. The unity of meaning (belief) and action is claimed because, following Geertz (1973:45-46), the individual is innately given only extremely general response capacities that allow himlher great plasticity, complexity, and effectiveness, but that lead to a dependence on culture to organize human thought and existence. Without the constructed, cultural world, behavior is seen by Geertz as being virtually ungovemable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions. "There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture" (1973:49).

Linked to the dichotorny set up between function and meaning is that between objectivity and subjectivity. It is assumed within the materialist conception of humanity that cross-cultural generalizations can validly refer only to the visible products of adaptive systems. Fact and theory are divorced and opposed (Ren- frew 1982). But it can be claimed (Leone 1982; Renfrew 1983) that we can make valid generalizations about how individuals act meaningfully. Indeed, a11 statements about human behavior necessarily involve reference to cultural attitudes,

I and observation of the material world is itself an active process, a giving of meaning to experience. Fact and theory are not opposed, they are intertwined. The final aspect of an alternative viewpoint follows from the rest. Social change is historically dependent. That is, it is subject to contextual, cultural particularities. Any adequate understanding of social change must take into account the knowledgeability of human actors, that is, their monitoring and observation of the intended and unintended consequences of their actions. Be- cause the dichotomies between function and meaning, process and norm, objectivity and subjectivity are to be broken down, the split between process and history can be denied. The coping systems that individuals and groups create are particular and unpredictable. Modem archaeologists and social theorists are not the only individuals who have tried to understand the actions of others. We must allow that individuals in other places and other times are and have been able to penetrate the "causes" of behavior and the "reasons" for reactions. They are also, then, able to act otherwise and to change the world through knowledgeable action. Because humans are intelligent they are able to contrive novelty as part of the process of transformation and negotiation. Each action has sense only with reference to past actions. It does not exist within a vacuum but within a historical context. While we can, as scientists, interpret the actions of others, using generalizations about the construction of meaning, and seeking to understand the principles of human social relation; such generalizations will be about the construction of difference, about the way in which humans create for themselves unique cultural experiences within specific historical trajectories.

The oppositions identified in these introductory paragraphs indicate that development from the processual approach can be contemplated. So far, however, I have simply provided some hooks, key words, and ideas on which to hang alternative social theories. The theories are centered around the notions of action, meaning, unity of fact and theory, and history.

ASPECTS OF SOCIAL ACTION THEORY

Attempts have been made (Hodder 1982a,b) to outline and discuss emerging components of a theory of social action. Such a theory or group of theories has not yet been clarified within archaeology and in relation to material culture. The following section of this essay identified various aspects of theories that can be discussed in relation to processual archaeology and that might be described as postprocessual.

Belief and Action Each individual grows and learns by giving meaning to experiences and by

interpreting those experiences in terms of his/her own understanding and knowl-

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edge. Helshe makes sense of the world and copes with it by fitting it around general assumptions. The world is ego-centered according to sets of values that work, for that individual, in the practice of daily life. These systems of durable, transposable dispositions, Bourdieu's (1977) "habitus" (see also Giddens 1979), have a partly cognitive purpose. Geertz's (1973) view that it is human

n L nature to depend on culture has already been referred to. Sperber's (1975) cognitive account of symbolism emphasizes the necessity for organization of memo- ry and responses through the cultural world. But it is also recognized by such authors that culture, though ideational, does not exist merely in someone's head (Geertz 1973110). The oppositions set up within anthropology between subjective and objective, idealist and materialist, are not helpful because it is through the actions of individuals that cultural forms find articulation. Man creates himself. The acts of individuals are not determined by a cultural code because the culture is itself constructed in those acts. Neither do the internal, intrinsic relationships of the code determine their meaning. Rather, artifacts and social acts draw their meaning from the roles they play, their use, and in the daily patterns of existence. Each moment is created. Each act and each artifact exist only after their construction. They have to be produced, to be "brought off," and it could have been otherwise. The notion of social action involves a unity of meaning and experience, subject and object, interpretation and observation. It involves the idea of the development of understanding through construction (Piaget 1972).

Material and Historical Context Individuals learn how to cope in the world and they find that certain strategies

work for them and make sense to them. Their goals develop in terms of the values generated within a cultural context and within a particular social and material environment. A11 societies, animal and human, have divisions of labor. For humans, these divisions have to be constructed and given meaning within a cultural and historical context. As individuals grow and make sense of the world in which they find themselves, they develop a value system that works for their material interests, and that disposes them to act in the future in particular ways (e.g., see Willis 1978). This is not to give primacy to the material conditions of existence, but to argue that those conditions result from practices produced by cultural dispositions that are themselves reproduced in those practices (Bourdieu 1977). So individuals find that they accomplish certain things by using and manipulating the cultural world in specific ways. They find they can make sense of their existence by certain attitudes and strategies. Although different people cope with and construct their similar situations in different ways, there is a commonality of interests within groups and, within a historical tradition, a commonality of ways of coping. This commonality of interests and cultural dispositions-is both produced because of a similarity in material conditions within a

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POSTPROCESSUALARCHAEOLOGY

historical context and reproduced by the sharing of views in order to further material interests.

Negotiation No group of shared interests is independent, but exists in reference to others

(as in relations of parent-child, mother-father). The interests and coping systems of individuals contrast with but are dependent on the material and cultural orientations of individuals in other groups. Social experiences have to be constructed and coped with from many different standpoints, from different points of view. The social world is thus negotiated by individuals with different expectations and experiences. Absolute control by one individual over another or by one group of individuals over another is rarely achieved solely by physical might. The prisoner isolated with only his naked body in an empty cell can still act with great social effect and can negotiate his position, by smearing his excretions on the wall or by refusing to eat. He still has power over his jailors, if in a rather special sense. A manager may have power over a worker, but that worker may have control in the arena of herlhis own body and leisure. Each group (e.g., management and worker) has different expectations and, from their own point of view, they may use each other to achieve their own ends. These are not false ideologies. Individuals are able to monitor the effects of their social actions and of their understanding of the world. People are not duped, although they may be thought to be duped when considered from an opposing point of view. Actions are evaluated according to different expectations and the cultural framework that makes the actions possible is negotiated and played out in the practice of the lived world. Control through physical dominance or through restricted access to the means of production is only part of a broader picture in which the position of individuals in the world is negotiated.

