Many people are becoming increasingly aware that the so-called New Archaeology of the 60s and early 70s was flawed. Though the New Archaeology met resistance from its inception, a tradition of substantial epistemological critique began more than thirty years ago (Bayard 1969; Kushner 1970; Levin 1973; Morgan 1973; Tuggle et al. 1972). However there is little consensus as to the nature and scale of these flaws. It can be claimed that the New Archaeology actually inhibited the development of archaeology itself by trying to subsume it within other realms of study, such as anthropology and the natural sciences. In fact, within anthropology, the type of materialist, neo-evolutionary approach from which New Archaeologists drew inspiration had already lost much of its ground to interpretive, symbolic and structural approaches. Despite David Clarke's insistence on ‘archaeology is archaeology is archaeology’ (1968), his own approach, based on the importation of ideas from statistics, geography and the information sciences, has not led to a viable and distinctive archaeology.

Despite the great methodological contribution of the New Archaeology, many of the central concerns of the pre-New Archaeology era need to be rediscovered if an adequate archaeological discussion is to take place. Of course, the traditional approaches themselves had flaws, and these have to be dealt with. But the older approaches do not have to be thrown out totally, in the way that the New Archaeology sometimes rejected ‘normative’ archaeology (Flannery 1967; Binford 1962; 1965).

The archaeology for which we have been advocating attempts to capture a new openness to debate in archaeology – a broadening to include a variety of influences including Marxism, structuralism, practice theories, embodiment, feminist critiques and public archaeology. At the same time, the aim is to establish archaeology as a discipline able to contribute an independent voice to both intellectual and public debates. The contextual approach discussed in chapter 8 is one way of doing this which we personally find attractive, given our own views of the society in which we live and of what ought to happen to it, and given our opinion of the development of archaeology over the last 20 years.

In contributing to and being involved in broader interdisciplinary debate, archaeologists read various types of general meaning in their data. We have discussed three overlapping types of meaning. One is the meaning of objects as physical, involved in exchanges of matter, energy and information; the concern here is with the object as a resource, functioning after its production, to facilitate organizational needs. A second is the meaning of objects in relation to the structured contents of historical traditions. A third kind of meaning – operational meaning – resides in the specifics of the context of each event or expression. Operational meaning is shaped by the previous two meanings but also takes into account (1) the specific intentions underlying the discrete actions of people in the past and (2) the unique lived, embodied experience of each actor.

The main concern in this chapter is to examine the contribution of Marxist archaeology to the understanding of social and ideological relations. In considering social structures in this context, the contrast with processual approaches again needs to be identified. In this chapter the term social structure does not mean the pattern of roles and relationships; rather it refers to the scheme of productive interactions which lies behind that pattern. However, our concern here is not to debate the full width of Marxist archaeology, which has been adequately covered elsewhere (Spriggs 1984; Trigger 1984; McGuire 1992; Kristiansen and Rowlands 1998). Rather, we wish briefly to outline the types of social structure that have been identified in Marxist archaeology, before considering Marxist archaeological discussions of ideology.

Marxist archaeology

Here we return to materialism, although some Marxist archaeologists would now claim to avoid the materialist/idealist split (Spriggs 1984). We shall see below that such claims can rarely be substantiated in archaeology, and the similarity with processual archaeology is clear in this respect. Rather, it is in the Marxist incorporation of the notion of structure that the major break with processual archaeology occurs. This is not to argue that Marxist archaeology avoids functional arguments, because we shall see below that it does not. What is new is an additional component, that all social practices involve dialectical relationships: the development of society occurs through the unity of opposites.

The first edition was written as a personal account in an uncertain world in which post-processual approaches had hardly had any impact. It represented my musings in the dark. Since that time there has been so much other publication (especially the books by Shanks and Tilley 1987a and b, Leone and Potter 1988, Gero and Conkey 1990, Tilley 1990a and b, Bapty and Yates 1990) and so much evaluation in relation to processual archaeology (e.g. the debate in Norwegian Archaeological Review 1989, Watson 1986, Earle and Preucel 1987, Preucel 1990) that the book needed to be brought up to date and my views tempered with the opinions presented in the literature.

The book still falls short of presenting a unified post-processual position since there are many diverging points of view now being expressed in theoretical archaeology. Initially post-processual archaeology was held together in the critique of processual approaches. This critique is now well established and post-processual archaeologists have turned more to the construction of the past. In doing so differences have become more stark but the discipline has been enlivened by the variety of perspectives. Nevertheless, the number of substantive post-processual interpretations of the past remains relatively small although several are about to appear (e.g. Hodder 1990a; Tilley 1990b). As more work is done so the differences and arguments will be brought into focus.

