We begin with some notes from a hospital ward:

Those are the opening words of a novel by Doris Lessing, Briefing For a Descent into Hell. It is not a novel that I like, but its theme is curiously apposite to this volume, for the man found wandering beside the Thames has experienced a mental breakdown, and the book follows his case history. Eventually the patient is identified as a Cambridge Professor of Classics. His crisis begins when he meets an archaeologist who has come to doubt whether he can know anything at all about the past: so much so that whenever he tries to lecture he is afflicted by terrible attacks of stammering. His experience has a familiar ring:

The brilliant compiler of The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History quoted above, Colin McEvedy, set himself the task of constructing a set of maps illustrating the development of Europe and the Near and Middle East from prehistoric times. In so doing, he had to make use of the evidence of archaeology, and his continued characterization of the subject is worth pondering.

Since the 1960s archaeology has become more disputatious than at any other time in its history. Practitioners openly debate conceptual and epistemological issues which lie at the core of the discipline. Archaeology exhibits such internal dissension that we are entitled to ask whether there are any disciplinary cultural norms left, whether there are any bedrock goals and understandings that can survive such disputation, and whether these norms of disciplinary behavior are necessary for there to be a productive future for the discipline. By extension, if what has served in the past as a basis for discourse is outmoded, can we replace it with a new account of disciplinary approach and purpose which facilitates communication and recognizes the diversity of the community of producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge?

Ironically, the prime cause of dissension, a positivist move to establish firmly that archaeology could be both scientific and relevant to the analysis of human affairs, was seen by its proponents as having the clear potential to reduce dispute by providing a generally agreed–upon basis for archaeological logic, archaeological epistemology, and archaeological ontology. Instead of this, our contemporary experience is of debates where archaeological logic is contextual, where archaeological epistemology veers wildly between varieties of positivism and relativism, and where archaeological ontology is a quicksand of mutually exclusive “commonsense” propositions about human behavior and the nature and significance of the archaeological record (see for example Patrik 1985; Sabloff etal. 1987).

Skepticism about the archaeological past

Archaeologists have debated a remarkably consistent core of issues since the turn of the century. In 1913, for example, Roland B. Dixon inveighed against research that showed “too little indication of a reasoned formulation of definite problems” and an inexcusable “neglect of saner and more truly scientific methods” (1913: 563); “the time is past,” he insisted, “when our major interest was in the specimen … We are today concerned with the relations of things, with the whens and the whys and the hows” (1913: 565). The problems he recommended for archaeologists' consideration had to do with “the development of culture in general,” with what he described as cultural processes, and the scientific methods he recommended were explicitly those of hypothesis testing: archaeologists should proceed by formulating “a working hypothesis, or several hypotheses” and then seeking material that might fill available gaps and “prove or disprove” them (1913: 564). Four years later, Wissler advocated a very similar (problem–oriented, hypothesis–testing) program, and explicitly aligned it with anthropology; he described it as “the real, or new archaeology” (the article was entitled “The New Archaeology”).

Background and goals

Post–processual archaeology has demanded that attention be directed to the symbolic systems that played important roles in prehistoric lives, but few methods of accessing symbolic systems have been developed. Certain aspects of symbolic systems are available to archaeological study, notably visual arts. This paper examines one kind of role that symbolic systems played in prehistory in order to address an on–going discussion in the archaeology of the proto–historic period in the American Southwest.

Most of those now working at large, late Pueblo sites in Arizona, such as Grasshopper, Homol'ovi, Awatovi, and Chavez Pass, are addressing the problem of what happens to social organization of village farming communities during the process of population aggregation and agricultural intensification. Controversy arose between those who think fourteenth century Puebloans had complex social organization, that is, social differentiation based on wealth and political power (Plog 1983, Upham 1982), and those who think pueblo society was more or less egalitarian and based on complicated ritual interaction and leadership based in religious authority (Reid 1989b: 87, Adams 1991). In the latter view, access to religious knowledge and authority might be inherited, but there is no social stratification, and no differential access to the means of production. This paper attempts to show that visual arts deserve more attention in attacking this problem, and that a cross–cultural comparative approach is useful.

Introduction

Palaeolithic archaeologists do not often reflect on the history of their subject beyond examining the heroes who established human antiquity (Grayson 1983). In this paper I want to consider how the questions on today's palaeolithic agenda have been set. To do this I will need to go beyond the familiar accounts of the founding fathers of the subject and attempt to set them and the questions they posed in a broader cultural, political, and scientific context.

Disembedding concepts such as those relating to human origins is difficult but necessary if we are to advance our chosen subject. Historicizing the contexts of discovery and interpretation are all important, as many historians of science are now aware (Bowler 1986; Desmond 1982; Stocking 1987). This involves tracing both the overt and subtle undercurrents in the growth, acceptance, and rejection of ideas. The aim is to overturn what Gould (1988) has referred to as “cardboard histories” (of which archaeology has many examples) by recognizing the social, cultural, and political contexts within which science operates.