Material Culture Material symbols and changing styles of artifact manufacture play a central

part in, for example, the analyses of Deetz (1977) and Glassie (1975). But as Leone (1982:746) suggests, the historical context is not fully incorporated in such studies. It is possible, on the other hand, to see material culture as involved in historical change through the negotiation of meaning in social action. Material culture patterning evokes and forms values and expectations. It is through the arrangement of the material world-the association of forms and uses-that the social world is produced and reproduced. Material culture provides the environment within which individuals find their places and learn the places of others, their goals and expectations. Yet it also produces new situations and is, with language and gesture, the medium through which individuals achieve their ends.

IAN HODDER

Control over material culture (e.g., the organization of space and artifacts within a house) gives power and control over others in that the values and expectations of others can be changed or negotiated by providing a world of experience that creates new associations and evokes new relationships and values. But, again, individuals are not duped by the material world. Rather, they make sense of it in terms of their own interests. The same item can mean prestige or ridicule, control of freedom when used in different contexts or when viewed by different people in the same context.

According to the dynamic notion of social action preferred here, change is inherent and continua1 in the mundane actions of daily life, forming and creating attitudes often at a nondiscursive level. There should be no dichotomy between statics and dynamics. Social position is continually negotiated in the relationships between individuals and groups with different interests and with different conceptions of those interests. There are, of course, different scales of change, and the innovations of the competent social actor may be copied because they work in new situations brought about by the intended or unintended consequences of actions. Revolutionary change is not different in nature from the gradual alteration of house layout or other minor aspects of material culture patteming. It may be more explicitly sought, it may have more far-reaching effects and different extemal conditions, but in both cases the position of individual~ in the world is altered through the negotiation of meaning, and relations of power and dominance are realigned along their various dimensions.

As already intimated, the intentionality of individuals that must play a central role in social theory is based on stocks of discursive and implicit knowledge about how the world is put together. The interpretations of actr and symbols given by social actors themselves do not constitute an explanation of them. As Sperber (1975) demonstrates, symbols are not tied to interpretations in any one- to-one relationship. Rather, the interpretation that adds to the symbol is itself to be explained as a social act. The elaboration of explicit meaning is a social ploy, and when associated with restrictions on access to knowledge can have powerful social effect. The interpretations given to the anthropologist are part of a broader picture of evocations, many of them implicit, that the anthropologist hopes to discem. The archaeologist, relying on general theory derived from such anthropological studies, must acknowledge that much material-culture patteming of the pots and bones type is organized by implicit knowledge that is often ambiguous and multivalent but is nonetheless a central part of social action.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGY

An archaeological application of the ideas sketched above is referred to below. For the moment I wish to explore some of the implications of an alternative

outlook for recent developments in archaeology that go under the various head- ings of processual, new, and behavioral. It is realized that many of those referred to here in these categories would deny any contemporary association and would point to differences in scope of the authors involved. Denials and dissatisfaction (e.g., Fiannery 1982; Meltzer 1979; Salmon 1978; Trigger 1978; Whyte 1978; Wylie 1982) perhaps foreshadow the emergence of postprocessual phase. What- ever the divergences of opinion between modern non-culture-historical, processual authors, I would claim that many contemporary archaeologists have a notion of humanity as passive in the way outlined at the beginning of this essay, and I hope to justify this claim in what follows.

The Individual and Society Within the processual view men and women often appear as determined by

and within a larger system. The aim is to reach not the Indian behind the artifact, but the system behind both Indian and artifact (Flannery 1967). Flannery (1967) believed that the process approach involved moving decisions about behavior farther away from the individual. It is argued by the process school that there are systems so basic in nature that culture and individuals are powerless to divert them. This trend towards determinism is linked to the quest for laws and scientific method as is examined further below, but the underlying conception is of the individual controlled by processes that are stochastic within determined con- ! straints. Behavior is predictable because there are necessary linkages between the components of sociocultural systems, and between material culture and human behavior (Binford and Sabloff 1982:138). Theory building is seen as being concemed with discovering deterministic causal relationships (Binford 1982:161). It can be claimed that within any social situation the results of volitional acts are predictable, provided only that enough information is available and the analyst is able enough. However, it is suggested here that while behavior can be interpreted after the event, it cannot be predicted, for the following reasons. First, it is acknowledged that predictability of human behavior occurs within specific cultural contexts because actions and responses are mediated by cultural values. Prediction is, then, possible, but only "from the inside." Sec- ond, however, the knowledgeability of lay actors includes the ability to discem predictability of responses within historical traditions. Such knowledge can be used to contrive power and social change. The generation of the unpredictable is a social process and individuals create laws by their activities. As anthropologists we cannot make general deterministic laws about human behavior but we can identify the general principies by which individuals construct their worlds within culture-historical contexts. Some such generalizations will be near universais (the incest taboo, or Sperber's theories of symbolic evocation and focalization), and most will be historically contextual, but none are deterministic.

