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1
Limits to a post-processual
archaeology (or, The dangers
of a new scholasticism) I
PHILIP L. KOHL
In search of the truly critical
Post-processual archaeology is an amorphous phenomenon;
it assumes many different shapes and forms, deriving
inspiration from fields as diverse as contemporary literary
criticism, women's studies, and human geography. As Earle
and Preucel ( 1987) have recently suggested, post-processual
archaeology may, in fact, constitute more a radical critique
of the long dominant, "new" Anglo-American archaeology
of the sixties and seventies than a unified research pro-
gramme or disciplinary paradigm in its own right simply due
to this diversity. It is such a mixed bag that it is difficult to
define a common core, a new orthodoxy that has already
replaced or, at least, is trying to dislodge the positivist,
systemic ecological functionalism (or what I prefer to dub
"animalism" - as opposed to the overused "vulgar" or
the misnamed "cultural materialism"), championed most
stridently by L. Binford and his disciples.
Yet if the adjective new had the most positive conno-
tations in American culture and American archaeology in the
late sixties, defining a rebellion against all that was old,
traditional, and therefore suspect, the adjective critical today
seems to be accorded the highest status, possibly uniting the
diverse strands of post-processual archaeology into a single
critically self-conscious, reflexive enterprise. Whether we
have read our Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas
or have not mulled over the profundities of the Frankfurt
School in our search for a meaningful - dare I use the
sixties word?- relevant archaeology, we post-processualists
by definition are involved in a critical process of self-
examination, engaged introspection, reflective inquiry on
the multiple meanings of the past for the present, the present
for the past, and all possible permutations thereof. If the
hypothetical deductive scientists of the "new" archaeo-
logical paradigm saw themselves as the ultimate social
planners, discovering laws of cultural evolution that would
lead us knowingly into the 21st century, we post-
processualists have more modest aims. We can predict
neither the past, nor the future; in fact, we claim not really to
know the past at all. Rather, we tell stories about it and
discover stories told by previous generations of scholars,
including, of course, -those constructed by the Binfordian
mad-scientists and their ilk. But - and this is the important
point - we proceed critically, seeing how these stories are
used and manipulated for present purposes, sometimes
condemning the tale, sometimes approving it - always, of
course, from a critical perspective.
We are also constantly critically examining the social
setting in which knowledge is produced, the disciplinary
academic context or class background of particular scholars
or schools to which they belong. Knowledge is never
absolute, nor certain, but must be contextualized, related to a
partiGular time and place. Thus, Shanks and Tilley have
exhorted us in their breathlessly inspired, albeit "provisional,
frail, and flawed" personal encounter with the past and its
present that "any adequate conceptual and theoretical frame-
work developed in studying the past must incorporate
reflection upon archaeology as a professional discipline in
the present" (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 2-3). In a critically
self-conscious spirit, this chapter will attempt to follow these
words of wise advice and reflect upon the current state of
Anglo-American archaeology, for- it must be emphasized
- in post-processual archaeology we are dealing with a
phenomenon largely limited to the British Isles and North
America; it is a curious fact (which also must be critically
examined) that archaeology as practiced in most areas of the
world has yet to experience its processual phase, much less
benefit from its post-processualist critique.
Post-processual archaeology: the good, the bad, and the
dangerous
Our cynicism must be tempered. Although this chapter is
written from a perspective that is critical of post-processual
archaeology (or at least some of its practitioners) and, in that
sense, concentrates on certain defects or limitations, we must
first acknowledge some real accomplishments. First, a
"radical critique" of processual archaeology was long
overdue and welcome. The debunking of the naive, "golly
gee, Mr. Science" positivism characteristic of the, worst of
the new archaeology (e.g. Watson, Redman, and LeBlanc
1971 ), as well as of the perhaps more insidious and
ubiquitous ecological materialism, characteristic of pro-
cessual archaeology, had to occur, and, in retrospect, it is
13
/4 Philip L Kohl
not surprising that critiques appeared more or less simul-
taneously on several theoretical fronts from Marxism to the
structural and symbolic/contextual approaches advanced
particularly by I. Hodder (1986 ).
There is no need to retread familiar ground; suffice it to
say that nearly a generation of young scholars grew up and
sometimes were uncritically indoctrinated in the canons of
the new archaeology. Rare are the scholars like Mark Leone,
who were first schooled in the heady days of the establish-
ment of the "new archaeology" or archaeological paradigm,
who later perceived the error of their ways. Retreats to the
safety of middle-range theorizing or the none-too-subtle
Red-baiting that characterizes Binford's defense (Binford
1986: 402-3) of the movement he pioneered illustrate how
obstinate most positivists are in the belief in objectivity and
in a knowable, external world. ~ r e of this defense later, but
here from a truly critical perspective it is worth noting how
ingrained American belief in the omnipotence of science
actually is; how easy it is in an American context for
technique and rigorous methodology to masquerade as
theory, a tendency that formed one of the dominant features
of processual archaeology; finally and from an equally
critical, contextually sensitive perspective, it is striking that
the most vigorous assault on positivism and a rejection of the
dichotomy between idiographic and nomothetic or between
historical and comparative evolutionary approaches has
emerged in England, a country whose experiences this
century, like those of all European countries, have been
considerably more complicated, nuanced, and fraught with
reversals and declines than those of the United States.
