In the account I have provided so far, science has been represented as a somewhat monolithic entity. However, if we consider scientific practice to have a critical effect on the kinds of knowledge generated, then it follows that different sciences engender quite distinct cultural practices and produce distinct forms of knowledge (Knorr-Certina 1999). This means that we cannot assume the existence of a unified laboratory-based practice known as ‘archaeological science’ that unites archaeobotanists, zooarchaeologists, soil micromorphologists, ceramic petrologists, etc. Within the next two chapters, I will set aside other areas of archaeological science in order to focus on the practice of materials science – the study of archaeological materials using techniques derived from engineering, chemistry and physics (Kingery 1996). In taking this step, I do not wish to present a further divisive view of archaeological practice; rather, I want to examine how we might re-orientate materials science analysis in terms of the wider goals of interpretative archaeology. In order to undertake this task I will focus on the interface between these branches of archaeology (see Renfrew 1982).

Hand in hand with the creation of the archaeological laboratory we observe the conceptual transformation of the physical traces of the site (both artefactual and environmental) as they become the focus of objective scientific analysis. In order to re-contextualise artefactual and environmental samples within a historically and culturally meaningful framework, I advocated a mode of enquiry that takes account of both context and content, both the physical dimensions of artefacts and environmental samples and their cultural and historical dimensions.

Introducing a biographical perspective

One of the major points to emerge from our discussion of scales of analysis is that modes of analysis that only attend to large-scale structures have little to tell us about how people lived and structured their lives on a daily basis. In order to understand these issues, we have to consider temporal and spatial scales of a more limited nature and duration, and work from these to consider how activities performed at these smaller scales transform larger-scale structures. What we are interested in, then, is how material culture is used to create and maintain meaningful social relations, relations that affirm the definition of identity and belonging at individual, local and wider scales.

One scale of analysis that provides a useful starting point is the human life span (Gilchrist 2000, 325). The narrative structure of human life cycles provides an extremely broad framework determined by biographically important events such as birth, life and death by which people make sense of their lives. Much of the literature concerning the way in which artefacts are invested with meaning focuses on their biographical relationship to human beings.

The notion of biography has arisen out of our understanding of the perception of objects in gift-based economies (see Mauss 1925 for his classic delineation of the notion of ‘the gift’). Gifts, unlike commodities, are exchanged as a means of establishing relationships between people.

Since the contents of this book are concerned so much with issues of biography, it makes sense to begin by saying something about the biography of both text and author. The subject matter – the relationship between archaeological theory and archaeological science – arose from my doctoral research between 1993 and 1997 at Glasgow University, which was supervised by Colin Richards and Richard Jones. The examination of the pottery assemblage from the Late Neolithic settlement at Barnhouse, Orkney comprised the central focus of the original thesis (see Richards forthcoming, and chapters 6 and 7 this volume). However I felt that wider and more fundamental questions lay behind my use of the techniques of materials science within a framework informed by interpretative archaeology and anthropology. It was for this reason that I began to write the first two chapters of the book in Glasgow, after the completion of the thesis. At this time the subject matter was written from a personal perspective derived from attempts to balance an interest in archaeological theory with the practical application of scientific techniques. This perspective altered when I took up a teaching appointment at University College Dublin, where amongst other things I was able to observe the pragmatic application of scientific analysis alongside archaeological theory under the aegis of the Irish Stone Axe Project, directed by Gabriel Cooney and Stephen Mandal.

Reviewing the record

The previous chapter broadly reviewed both the physical and the textual approaches to the archaeological record, and was intended as an assessment of many of the debates prevalent in the archaeological literature. This re-examination had an important aim: by broadly characterising the two main approaches to the archaeological record and providing a brief account of the problems with each position, I drew out the differences between the two approaches. These distinctions are crucial since I feel that the source of the rift between archaeological scientists and theoretical archaeologists lies, at a fundamental level, with the starkly different philosophical approaches each group employs as a means of understanding the past. On one side, we have a viewpoint which regards the archaeological record as the product of physical processes which can be examined empirically and objectively using the sense data derived from the description of objects. These descriptions and measurements can then be built up into generalising laws that can be applied in all archaeological contexts. On the other side, we have a viewpoint which considers the archaeological record to be the product of meaningful social action. As such it can be considered to be composed of a structured set of differences, like a text. In this case, each sentence of the text, or part of the archaeological record, is contextually distinct.