Culture and Process Within the process school the individual was submerged beneath systemic

exigencies perhaps because of a concem with scientific control and the desire to make a relevant contribution to the ruming and administration of a modem world. In the same way the particularity and otherness of culture needed to be denied, to be replaced by the universally predictable character of human and animal behavior. The rarity of occurrence of the word culture in the new Ameri- can archaeological literature is remarkable and Flannery (1982:267-268) has described the demise of the concept of culture and the current emphasis on behavior. Binford and Sabloff (1982:139) refer to the replacement of the normative paradigm by the preferred systems paradigm, in the same terms as was argued in the 1960s and 1970s (Binford 1965, 1972, 1978). The distinction between normative, cultural, and historical on the one side and processual, systemic, adaptive, and behavioral on the other was admirably clarified by Flannery in 1967. Culture historians were described as using a normative theoretical framework in which culture was treated as a body of shared values and beliefs. Prehistoric artifacts were seen as the products of shared ideas, with normally distributed variation. Culture change was viewed as being the result of a change in shared ideas and similar cultural assemblages were thought to be spatially and temporally proximal.

Instead, Flannery suggested that the processual school was going to examine the locus of human behavior within a vast number of cultural and noncultural systems. Multivariant functional relationships would be sought and cultural change would be shown to have adaptive advantage. Laudable as these aims might appear, it is not apparent that they necessarily involve a rejection of the normative approach. The latter largely functioned as a classificatory device and there is cerainly no necessary incompatability between the study of history and the study of process (Trigger 1978). The desire to shrive archaeology of any taint of the subjective and nonmaterial can only be understood as part of the quest for scientific control already referred to. Binford (1972:9) claimed that culture is a material-based organization of behavior, not a mental phenomenon, and again more recently "we do not have to try to study mental phenomena. In fact we study material phenomena " (1982: 162; original emphasis). Binford (1982) goes so far as to equate any attempt to understand the principles of human nature with uniformitarian assumptions about psychic propensities and with empathetic understanding. It is assumed that the consideration of cultural contexts necessarily involves equating culture with ideas, and the same viewpoint, caught within the trap of an ideaiistlmaterialist dichotomy, is expressed by Renfrew (1982).

The materialist view espoused by some new archaeologists, but foreshadowed in the 'ladder of inference' of many traditional archaeologists (see Hawkes 1954), can be seen to restrict the scope of archaeology if it rules out theories conceming the way individuals give meaning to experience. The recent re-

POSTPROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGY 9

awakening of interest in recovering past ideas (summarized by Leone 1982; see also Hodder 1982b and Renfrew 1983) argues against earlier views that the mind could not be reconstructed and that paieopsychology should be condemned (Bin- ford 1965:203-210). But many existing structural and symbolic studies do not use theories in which there is an adequate notion of the unity of meaning and action or in which there is interpretation of the generation of symbolic codes. The split between culture and process is thus retained. In the theories preferred in this essay it is not possible to divorce process from culture, to study one without the other, because the emphasis on action rather than behavior states a unity of idea (intentionality) and material event, and the challenge is to develop theories that specify integration and allow both for general principles of human action and for the particularity of cultural constructions. Equally, within existing symbolic and structural studies in archaeology the role of the individual negotiating social position through the medium of cultural values is underplayed. As in stmctural anthropology, the individual often appears subordinate to the cultural code in the same way that in processual archaeology, hetshe had been subordinate to the system. In the archaeological reconstruction of ideologies similar criticisms can be offered.

Ideology Within materialist anthropology there has been increasing discussion of ide-

ology and it is perhaps to such accounts that social action theory should be most closely linked (Leone 1982). However, I have avoided adopting the t e m ideology in this paper. In the work of Flannery and Marcus (1976), Hall (1977), Fritz (1978), and Friedel (1981); religion, ritual, and ideology allow the smooth running of the material system and, in contrast to the viewpoint presented here, the material is primary. Culture and the ideational are the servants rather than the media of activity. Within Structural-Marxist and Neo-Marxist anthropology, ideology is often seen as functioning to hide, mask, or suppress conflict (Leone 1982:748). Once again, in the viewpoint preferred here, ideology is the medium of conflict and it at the same time hides and reveals conflict, from different standpoints, within the process of the negotiation of power. The t e m negotiation is used to refer to the view that individuals are not duped by an all-embracing set of ideas serving a sectional interest and to suggest that social control and interde- pendence are achieved through the use of different types of power to which there can be varying attitudes within a specific historical context.

The challenge to behavioral, functionalist archaeology posed by questions of style has been admirably met (Dunnell 1978, Plog 1980, Sackett 1977, Wobst 1977). According to the viewpoint presented here, on the other hand, style is the

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particularity of action and meaning that is built up within an historical context. 'Style' refers to the fact that in British society punk is evoked when a safety pin is wom by adults (Hodder 1982c) but not when an ivory knife ora daisy chain are wom. We can generalize about the principles of evocation, analogy, and context that are involved in the use of such material items, but the particular construction is unique and has an effect particular to its context. Questions of style must involve not only the principles by which individuals give meaning to the world, but also the social acts within which style is created and manipulated. The integration of meaning and function is evident in the work on pottery decoration discussed by Braithwaite (1982b), in studies of domestic space (Bourdieu 1977), and M studies of burial practices (Parker Pearson 1982). In all these cases, material styles in, for example, pottery decoration are created as part of the negotiation of power, defining boundaries, and producing social differences. Hypotheses about the effects of such strategies depend on a general understanding of how symbolic evocations occur and act. The concept of style comes to have a central place in archaeological discourse because it refers to the historical particularity of culture and can be observed in a11 spheres of life, since a11 spheres are meaningful. Thus the economy is as much stylistic as the decoration on a potsherd. Elaboration and variation in stone to01 assemblages relate to the way in which food and food preparation are involved symbolically in social strategies of control. The diffusion of styles is a legitimate topic of study in that it is an active social process. Styles may diffuse from A to B in order to cause change in society B by reference to society A. The diffusion creates a new situation in B on analogy and in reaction to that in A. In such cases we see how the notion of social action involves, in the instant of use of material items, meaning, power, and change. We also see how traditional concems with typology and culture-history need to be integrated with processual approaches. A social adaptive system cannot be understood without reference to its style, which can itself only be explained in relation to the origin and diffusion of cultural traits and the continuity and transformation of the meaning content of attributes, types, and con- figurations. On the other hand, the culture-history of material traits must be understood as a social process.

