| ORIGINS RESEARCH AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM: PARADIGM
CHANGE AND CONTINUITY
EAA99,
BOURNEMOUTH, U.K.
Stephanie Koerner (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
skost1+@pitt.edu
and Jennie Hawcroft (Sheffield University, UK)
J.E.Hawcroft@sheffield.ac.uk
Since
ancient times, questions about the origins
of human behavior, social institutions,
agriculture, inequality and the state have
figured centrally in the ways scholars have
thought about human history. During the
19th century, these questions became the
foci of anthropological archaeology’s various
areas of ‘origins’ research. Throughout
anthropology’s history, major changes in
methods and theory have been accompanied
by efforts to rethink and remodel the discipline’s
diverse areas of origins research. Numerous
examples might be mentioned to illustrate
the continuing significance of origins research
to archaeology’s disciplinary definition,
conceptual foundations and goals. One is
the “world archaeological chronology” presented
by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn in their
influential textbook, Archaeology.
Theories, Methods and Practice (1994).
In their account of human history, “the
story begins in East Africa, with the emergence
there of the earliest hominids of the genus
Australopithecus
around 4 or 5 million years ago…By around
1.6 million years ago, the next stage in
human evolution, Homo
erectus had emerged in East Africa…By
the time Homo
erectus became extinct (400,000-200,000
years ago), the species had colonized the
rest of Africa, southern, eastern and western
Asia, and central and western Europe. The
Middle Paleolithic period - from about 200,000
to 40,000 years ago - saw the emergence
of Homo
sapiens...[There is] evidence for fully
modern people - our own species, Homo
sapiens sapiens - in Africa by at least
100,000 years ago...By 10,000 BC, most of
the land areas of the world...were populated...Nearly
all the societies so far mentioned may be
regarded as hunter-gatherer societies...[T]he
transition from hunting and gathering to
food production seems to have occurred independently
in several areas...after ca. 10,000 years
ago...[T]he first farmers...may be described
as segmentary
societies...without any centralized
organization...[F]ollowing the development
of farming, there is much diversity. In
many cases, the farming economy underwent
intensification, and became less egalitarian,
displaying [the] differences in personal
status sometimes summarized...by the term
ranked
societies [or] chiefdoms.
The urban revolution, the next major transformation,…is
not simply a change in settlement type:
it reflects profound social changes. Foremost
among these is the development of state
societies” (Renfrew and Bahn 1994:142-148).
Another example is the way in which Robert Wenke structured his book, Patterns
in Prehistory. Humankind’s First Three Million
Years (1984). The “Table of Contents”
reads as follows:
Chapter 1
Prehistory, History and Archaeology
Chapter 2
Fundamentals of Archaeology
Chapter 3
The Origins of Culture
Chapter 4
The Emergence of Homo
sapiens sapiens
Chapter 5
The First Americans
Chapter 6
The Origins of Domestication, Agriculture,
and Sedentary Society
Chapter 7
The Origins of Complex Societies
Chapter 8
The Evolution of Complex Societies
in Southwest Asia
Chapter 8
The Origins of Cultural Complexity
in Egypt
Chapter 10
The Rise of Civilization in the Indus
Valley
Chapter 11
From Tribe to Empire in North China
Chapter 12
Secondary States and Empires of the
Old World
Chapter 13
The Origins of Complex Cultures in
Mesoamerica
Chapter 14
Aboriginal States and Empires of
Andean South America
Chapter 15
Patterns of Cultural Change in Prehistoric
North America
Chapter 16
Prehistory in Perspective (Wenke
1984:xi-xii).
These
matters were taken up in the second of a
two-part session we organized for the Annual
Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists
(EAA) held at Bournemouth University (Bournemouth,
UK) in September 1999. The first part took
place in the Annual Meeting of the EAA held
at the University of Götenborg, Sweden,
in September 1999. The session had two main
objectives. One was to explore patterns
of paradigm change and continuity in the
history of particular areas of origins research.
The second was to consider various general
implications of these patterns (methodological,
theoretical, philosophical, ecological,
social, ethical, pedagogical). It is hoped
that the papers and discussions in the session
will contribute to the growing historical
and philosophical understanding of change
and continuity in archaeological theory
and methods, as well as interest in going
beyond the problems dualist paradigms pose
for understanding the diversity of the human
past. The importance of archaeology’s contribution
to change in relations between human sciences,
philosophy, and everyday human affairs were
also discussed. The session had the honour
of being sponsored by Archaeopress, publishers
of British Archaeological Reports (BAR),
and the organizers look forward to editing
a BAR volume consisting of papers presented
in the two parts of the session.