The risk is that many archaeologists will not accept such an endeavor. As hostile reaction to the World Archaeological Congress in 1986 showed, many palaeolithic specialists object to what they see as the politicization of the subject. They refer instead to the neutrality of scientific enquiry and the independence of academic thought about human origins.

A well–established dialogue concerning “post–processualism” reflects a current lack of consensus in archaeological theory. Post–processualists advocate a particularistic, hermeneutic approach to archaeological inquiry and thereby challenge the “explicitly scientific” approach of what has now become known as processual archaeology. This debate has produced a substantial corpus of literature, only some of which will be considered here. Ethnographic data form the foundation for many archaeological interpretations, and have been used in both processual and post–processual frameworks. Moreover, ethnoarchaeology represents a research strategy of increasing importance in supplying both processual and post–processual archaeologists with ideas for interpretation. Accordingly, this analysis broaches the post–processual discussion by focusing on strengths and limitations of ethnoarchaeological research.

In the post–processual spirit of polemic strategies (Shanks and Tilley 1989: 8), this paper challenges the premise that “varieties of empiricism do not form an appropriate medium for a materialist practice” (ibid. 1989: 44). Embodied in Hodder's (1986: 79) claim that empirical science is a “cracked and broken facade” (and resounded elsewhere, e.g., Shanks and Tilley 1989: 3), the paper focuses on the domain of current ethnoarchaeological research and argues that archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists are compelled by the nature of their data to maintain methodological rigor in research.

This paper considers symbolic analyses of material culture that are conducted within traditional (i.e., nonindustrialized) societies as post–processual ethnoarchaeological research.

Introduction

The Four Corners country of North America was the heartland of Anasazi farmers for almost a thousand years before AD 1300. Today, the country is a sparsely populated rural setting. For every farmstead or small town established since the nineteenth century, there are many ancient ruined hamlets and villages in the surrounding fields. With so many ruins so close at hand, the hows and whys of abandonments, the subject of this volume, have been at the center of Southwestern archaeology from its earliest days.

When the field was young and there were few archaeologists and many ruins, the general opinion was that a widespread drought had forced the Anasazi to abandon their homes. By the first decade of this century, as the number of archaeologists rose but the general state of knowledge remained unchanged, A. V. Kidder pronounced Southwestern archaeology to be a “sucked orange” (Kidder 1958:322) and suggested that archaeology abandon the Anasazi. Kidder, one of the founders of the field, left for the lusher environs of lowland Mexico and Central America.

Archaeology did not abandon the Anasazi, however, and the field revived as A. E. Douglass' tree–ring studies began to yield a double harvest of absolute dates and data on paleoclimatic patterns. By 1929, Douglass thought he had identified the cause of “the abandonment” as the Great Drought of the later thirteenth century, AD 1276–99 (Douglass 1929).

Introduction

Our assumptions about what we expect to see in the archaeological record influence our interpretations of that record and of the cultural adaptations we strive to understand. Understanding abandonment is a case in point. As the papers in this volume show, the term “abandonment” includes a variety of meanings and physical manifestations. Interpreting abandonment of habitations through the archaeological materials left at a site has implications at the level of the residential sites and in terms of regional settlement patterns. If we assume a single kind of abandonment in archaeological contexts, then the variations in assemblages must be interpreted along other lines – for example population, wealth, or social status. If we consider that the archaeological record may represent several different contexts for abandonment, then we can address the problem of how to distinguish between them.

Punctuated abandonment is the regular, planned movement of a household from one residence to another. The term “punctuated abandonment” implies both planned departure from and anticipated return to a residence. When regular intervals of abandonment and reoccupation are an integral part of a subsistencesettlement system, they strongly influence the kinds of goods and the organization and use of space at contemporary habitations. An ethnoarchaeological study of the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) of northern Mexico provides an example of punctuated abandonment and the resulting material assemblages expected at residences. This discussion considers how formal and distributional aspects of materials at habitations are indicative of the general settlement system of punctuated abandonment.

Introduction

What is the relationship between camp abandonment, mobility (actual and planned), material culture, and the archaeological record? Archaeologists have used artifact frequencies as one indicator of length of occupation and mode of abandonment. However, in order to understand the relationship between mobility, abandonment, and artifact frequencies, it is necessary to examine the factors influencing the accumulation of material culture at camps that have been occupied for various periods of time. The following explores variables traditionally considered important in abandonment studies.

This chapter is based primarily on quantitative data collected in 1987 at a community located just outside the Khutse Game Reserve in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, although research has been conducted at the community periodically from 1987 to 1992 (Fig. 5.1). The settlement is inhabited by Basarwa (“Bushmen,” San) and Bakgalagadi (Bantu–speakers). It is comprised of a number of scattered camps that are occupied by one to twenty–four people (Fig. 5.2). Camps consist of huts, ash areas where ashes from hearths are dumped, storage platforms, roasting pits, hearths, windbreaks, and informal storage loci such as trees. Some camps also contain goat kraals and pens. Formal middens are not used at Kutse (the alternative spelling for the community to distinguish it from the game reserve). Trash is routinely deposited at ash areas. Since length of camp occupation at Kutse is variable, it is possible to test timedependent hypotheses.