Ethnoarchaeology Another area in which the theory of social action has impact is the conduct of

ethnoarchaeology. It has been claimed (Gould 1978; Schiffer 1978) that study of living societies should be concerned primarily with recording observable behavior and residues. For some, the appropriate perspective for ethnoarchaeology should be nonparticipatory and from the outside (Binford and Sabloff 1982: 151). In the viewpoint expressed here, however, it is inadequate to examine the rela-

. tionship between statics (archaeological residues) and dynamics (human behav-


ior) without understanding the generation of that relationship by individuals in an active social context. The aim of the ethnoarchaeologist is widely recognized to be the understanding of the variables relevant for the explanation of past material remains. But if the ethnoarchaeologist does not participate, or does not attempt to understand the culture in which helshe works, it is difficult to claim that the relevant variables have been examined. To disregard variables that might have been relevant because they are "not observable" or because they are not thought, a prioi, to have long-term evolutionary effects (Binford 198 1) is insuffi- cient. Binford's (1978) work on Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology makes little refer- ente to Nunamiut dispositions and social strategies that could have been subject to the same analytical rigor applied to the distances bones were thrown and to the way carcasses were cut up. An analysis of Nunamiut culture history would have provided a context for the understanding of past activities and for an assessment of the relevance of the data for prehistoric examples.

Epistemology The gradual search for adequate theories of social action can thus be seen to

have varied effects in the arena of archaeological theory. But the claims for a scientific archaeology made by its proponents related less to explanatory goals and more to explanatory methods. While there has been little general agreement on the use of logical positivism and the hypothetico-deductive method, for most new archaeologists, the theory that explains the observed data is separate from those data. Predictions are made and tested against the data and any residual patteming is noted (Hannery 1967). The confrontation of fact and theory, is the hallmark of the archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s, but it is also the heritage of archaeology through most of its history. In 1925, Childe was concerned "objec- tively" to set out the data (p. xiv) and to survey "the facts" (p. xiii), and the same concem for empirical rigor is evident in much, although not all, of his later writing and in the writing of many of his contemporaries. More recently, Ren- frew (1982:143) has restated "the old relationship between theory and data" as

n Theorv Data

and welcomes the stress within the hypothetico-deductive method on the passage from theory to data, by means of deduced hypotheses and hypothesis testing. While Binford and Sabloff (1 982: 137) are correct in locating an important source of this factltheory contrast in logical positivism, and while earlier archaeologists may have embraced a more "strict empiricism" (1983), it is clear (pace Binford and Sabloff 1982) that an explanatory methodology based on confronting theory with obsemed facts is, at least in some sense, empiricist.

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However, the "facts" are interpretations made by field archaeologists as they work. As already stated, any process of observation involves making sense of the world (in this case artifacts in the ground and their relationships to each other). It is thus an interpretive experience. There can be no confrontation because theory and data are both part of one formulation and argument. Equally, the separation of data and theory raises the problem of how to evaluate the fit of predictions to observations. While archaeologists can support theories by analogical argument, using closeness of fit and cross-cultural regularities, the relevance of the theory to the data depends ultimately on an understanding of social process that is culturally contextual. Binford and Sabloff (1982) recognize the difficulty but assume that independent tests can be used to evaluate hypotheses. "The challenge today is how to achieve some independence for the experiences to which archaeologists appeal" (1982:149). Archaeological knowledge of the past is based on meaning given to the archaeological record within current cultural paradigms. Because theories cannot be tested independently, in the past, many archaeologists claim that theories must be tested in the present by the development of "middle range theory." The problem here is that our cultural paradigms infuse not only our evaluations of the past, but also our evaluations of theories developed in living societies. If Binford and Sabloff accept that knowledge of the past is dependent on contemporary paradigms of thought, they must also accept that modern material culture studies are subject to identical problems of evalua- tion, and that the paradigms within which we work cannot be evaluated objec- tively (1982: 150).

observation of a contemporary event, such as the raising of an arm, will be coupled with interpretations (e.g., the raised arm is a salute or it means good bye) depending on context. The observation itself, and its explanation, depend on the largely implicit intentions and knowledge of the individuals involved. Equally, to know what an object is and whether it can be described as, for example, flat, we must theorize about and make attempts at interpreting the implicit knowledge and intentions of the actors within the relevant cultural context. Archaeological classification does not equal description. There is virtually an infinite number of attributes that can be recorded on any artifact and normally "common sense" is used to make a choice. As Clarke (1968:15) argued, this choice is "arbitrary and dependent on the observer and his view or model of the mind of ancient man."

From such statements it has often been concluded that the archaeologist has no choice but to indulge in speculative, emphathetic understanding (Binford 1982:162). It is assumed by some processual archaeologists that if one talks of subjective meaning an idealistic stance is being taken. However, because observation and theory are one, and because archaeological theory building has always involved adding to (in the process of interpreting) data, there is no logical reason why those theories should not include contextual meaning and intentionality. No epistemological break with what archaeologists actually do (however they may

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describe what they do) is needed. In addition, the theory of social action sketched at the beginning of this essay does not necessarily involve thinking the thoughts of paleoIndians. Most knowledge of "how to go on" is practical and nondiscursive and it is possible to generalize with theories about the principles involved. Because verbal interpretations by social actors are just that-interpretations and explanations in their own right-we can generalize about how people "get on with" material culture, creating historical traditions, and we can interpret the past in the light of such generalizations. Our theories must also consider the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge. That no objective test is possible is as true of such interpretations as it is of those based on behavioral assumptions.