European positivism and belief in unlimited progress died on
the battlefields of World War I only to be resurrected
phoenix-like on the relatively unscarred terrain of the United
States. Or, as B. Trigger ( 1989: 19) correctly reminds us, the
relatively low prestige accorded history in the United States
is related to American history (our collective escape from
Europe) and the "present-mindedness" of American culture.
In Great Britain the distinctive internal disciplinary
development of prehistory came as an extension of history
while in the United States archaeology came to be con-
sidered part of anthropology, which itself developed within
institutions of natural history, like the Smithsonian and
the American Museum of Natural History. From such a
perspective one can better understand why British archae-
ologists today are sensibly turning to historians and
philosophers of history and are suggesting, like Hodder, that
archaeology is a form of long-term history, a discipline with
its own distinctive methods and techniques of analysis, but
one whose task is essentially the same as history's: the
reconstruction of the human past. Binford's continuing
insistence that "history as the model for archaeological
investigations is ... totally inappropriate" (Binford 19H6:
40 I ) simply does not understand the nature of historical
sources, particularly their inherent limitations and ambi-
guities, nor the art of historical interpretation, and nothing
that I have read which he has written suggests that his
understanding of contemporary historiography has advanced
beyond the grossest, dated caricature of history as a
particularizing, idiographic discipline. Post-processualists,
thankfully, have rejected this one-sided and now completely
outmoded perspective on the discipline with which archae-
ology forms a natural alliance, indeed extension: history.
The diversity of post-processual archaeology and its
advocacy of multiple perspectives for perceiving the past is,
generally speaking, a strength; it certainly is a welcome
development compared to the orthodoxy or dogmatic
features of the new (or) processual archaeology. A French
archaeologist with whom I worked used to delight in
parodying the structure of a typical article gracing the pages
of American Antiquity during the late sixties and the
seventies: refutation of all previous explanations for problem
X; development of an alternative, more satisfactory and
inclusive hypothesis for explaining problem X; test and
confirmation of the proposed hypothesis often without
newly excavated evidence to support the theory but never
without rigorous statistical confirmation, always demanding,
as the seventies proceeded, access to a computer. The
references cited in these articles, as my French colleague
fondly noted, were always exclusively written in English .
Hopefully, we have moved beyond such mechanical
allegiance to a formula, beyond such parochialism.
Hopefully.
How refreshing today to sec a thousand alternative
approaches to the past blooming! Since subjectivity and the
bias of the observer can never be eliminated, let us not insist
upon mathematical rigor for its own sake, but form
impressionistic, qualitative judgments; the intuitive, gut
feelings of traditional archaeologists often resulted in great
discoveries, and we should emulate them as much as the
unimaginative scientific drones who succeeded them.
A feminist archaeology? Why not? There is no question
that models of cultural evolution largely have had a male
bias; attention to gender distinctions in the prehistoric record
cannot help but yield a more representative and complete
understanding of past societies. Many contemporary social
historians (e.g. Davis 1975-76), archaeology's natural
disciplinary bedfellows, have successfully rewritten or
reexamined past societies by focusing their research on the
contribution and role of women in the societies and
historical periods of concern; clearly a similar emphasis in
prehistory is overdue. There is no debate that gender should
be recognized as "a central category of human social life,"
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that the past should be "engendered. "2 Nor is there any
argument with the extremely salutary goal of correcting
the androcentric, often largely speculative reconstructions
that constitute most attempts at piecing together the past.
As sympathetic investigators have noted, the inherent
limitations of the archaeological record have not inhibited
archaeologists from attempting to reconstruct intangible
features of social organization or ideology. The avoidance of
engendering the past on epistemological grounds, thus,
appears unfair and biased.
Or docs it? Part of the critical reading of post-processual
archaeology advanced here relates ultimately to the nature of
the archaeological record. Whether one writes of conceptual
oppositions supposedly driving significant processes of
cultural evolution (e.g., the imagined domus/agrios dis-
tinction for the domestication of Europe [Hodder 1990]) or
engenders a very deficient record that is essentially silent on
male/female tasks and roles within a particular society or
archaeological culture (like the Upper Paleolithic Magda-
lenian culture of southwestern Europe), the problem of
evidence cannot be ignored or swept aside simply by
conjuring up one plausible, "peopled" reading of this record.
Or, to use an older metaphor, sometimes the "Indians" are
not particularly visible behind the artifacts, and, when that is
the case, one should restrain or modify one's poetic, fictional
impulse to concoct a just-so story. As archaeologists, we
should not aspire to he Jean M. Auel. It is just an unfortunate
fact that a pure\y prehistoric recuru is a\\ tuu fre4ucntly silent
on this important problem of determining gender differences
and contributions. The point is not to condemn beforehand
imaginative efforts at teasing out gender distinctions in the
archaeological record; the data we collect and analyze and
the interpretations we impart to it clearly arc conditioned by
our theories and perspectives, by the questions we ask. It is
just that one should not gloss over the difficulties involved in
interrogating that often intractable material culture record.