I will begin this final chapter by reiterating three theoretical propositions that I consider to be of signal importance to the motivation and structure of our practices as archaeologists:

1. Most importantly, knowledge does not arise from simple one-to-one observations and descriptions of pre-existing categories in the world. Instead knowledge is created from our engagement with the world through the construction of categories. These categories are then utilised as the means to interrogate and provide an understanding of that world.

2. If we accept the view that knowledge is constructed, we need to consider precisely how it is constructed. One of the ways in which we may understand the process of knowledge construction is through an analysis of the practices of particular groups of people. As I have already observed, distinct practices are associated with distinct groups of people or cultures.

3. It follows from the above two points that cultural knowledge is not a static or concrete entity that can be grasped ‘out there’ in the real world; instead people live within cultures, and they both use and alter cultural knowledge through practice. Culture is therefore a contingent process that must be continually performed if it is to be maintained. It is this point that I want to develop with regard to science and archaeological practice in the context of this chapter.

These viewpoints apply with as much force to the study of scientific practice as they do to the cultural practices of other peoples distant in place or time.

In the previous chapter I described the interpretative framework and analytical methodology I employed to examine the production, use and deposition of Grooved ware in the Later Neolithic settlement site of Barnhouse, Orkney. The analysis suggested that the ‘lives’ of different categories of pottery take quite different forms. Their production is associated with different areas of the settlement, while their use and deposition are framed by their association with different kinds of activity, different foods and different social occasions. The biographies of different categories of vessels are therefore associated with different, but overlapping, social identities. In this chapter I will delineate these biographies and outline their significance in relation to other sites in Later Neolithic Orkney. Following this I will examine the nature of the cultural metaphors that motivate the construction of these biographies and how these intersect with food technologies. I will then open out the discussion to examine how the social practices associated with food and pottery production are bound up with long-term settlement histories, and finally I will discuss the role of pottery and food in terms of our understanding of changing social relations during the Neolithic.

The biography of Grooved ware at Barnhouse

It is important to reiterate the distinction between the production of rock- and shell-tempered vessels. In the previous chapter I suggested that the production of shell-tempered vessels is undertaken communally in the space at the centre of the settlement, while rock-tempered vessels are produced by specific individual households.

The next two chapters provide an extended case study that illustrates some of the ways in which we might articulate the methodologies of materials science with the concerns of interpretative archaeology. Before commencing with this, I want to reiterate a point that recurs throughout this volume: we are required to consider the interpretative framework within which we operate prior to undertaking our analyses. Dobres articulates this well with regard to technological studies when she argues that ‘explicit consideration of the sociopolitical nature of technologies cannot be done after the material facts are settled; one cannot simply insert symbolism, questions of value, or the dynamics of social differentiation into a pre-existing materialist pot that, by definition, discounts or downplays them as constitutive elements’. She then goes on to point out, ‘These intangible processes clearly play a structural role in shaping and changing technologies … and if we are to understand how they did so in the past, they must be central to our conceptual frameworks rather than added after the facts are in’ (Dobres 2000, 118, original emphasis).

In this chapter and the next, I will present an analysis in which concerns of a theoretical nature play a central role in determining what and how material is analysed and how this analysis ultimately relates to wider theoretical concerns. My case study focuses on the analysis of a pottery assemblage from the later Neolithic settlement site of Barnhouse, Orkney, Scotland.

In this chapter I will take a broad view of some of the problems associated with archaeological interpretation by examining the relationship between archaeological science, the archaeological specialist and the practice of archaeology as a whole. My account will provide a situated perspective of archaeological practice (see Harding 1991 and Haraway 1997 for a discussion of situated knowledge). My situated knowledge is derived from the experience of working within the field of post-excavation analysis in Britian as both a materials specialist and an archaeological scientist. While this knowledge is specific to this context, more general points may be extrapolated from my account which can inform our understanding of wider archaeological practice.

Throughout, I want to examine the process by which we come to make archaeological interpretations. In doing so I will consider a wide range of questions: How are archaeological reports constructed? Who provides the information that makes up the archaeological report? What are the conditions under which this knowledge is constructed? Is there an interpretative distance between those who have a primary engagement with the site, and those who report that encounter? How is this knowledge deployed in the construction of subsequent archaeological knowledge? Simply put, I will consider how it is that we create accounts of past societies using the medium of material culture.

For the purpose of discussion, archaeological practice can be divided into three broad enterprises: excavation, post-excavation and publication. These are crude divisions, but they will suffice for the present.