Before illustrating the theory of social action with some specific applications to archaeology, it should be emphasized that the divergences identified here with processual archaeology could contribute to an emerging postprocessual phase only in the sense that poststructuralism differs from structuralism (Ardener 1978; Harstrup 1978). The critique is built on that which went before. The broad concems with process, generalization, archaeology as anthropology, and methodological rigor remain. The generalizations may be of a different kind but they both develop from, and are in conflict with recent trends in archaeology. While it does not seem possible to identify and it is not my purpose to encourage, a unified postprocessual stance, it is conceivable that the varied recent attempts to deal with the ideational andlor the subjective will lead to a departure from and a questioning of many of the assumptions of the "new archaeology. " In particular it is claimed that it is impossible to consider process without culture, social systems without individuals, adaptive change without history, science without the subjective. As these questions are grappled with and answered in varied ways, a postprocessual phase may be defined.

MATERIAL CULTURE THEORY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPLICATION

Theories basic to archaeological knowledge must be concemed with the principles according to which individuals construct their social worlds; and some aspects of a general set of theories of social action have been outlined. But there is also a need for theory concerning general principles involved in the meaningful use of material culture for social ends. Aspects of such a material culture theory have been described (Hodder 1982c), and will be referred to again here.

Material s y ~ b o l s do not mean anything in the semiotic sense. That is, their meaning is not entirely explicable and is not expressible by semantic analysis. Symbolic knowledge is different from encyclopedic knowledge (Sperber 1975) and we cannot look up the meaning of a safety pin or a black pot. As already claimed, cultural knowledge is largely implicit and the explanations given by


social actors within a cultural context add to the symbolic process. The explanation of a symbol is itself a social process, a rationalization within a social matrix. The symbol itself has no meaning, no labels attached to it. Rather, it works in the practical world by focusing attention and by evocation. Any material culture item evokes conditions, ideas, or sentiments within the instant of social practice, and (re)constructs by recollection or imagination. The meaning of material symbols is not abstract and semantic but immediate and practical. The verbal descriptions of the safety pin wom by punks are numerous and as ingenious as the human brain can provide (Hodder 1982~). The safety pin is seen by different people in contemporary Britain as meaning aggression, pity, children, or bondage. Ra- tionalizations are provided. But these explanations do not affect the practical use of the safety pin. The pin is highly evocative and articulate in a nonsemantic sense. It is widely used as a symbol in the daily lives of numerous teenagers. It focuses attention and evokes connotations in an active social context. It changes the world in a way that is seen as appropriate.

While the concept of evocation is of central importance in material culture theory, it is closely tied to a second concept, that of context. The practical meaning of an item of material culture varies according to the context in which it is used although, as has been suggested above, the use of an item in one context is not independent of its use in others. 'Context' does not refer to any particular scale of analysis. The context can vary from the microcosm of traits on an artifact, or artifacts on the human body, to regional and interregional cultural groupings. Pader (1982) has shown, for example, how the significance of an item of dress can vary within one cemetery. In some parts of a cemetery a brooch wom on the left shoulder may signify sex differences, but in other graves in the cemetery the same brooch type wom on the breast may signify age differences or status. The practical meaning of an item is affected by, and affects the set within which it occurs and is also related to the location of the item within the set. At a larger scale, items come to have meaning through use within historical traditions. An artifact type found in graves in one area may occur in domestic contexts in another and its social significance in the two areas will be different but interde- pendent. Equally, similar items and similar organization of space may occur in the same culture at two time periods but their practical meaning and social impact may change. It is because of the contextual, particular characteristic of human culture, tied with its creative, active use, that prediction is impossible. But by referring to principles such as evocation (through use, formal analogy, and contrast), context, and ambiguity (the latter to be described below), and to theories of social action within which the symbolic mechanism takes its place, interpretation of unique cultural contexts becomes feasible.

The evocative effect of a material symbol depends on context and the same item may be viewed from different contexts at the same time. Each person brings an individual understanding, a particular coping system to the perception and use of each artifact. The meaning and cffects of the material item are necessarily

ambiguous and the ability to "bring things off" is closely tied to this ambiguity. In some situations in certain societies, the evocational field may be highly undetermined. In others, there may be numerous beliefs, rituals, and so forth that are taken into account, the range of possible evocations may be restricted, and more members of a single culture are led to similar evocations (Sperber 1975: 137). But the evocation is never totally determimed.

Cultural symbolism focuses the attention of members of a social unit in the same direction, but leaves the individual free to make individual opinions. Evo- cation is an active process of the creation of meaning. The effective use of material symbols is thus part of the negotiation of power. It has no set lines and everything is to be played for. Ambiguity is thus a necessary and central part of the symbolic process. Without it, individuals could not, from their different standpoints, agree to differ, they could not be competent (or incompetent) social actors; and they could not change the social world by changing the material world.

An outline of a material culture theory includes, along with theories of social action as described in an earlier part of this paper, the concepts of evocation, context, and ambiguity. The development of a fuller and more adequate material culture theory is necessary (Miller 1982a; Tilley 1982) and is sought in ethnoarchaeological studies (see Hodder 1982b). In the latter instances, studies have been made of house and settlement organization, pottery decoration, burial, production, and exchange, in order to explore the social and the material together and to derive principles of wider applicability. More mature studies are forth- coming (Miller and Tilley 1983), but it can at least be claimed that material culture theory linked to theories of social action is by no means waiting to be shown "to work" (Renfrew 1982:143). As has been suggested, assessment of the working of a theory partly depends on the paradigm within which the theory is produced. But it is demonstrable that the types of theories espoused in this essay have engendered and continue to engender new interpretations of archaeological and ethnographic data (see also Bourdieu 1977 for applications). In- deed, it is claimed that the removal of rigid boundaries to what is, or is not, valid archaeological science, will encourage more varied interpretations of a wider range of evidence. The published examples also demonstrate the nature of gener- aiizations concerning principles of social action. They do not state "in conditions A, behavior B will result. '' In any archaeological application, statements of the latter type will be required in order, for example, to set up social conditions within which particular types of negotiation of power might occur. But there are

-

also propositions concemed with the principles according to which individuals create meaningful acts.