To expand on our theme, he 20th century has seen major change in the methods
used to investigate questions about diverse
‘origins events’. Today each is the focus
of one or even several specialized fields
of multi-disciplinary inquiry, each with
its own combination of techniques, analytic
procedures, and interpretive principles.
However, the importance of origins research
to the ways anthropology defines its aims
and structures its fields of inquiry is
not the only manifestation of paradigmatic
continuity. Throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries, the most polemical debates have
turned on several issues that have engaged
scholarship on human history since antiquity,
namely, issues of characterizing (a) human
nature, (b) the factors most responsible
for socio-cultural change and diversity;
and (c) the epistemological status of human
sciences. These themes are commonplaces
of debate in diverse areas of origins research
today. They were commonplaces of 19th century
debate over the cultural evolutionary schemes
of the founding figures of ‘classical’ anthropology.
And before that, they engaged some of the
most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment
and Romantic movements.
The basic concepts which divide apparently antithetical theoretical paradigms
have not changed in fundamental respects
either. Throughout anthropology’s history,
the nature-culture dichotomy has provided
opposing theoretical programs with analytic
tools; and the discipline as a whole with
an identity marker. The persistence of the
nature-culture antithesis is rather remarkable
in light of how centrally it figures among
the Western dualist categories, which anthropologists
have so successfully criticized, such as
those of mind versus body, and individual
versus society. The antithesis has also
been challenged by advances in major areas
of origins research, which would not have
been possible without the co-operation of
human and physical scientists. In addition,
the recent emphasis on the active role of
material culture in creating and transforming
social relations would seem conducive to
awareness of the paradoxes that an artificial
nature-culture antithesis can be expected
to create. Yet to this day, the most controversial
debates turn on opposing theories about
human nature, history, and the epistemological
status of archaeological knowledge, articulated
in relation to the nature-culture interface.
In the 1970s, persisting debate over the relative merits of materialist
and culturalist types of determinisms led
Marshall Sahlins (1976:55) to describe anthropological
theory as a “prisoner pacing between the
farthest walls of his cell.” Dualist paradigms
focus on contrasting sides of the nature-culture
opposition - nature shaping culture versus
culture imposing meaning on nature. But
they have several significant features in
common, including: (a) notions that nature
and culture constitute ontologically antithetical
domains; (b) universalistic conceptions
of nature; and (c) beliefs about cultural
diversity and change, which are historically
rooted in ideal views of the Scientific
Revolution, the Birth of Modernity, and
modern Western culture’s supposed triumph
over nature (Crumley 1993, Descola and Pálssen
1996).
Fortunately, the last decades have seen major change in the situation.
Studies of the historical background and
philosophical foundations of dualist paradigms
for humanity’s history are putting us in
a position to understand a number of the
methodological, theoretical, and ethical
consequences of paradigms structured around
a nature-culture antithesis. Several important
examples of such problems are explored by
Johannes Fabian, in Time
and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object (1983, cf. Wolf 1975). In this
book, Fabian shows how dualist paradigms
confuse cultural differences with evolutionary
typological temporal distances, and why
this confusion results in a “denial of the
coevalness” of the histories of the so-called
West and “all the Rest.” Fabian notes that
the term “coevalness” is intended to serve
as a translation of the German terms gleichzeitig
and Gleichzeitigkeit. The unusual coeval,
and especially the noun coevalness, express
the need to steer between such closely-related
notions as synchronic,
simultaneous
and contemporary. I take synchronic
to refer to events occurring at the same
physical time; contemporary asserts co-occurrence in what I called typological time.
Coeval,
according to my pocket Oxford dictionary,
covers both (Fabian 1983:31).
Another factor which has contributed to change in the abovementioned situation
is that researchers are developing more
sophisticated methods for studying the diversity
of the human past. Dualist paradigms that
precluded satisfactory ecological analyses
are being replaced by multi-dimensional
approaches that emphasize the advantages
of an explicit focus on the role of human
perception, cognition, and symbolic creation
in the human-environmental dialectic (Hornborg
1996). Aspects of human experience and social
life that were ignored by studies underwritten
(explicitly or implicitly) by beliefs that
all of human history was somehow reducible
to a unilinear sequence of origins events,
are being explored from the perspectives
offered by new data bases and interpretive
tools (Conkey and Gero 1991, Wylie 1994).