Processual archaeology made contributions to archaeological theory by encouraging the notion of culture as adaptive, and by applying systems theory, information exchange theory and a host of other general theories. Many of these ideas had existed in some form in earlier approaches in archaeology, and the extent of this continuity will be further examined below. Yet perhaps the major contribution made by the New Archaeology was methodological (Meltzer 1979; Moore and Keene 1983, p. 4). Archaeologists became more concerned about problems of inference, sampling and research design. Quantitative and statistical techniques were used more frequently; procedures were questioned and made more explicit. Contextual archaeology is an attempt to develop archaeological methodology further.

In the realm of theory, there have been a number of developments since the early 1960s which, it can be argued, indicate movement from the initial stance of processual archaeology as represented by the early papers of Binford (1962; 1965) and Flannery (1967). In the 1980s, what we now call post-processual archaeology encouraged an engagement with the theoretical turns taken in other fields, particularly anthropology, which had explored many new directions not foreseen by the first wave of anthropological archaeology in the 1960s. In the new millennium, as the debate between processualism and post-processualism gives way to a thousand archaeologies (Preucel 1995; Schiffer 2000), the usefulness of this debate is as questionable as the demand for a resolution (Hutson 2001; cf. Van Pool and Van Pool 1999).

Practice and structuration

In outlining a ‘theory of practice’, Bourdieu (1977) notes the difference between, on the one hand, observing and analysing social events, and, on the other hand, participating in activities. Structuralism, for example, allows us to see how pattern is generated, but gives us no indication of how we make relevant use of structures in constantly changing situations. Giddens (1979; 1981) is also concerned to escape notions of change which involve the playing out of some pre-set code.

Both Bourdieu and Giddens thus develop theories of practice or social action, called by Giddens ‘structuration’, in which there is a recursive relationship between structure and practice. Bourdieu's account is of particular relevance to archaeologists because he develops his theory in relation to material culture and the use of space. Indeed his ideas have been applied in ethnoarchaeology by, for example, Donley (1982), Moore (1982), and Braithwaite (1982), and in archaeology by Barrett (1981) and Davis (1984).

Bourdieu situates the notion of the habitus, a term first coined by Marcel Mauss (1973 [1935]), between structure and practice. However, any attempt to define the habitus (singular and plural) goes against the grain of Bourdieu's project. As part of his challenge to certain types of objectivism, Bourdieu argues that a concept is understood through its use: any attempt to formalise it – to step back from the context of use and construct a rule that systematises the ways it is used – misrecognizes the ambiguity and unpredictability of the situations in which the concept is exercised.

When Edmund Leach (1973) suggested that archaeology would soon turn from functionalism to structuralism, following the path of social anthropology, he was clearly unaware that structuralist archaeology already existed. In particular the work of Leroi-Gourhan (1965), similar in some respects to that of Levi-Strauss, had been widely debated. Certainly structuralism has never dominated the discipline, but its wide-spread attraction cannot be denied (Anati 1994; Bekaert 1998; Bintliff 1984; Campbell 1998; Collet 1993; Deetz 1983; Helskog 1995; Hill 1995; Hingley 1990, 1997; Huffman 1981, 1984; Kent 1984; Lenssen-Erz 1994; Leone 1978; Miller 1982a; Muller 1971; Parker Pearson 1996, 1999; Richard and Thomas 1984; Schnapp 1984; Small 1987; S⊘rensen 1987; Schmidt 1997; Tilley 1991; Van de Velde 1980; Wright 1995; Yates 1989; Yentsch 1991). These various articles, in addition to those to be discussed in this chapter, suggest that one can now talk of a structuralist archaeology.

Yet why has the analysis of ‘structured sets of differences’ been so slow to arrive and so slight in impact? Why has structuralism never formed a major coherent alternative in archaeology? The first answer to these questions is that structuralism is not a coherent approach itself, since it covers a great variety of work, from the structural linguistics of Saussure, and the generative grammar of Chomsky, to the developmental psychology of Piaget and the analysis of ‘deep’ meanings by Levi-Strauss.

In chapter 1 the question was posed: how do we infer cultural meanings in material remains from the past? In this and the following chapters various approaches to achieving this end will be discussed. The search is for an approach that takes adequate account of agency in an historical and cultural context.

It is necessary first to make a distinction between two broad classes of approach followed by archaeologists, which we shall term materialist and idealist. We shall see later that these terms have numerous senses within different schools of thought; for the moment we wish to give them provisional but precise meanings.

For Kohl (1981, p. 89) materialism ‘accords greater causal weight to a society's behaviour than to its thoughts, reflections, or justifications for its behaviour’. This kind of materialism is considered ‘vulgar’ because thoughts, reflections and justifications – the ‘superstructure’ – are said to be wholly determined by the productive economic behaviour that forms the ‘base’ of society. In the materialist scheme, productive capacity and behaviour is influenced only by technology and environmental limitations (see chapter 4 for other forms of materialism). This definition needs to be extended to include the nature of inference within materialist approaches. In this book we mean by materialist approaches those that infer cultural meanings from the relationships between people and their environment. Within such a framework the ideas in people's minds can be predicted from their economy, technology, social and material production.