In order to illustrate the applicability of the approach and the nature of its assumptions, a more detailed example is provided, drawn from a study of Neo- lithic houses and burials in central and westem Europe (Hodder 1983). Recent Processual attempts at explaining the megalithic monuments of western Europe

(Chapman 198 1 ; Renfrew 1976) have paid scant attention to the megaliths themselves. The monuments become instances of a general relationship in which temtorial markers (in this case the tombs) occur in conditions of population stress, competition between segmentary units, and legitimation of control of crucial but restricted resources. The particular form of the tombs and the associated complex rituals are not accounted for. No attempt is made to interpret the cultural meanings constituted by the tombs and, as a result, it is impossible to evaluate the functional hypothesis. Unless one has some notion of what the tombs evoked, what they meant, it cannot be possible to determine their social effects.

Traditionally, however, archaeologists have recognized strong formal similarities between the long burial mounds of westem Europe and contemporary and earlier long houses in central Europe. The detailed similarities between the westem tombs and the houses can be listed: (I) similar post construction; (2) trapezoidal and rectangular shapes with similar lengthlbreadth ratios; (3) en- trance of trapezoidal mounds and houses at the broader end; (4) entrances frequently face the southeast; (5) the entrances are elaborated; (6) there is frequently a tripartite division of the long house or burial mound; (7) tombs and houses frequently have intemal decoration; and (8) ditches flank the long sides of houses and barrows. These similarities specifically concem the long barrows, gallery graves, and rectangular and trapezoidal long houses. But other traditions are known that again show similarities between houses and tombs. It is claimed, as a result of these formal similarities, that the Neolithic burial monuments of westem Europe could have evoked the earlier and contemporary houses of central Europe.

In order to understand the significance of this evocation it is necessary to examine the social strategies within which houses and tombs were constructed and used in central and westem Europe. It is widely accepted that burial and settlement evidence suggests a lineage-based organization of society in the Euro- pean Neolithic. As initial agricultural settlement expanded on the loessic soils of central Europe in the fifth and early fourth millennia b-c., settlement densities were initially low with ready availability of light, rich soils. Labor rather than land would have been the major restricting resource. It seems reasonable to suggest that increase in lineage size and the dominance of groups within society (such as elder men) depended to an important degree on the reproduction of labor. Ethnographic evidence conceming such societies (summarized by Hodder 1983) indicates that where there is dependence on women for the reproduction of

1 labor, the domestic world (house construction and organization, domestic pot- I tery, etc.) may become elaborated by both men and women as the focus of

strategies of negotiation and control. Women are able to negotiate social position by drawing attention to their reproductive roles in the domestic context. On the

f other hand, the domestic elaboration is central to male interests and allows male s -*

POSTPROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGY

control through such strategies as the seclusion and separation of women. The elaboration of the domestic world might be expected to become more marked in contexts in which there is lineage competition for dominance, increased lineage size, and control of women. In the central European Neolithic of the fifth and early fourth millennia, the domestic world is elaborate; and the elaboration increases through time as evidence for competition and defense also increases. In many parts of Europe houses become more elaborate in form during the early Neolithic (e.g., Sherratt 1982). Similarly, domestic pottery often starts decorated and the decoration becomes more elaborate through time.

By the third millemium b.c., however, there is evidence of filling up of the I landscape and of shortages of, and pressure on, light, rich agricultura1 soils. L Land rather than labor became the main restricting resource. Women had less

ability to negotiate social position by drawing attention to their roles as re- I producers in the domestic context and other strategies were chosen. For both men

and women the domestic context became of less central importante and the I domestic role was not elaborated symbolically. By the beginning of the third

millennium in central Europe, domestic pottery has simpler and less frequent I decoration and houses are less elaborate. The simplification of houses and pot-

tery through time could have played an active part in forming new social relations.

The long barrows in Atlantic Europe then, evoke a situation in central Europe in which lineages were competing for reproductive potential and in which women could negotiate real social position because of the emphasis on the reproduction of labor. But the houses used by those building the megaliths are small and simple, and the domestic pottery is simple and sometimes undecorated. While in parts of Atlantic Europe such as Scandinavia, ritual pottery is highly decorated, 1 domestic pottery is less elaborate. Context such as the SOM (Seine-Oise-Marne) culture (Paris Basin) where pottery is undecorated, and the general lack of complex houses in Atlantic Europe indicate that the position of women is only elaborated and emphasized in the context of comrnunal ritual, outside the domestic sphere. For example, in burial ritual, women are depicted in Atlantic Europe and the domestic "house" context is evoked. Women as reproducers, as the

i source and focus of the lineage, are celebrated here-but only in the house of the ancestors, in a context in which communal participation is stressed in the nature of the burial rituals. Women, as reproducers, and their social positions within the domestic context are, in ritual, appropriated for the lineage as a whole. Their . services are for the lineage and this control is legitimated by the ancestors and by

higher authorities. A difference thus emerges between central and Atlantic Europe. In both areas

competition developed through the control of reproduction. But in the former I m a there was direct negotiation of the position of women in the domestic

context while in the latter area tombs were built to legitimate the absolute control