These developments have led to remarkable
growth in available information on the previously-unimagined
diversity of past human ecologies, and motivate
many interesting projects to develop alternatives
to dualist paradigms for humanity’s history
(Croll and Parkin 1992, Descola and Palssen
1996). There is considerable variability
among these projects. However, they share
several features share in common. One is
concern to go beyond the various methodological,
theoretical and ethical problems associated
with dualist paradigms for the emergence
of human behavior and patterns in humanity
history (Foley 1991, 1995, Descola 1994,
Ingold 1994, 1998). Another is an awareness
of the challenges facing attempts to go
beyond the constraints of received dualist
models of human history and related objectivist
and relativist philosophies of science.
For example, in the introduction to the
collection of studies, Nature
and Society. Anthropological Perspectives
(Descola and Pálssen 1996), Philippe Descola
and Gí_li Pálssen write the following.
“Deconstructing the dualist paradigm may appear as just one more example
of the healthy self-criticism which now
permeates anthropological theory...If such
analytic categories as economics, totemism,
kinship, politics, individualism, or even
society, have been characterized as ethnocentric
constructs, why should it be any different
with the disjunction between nature and
society? The answer is that this dichotomy
is not just another analytic category belonging
to the intellectual tool kit of the social
sciences: it is the key foundation of the
modernist epistemology. Going beyond dualism
opens up an entirely different landscape,
one in which states and substances are replaced
by processes and relations; the main question
is not any more how to objectify closed
systems, but how to account for the diversity
of the processes of objectification” (Descola
and Pálssen 1996:12).
Our two-part EAA session built upon these developments. We have backgrounds
in the history and philosophy of anthropology,
archaeology and paleoanthropology. We met
at the Annual Meeting of the Theoretical
Archaeology Group held in Bournemouth in
December 1997 in a session organized by
Patrick S. Quinney entitled, “The Rise of
the Modern Behavioral and Biological Perspectives
on the Evolution of Humanness.” During the
meeting, we began an on-going discussion
concerning the roles of the nature-culture
antithesis in anthropological archaeology’s
major areas of origins research.
The presently-described session brought together researchers normally more
likely to have attended and presented papers
in quite separate sessions. Even at meetings
attended by very innovative researchers,
many problematic divisions are perpetuated.
The sharpest divisions are those historically
rooted in the roles played by the nature-culture
antitheses in the ways 19th and early 20th
century scholars conceptualized contrasts
between: (a) the physical and human sciences;
(b) opposing theoretical paradigms for human
history; and (c) strongly objectivist and
relativist philosophical positions on the
epistemological status of archaeological
knowledge. Some of these divisions have
widened during the second half of the 20th
century. Specialization has only been one
of the factors involved. Another factor
has been the widening of epistemological
gaps structured around dualist categories
to a level of incommensurability. Fortunately
it is becoming possible to discern a general
pattern, one which might be roughly characterized
as a movement from emphases on dichotomies
during the Renaissance, to emphasis on antitheses
(such as in the works of Kant, Hegel and
Marx), to the recent emphases on the incommensurability
of opposing paradigms for human history
and the conditions of knowledge concerning
the human past. The present session served
as a context for discussing the consequences,
not just of increasingly specialized data
bases and analytic procedures, but of manifestations
of such patterns of incommensurability.
There may be similarities between such manifestations
of incommensurability in fields as diverse
in their subject matter as those concerning
the emergence of human behavior, and those
concerning the development of states. As
session organizers, we also provided
a context for discussion between (a) researchers
who are developing the data bases and analytic
procedures needed to go beyond dualist paradigms
for human history, and (b) researchers who
are investigating the historical background
and philosophical foundations of these paradigms.
The session had three main sections. All three included papers concerning
patterns of paradigm change and continuity
within particular areas of ‘origins’ research,
as well papers that examined general implications
of these patterns. Despite their diversity,
it is possible to group the papers in relation
to three themes, namely, views beyond dualist
perspectives on: (a) the emergence of human
ways of life; (b) the factors most responsible
for socio-cultural change and diversity;
and (c) the conditions of archaeological
knowledge. The abstracts of the papers were
in the programme for the EAA98-Bournemouth
meeting. The website is: http://csweb.bournemouth.ac.uk/consci/eaa99/.
Three spaces in the session were reserved
for discussions. These explored such questions
as: “Have the last several decades (years)
seen major critical and constructive paradigm
change in anthropological archaeology? If
so, in which contexts, and how might these
changes be characterized? If not, why not?”
We were very happy to have Professor John
Bintliff as the session’s main commentator.
Bintliff has made important critical and
constructive contributions to a number of
the changes in archaeological methods, theory
and philosophical orientations which made
the session possible (Bintliff 1998, 1991,
1984, Bintliff and Gaffney 1986, Bintliff,
et al. 1988).
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World
Archaeological Bulletin