of lineage heads. It is difficult to explain these differences in adaptive or ecologi- cal terms. The task is to explain two ways of coping with similar problems, and these two coping systems can be interpreted as meaningfully constituted within historical traditions. The differences between Atlantic and central Europe occur not only in megaliths and not only at one time period. Monumental burial is one type of ritual occurring outside, if referring to the domestic context, but there are others. From Camac to Stonehenge and to the Maltese temples, from the fifth to the second millennia b.c. Atlantic and west Mediterranean Europe are charac- terized by the occurrence of separate, nondomestic ritual that is wholly alien to the central European tradition. In the latter area ritual occurs, but it is normally closely linked to the domestic context. In Atlantic Europe the ritual extends into a separate sphere where much of the art and cultural elaboration center. It is provocative to note the same structural difference at much later and earlier times. For example, in the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, painted caves are found in westem Europe but not in central Europe despite (1) careful research in the latter area, (2) the existence of appropriate caves, and (3) the occurrence of portable art in domestic contexts in central Europe. Upper Paleolithic cave art is largely confined to Atlantic Europe and often occurs in clearly nondomestic contexts, in caves and parts of caves that are not used for habitation.

While much research needs to be carried out into the existence of long-tem traditions, the example suggests that an adequate explanation of an artifact such as a megalithic tomb must make use of the unique potential available to archaeologists of exarnining continuities over long time periods. Individuals act in society through the medium of their cultural hentage and in doing so they change that heritage. It cannot be adequate to disregard symbolic meanings and intentions. The example of the European Neolithic has indicated both the potential for studies of long time spans and that the intemal meaning of artifacts can be interpreted by reference to comparisons of form so long as the formal similarities and contrasts can be hypothesised to play an active part within social strategies. When meaning and function are integrated in reconstructions of the past, fuller interpretations can be attempted of a wider range of information.

CONCLUSI0N:PROCESSUALARCHAEOLOGYANDA TIMELESS PAST

Focus on the individual as an active social agent brings to the forefront the meaningful constitution of human behavior and its material products. In my conclusion the same approach is applied to archaeologists themselves, in order to set processual and postprocessual trends in a wider perspective. Any reconstruction of the past is a social statement in the present. It orders experience and creates social positions. The past is used as an effective stmcturing principle in


many walks of contemporary life. The emphasis in this essay on meaning and culture in the past is part of a contemporary social reaction against a legitimating ideology of control that has dominated archaeology throughout much of its history .

Since the Enlightenment, the objective within which archaeology found its place was control of the natural world by rational means. In the eighteenth century, nature took on a changed meaning (Bloch and Bloch 1980). It was no longer something despised as low, associated with The Fall, savages, and the failure of education. Now nature became cherished as the source whereby society, morals, and education were to be reformed and purified. Before the eighteenth century, the source of light and legitimacy came from God through mon- arch and church. From the eighteenth century, light came from an antecedant and superior basis for society and morality-from nature. In archaeology, culture became equated with the control and capturing of nature not only in the sense that past material culture was labeled, categorized, controlled, and administered, but also in the sense that a past was erected in which Man gradually pulled himself out of the mists of irrational beliefs, achieved intelligent enlightenment, and obtained mastery over nature.

This emphasis on the past as a symbol of Man's delivery from irrational beliefs is seen clearly in Childe's (1925) first edition of The Dawn of European Civilisa- tion. In his preface, Childe noted that the Bronze Age of Europe saw new and particularly European qualities that were "energy, independence and in- ventiveness," the hallmark of the "Modern West." This new rational force "ultimately transformed the face of the world." The monuments of the past embody "the achievements of our spintual ancestors" because they show the energy and success of our European forefathers. "In such rude implements are revealed the preconditions of our gigantic engines and of the whole mechanical apparatus that constitutes the material basis of modem life. Progress is an indi- visible whole" in which the invention of the hafting of an axe leads to and is the basis for modern technology. "In the first innovation, the germs of a11 subse- quent improvement were latent. . . . The achievements of our nameless forerun- ners are in a real sense present in our cultural heritage today" (Childe 1925:xiv and xv).

The past, then, indicates the progress of control over nature by rational means. Childe (1925:301-302) talked of progressive cultures, the pioneers of progress, in contrast to stagnant cultures in which cults and superstitions stifled development. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were ' 'miserable' ' and ' 'barbarians' ' because they were still held in bondage by the environment. Minoan Crete, however, was seen as European and modem because it was practical, it was not tied by superstitions and the building of pyramids, it was concemed with invention and the elaboration of tools, and it exemplified a "modem naturalism" in decorative designs and frescoes (1925:29). While Childe in later years developed rather

IAN HODDER

different outlooks, the theme of rational progress, which is possible only in the absence of hindering beliefs and superstitions, frequently reappears (e.g., Childe 1936). It does not seem too big a jump to read Binford in recent decades, where the main theme is again the reaction against norms and beliefs in favor of adaptive expedience.

Since Childe's early writings, however, a11 of the human past, not only the period since the Bronze Age, has become celebrated as an arena for the display of Man's place within, yet controlling, nature. Since the influential Lee and De Vore (1968) volume, it has become customary in many quarters to see early hunter-gatherers as far from miserable barbarians and the noble savage has returned with a vengeance. The materialist and utilitarian character of the modem West is fully legitimated because all societies that have survived at a11 times are presented as having followed the same rational procedures, having followed the same natural plan.

The emphasis on control through universally rational means has been seen particularly in recent years. The procedures used have included the use of systems theory, the label science, and the development of an appropriate language. Examination of these various procedures demonstrates the way in which the past was and is actively used within an expanding discipline.

The concepts of systems theory relate to a social interest in technical control within the modem west. Systems theory was introduced into the social and human sciences from control engineering, thermodynamics, and communications engineenng. It involves the drawing of boundaries and the specification of relationships between empirically defined entities. The concern is with regula- tion and control, particularly in relation to "the environment." As Marcuse (1972:130) stated, this control is related to man's control of other men. "The scientific method [can] lead to the ever-more-effective domination of nature [and] thus come to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of man by man through the domination of nature". The negotiation of the labor process depends on the ability to achieve technical control over material and to predict outcomes, and on the communica- tion of agreements and procedures. Technical and communications control thus lie at the heart of modem social life. By developing a concern with prediction and determinism archaeologists could present themselves as relevant to the present and future, aiding in the administration and planning of their fellows. Lillienfield (1978:262) suggested that systems theory was "the ideology of the administrative intellectual." Archaeologists, by making the whole of the human past, and now the human present, into their laboratory, make it their world, and the conception of systems provides a world they can manipulate. Such a claim may be fanciful, and in any case it is debateable whether archaeologists have been successful in pressing the current importance of their knowledge. Yet 1 would argue that the attraction of systems and science was the potential for


relevance through the ideology of control. In particular, once again, the claim that human beings could be seen as rational, and adaptively expedient, escaping the delusions of histoncal traditions, provided the required aura. Ultimately, perhaps, the vision is of a "technological democracy" of a new technocracy making "rational" decisions over the heads of a depoliticized populace.

The passive processual view of individuals in society, according to which there is a system behind the Indian to which the Indian is subordinate and helpless, has the result that the social analyst puts himtherself forward as having specialist knowledge and insight. The control of nature is the system, not humanity, and only the specialist theoretician can provide the keys. The knowledge, the keys, are valid cross-culturally. A timeless past is produced in which a11 is utility and control. This ideology provides a forceful legitimation for a modem, utilitarian world. "It has always been so" is the claim. But the political statement is hidden with great subtlety. Societies are compared cross-culturally by neutral, abstract means, by reference to utility and the optimal. The historically concrete and specific in social development is lost in "theory." Archaeology appears to be depoliticized, and the theoretician and academic are represented as neutral, providing professional knowledge. By this device, implicitly arrived at, the true social nature of archaeological knowledge is masked.

Perhaps the clearest attempt to hide the political in reconstruction of the past is found in the embrace of the hypothetico-deductive method, independent tests and "middle range theory," prediction, and objective measurement. The inadequacy of this epistemology for what archaeologists do has been outlined above and has been more effectively treated by Wylie ( 1 982). The scheme provided a language that was appropriately scientific. Put another way, by using the language the work of archaeologists became scientific. Like material culture, language provides an active force within the instant of social change. Like material culture, also, it is the medium within which people think and act, and so it structures society.

But it was not only the terms and the methods of the positivist tradition that produced the "new" science. The whole of archaeology became infused with a changed vocabulary. David Clarke (1972) argued the need for jargon but there is clearly a distinction to be made between necessary specialist terminology and the elaboration of language. Much of the initial reaction against the new science in Britain centered on the use of language. When "decrease in quantity" became "fall-off," and then became "the law of monotonic decrement," a different world was being evoked and created. ' 'Information" became "data, " " survival and recovery" became ' 'postdepositional processes, " and phrases such as "peer-polity interaction" demonstrated a political sense of language that has been admirably successful in creating new concepts and a new archaeology. Systems theory itself, as applied in(,archaeology, is largely a framework for expression, a way of thinking about the past, that appears appropriate because it

22 IAN HODDER

involves scientific concepts. Within the social context surrounding archaeologists, archaeology began to sound good. It sounded right. Few of us were aware of why we started using "interaction" rather than "contact," "model" rather than "theory," and once again the nondiscursive nature of much practical action is exposed. We changed the words because, implicitly, the words evoked science, control, and professional expertise. The new discipline had been created, or at least, that is what was thought.

That Binford and new archaeologists, among whom I include the authors of Spatial Analysis in Archaeology, did or do not allow generalizations about meaningful social action and do not allow explanation without prediction is, in my view, because they are caught within a language and a coping system that is based on technical control. I have tried in this essay to sketch out an altemative approach. By emphasizing the meaningful construction of social acts and the historical particularity of human culture I seek to dissolve the timeless past both in its role as the ultimate legitimation of the modem technocratic West and in its function as the prop of the professional theoretician.

There are already indications that a critica1 altemative viewpoint is emerging (Hodder 1982, Milier and Tilley 1983) but it is in the particular context of the feminist view of the past that the potential for radical viewpoints is perhaps most evident (see Braithwaite 1982a; Conkey 1982; Moore 1982). Tanner's (1981) reconstruction of the early development of human characteristics challenges androcentric assumptions. It is difficult to assess what type of archaeology will emerge when equally fundamental reconsiderations are repeated from other points of view. It is possible, however, that many of the radical assessments will be European in setting and it has been claimed (Renfrew 1982:142) that alternative approaches are at present more pervasive in European than in North American archaeology. In Europe certainly the public disillusion with science and centralized control is marked (I cannot speak of North America in this regard). The processual approach grew to have its greatest popularity in North America and it was never acceptable to the same degree in Europe, except locally and often temporarily. The new critica1 developments may now come primarily from Europe where diachrony, not synchrony, is the dominant cultural experi- ente and assumption.

This essay has been about breaking down the distinction between pmess and norm, the political nature of which has been suggested. It has sought to eradicate the dichotomy by locating human agency and the active, monitoring individual at the center of social theory. The social theory presented, albeit in the form of an introductory and partia1 sketch, seems to be as relevant for reconstructions of the past as it is for understanding the archaeologist at work in contemporary society. Culture and the cultural past are the media and results of practical actions. Focus on the individual within the theory of social action reawakens an interest in culture and in the historical specificity of material culture production. Culture, as

meaningfully constituted, is the critica1 and desperate spirit of Orwell's 1984. As that year passes, the complacent supportive ideology of a timeless past in which Man the passive and efficient animal is controlled by laws that he cannot unsurp, must be at least criticized and can, it is hoped, be replaced by the individual, actively and meaningfully creating his or her world.

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