To insist that "gender attribution" is unimportant or
inessential to the task of constructing a feminist archaeology
is to mislead. If one cannot determine whether some socially
important group labor was performed by women or men or,
more mundanely, whether this pot or this tool was made by
a male or a female, one should simply admit it and ask other
questions of these materials. Alternatively or even more, if a
given record lacks the information needed to engender the
past, the archaeologist interested in these questions should
not just spin a plausible engendered tale but should feel
compelled to gather to the best of her/his ability the data that
would allow for such reconstructions. Binford probably was
correct in his revisionist reading of Bordes' interpretation
of the Middle Paleolithic, but, unfortunately, he never
bothered to "test" his theory by collecting better information
Limits to u post-processual archaeology 15
through his own excavations. This is not a model one should
emulate.
The same epistemological difficulty must be addressed for
all the alternative readings of the past that we can envision.
Since there were nearly as many important social divisions
in the past as there are in the present, we must be open to and
explore all sorts of possibilities. An homosexuals' archae-
ology? A workers' archaeology? An archaeology for and
about the elderly? Why not? Name a cause which any fair,
liberal, open-minded folk would support, and we should
be able to devise a material culture reading of the past
addressing its concerns. This is not an unhealthy develop-
ment. An archaeology that focuses on questions pf social
inequality is appropriate and exciting, as is the nascent and
flourishing archaeological examination of plantation
complexes and slavery in the American South and else-
where) One nevertheless must keep analytically distinct the
admirable social cause from the archaeology and the
evidence that the archaeological record may or may not
contlfin. Unfortunately, not all of these new approaches to
the past will be equally amenable to archaeological analysis,
to the direct interpretation of the material culture record. If
the post-processualists triumph in their struggle against the
old fogeys and reactionaries, entirely new departments of
archaeology can be envisioned. No more job announcements
for areal, period, or even theory specialists; rather, depart-
ments will hire archaeologists trained to represent "different
interest groups" (see Hodder 1986: 149). Such a develop-
ment could bring healthy change in the hallowed halls of
academe- if it leads to the rigorous and appropriate archaeo-
logical examination of these issues. If, on the other hand, it
results only in unconstrained multiple readings of the past,
the discipline of prehistoric anthropological archaeology
will come to resemble a poor stepfellow's department of
fictional literature.
Diversity is a strength, but we cannot abandon tests of
adequacy or those approaches to the past which are more
satisfying, which may also mean more explanatory; than
others. For accounts of specific problems, this may mean
recourse to environmental-, demographic-, or technological-
based explanations. Not for every issue, not inevitably; but
when the archaeological evidence is most satisfactorily
accounted for through such an interpretation, we should not
be afraid to make it simply because it smacks of the vulgar
materialism long dominant in processual archaeology. The
problem with the metaphor of story telling is not just that
links to an external real world are severed or, in some sense,
trivialized, but also that the relativity of the exercise may be
implied: one yarn is as good as another. Here, diversity
becomes liability as any review of racist or chauvinist,
nationalist readings of the past would demonstrate. The point
/6 Philip L. Kohl
ts obvious and should not require belaboring, but,
apparently, many post-processualists in England and the
United States operate under the illusion that such dangerous,
undesirable tendencies are behind us and represent nothing
more than an unfortunate episode in the history of the
discipline. In the real world (e.g., Southeast Asia, China,
the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, continental
Europe) such "readings" are still ubiquitous and still
dangerous: the material culture record all too frequently is
used to justify nationalist aspirations and land claims. In this
light, post-processual archaeology seems absurdly aca-
dc;mic.
Diversity is a strength, but it may also result in an archae-
ology that refuses to confront significant problems, to
address unresolved difficulties in our understanding of the
past. When I am lectured to on the significance of decorated
calabashes among the llchamus of Baringo, Kenya or
subjected to an excruciatingly detailed analysis of contem-
porary Swedish and British beer cans- besides yawning and
falling asleep or turning to a really good story, i.e., a novel to
be read for pleasure, I note, as others have done before me,
that the advocated contextual critical approach seems to
offer its most telling insights on the contemporary or
ethnographically and historically documented world. The
translation of these examples to the prehistoric pan,
however, and their relevance to what should be the major
activity of most archaeologists, is either unclear or largely an
article of faith.
Being critical, I also contemplate how trivial our sense of
problem has become. The greatness of Childe consisted not
only in his consistent application of the most powerful and
generally appropriate and amenable social theory for
archaeological purposes, Marxism, but also in his concern
and focus in his major works on important prehistoric
questions ranging from the introduction and utilization of
wheeled vehicles to the spread of food-producing economics
up the Danube or the interrelations among the early riverine
civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile and Indus valleys.
What will consign some of the output oftoday's most visible
post-processualists to early obscurity is their choice of
fundamentally irrelevant, at times even ludicrous, subjects
for analysis. Phrasing this even more critically, it seems to
me that the intellectual game-playing quotient (or sophistry)
of post-processual archaeology, at this stage at any rate, is
even higher than that which characterized the early writings
of the first generation of new archaeologists. Whether
questioning the food-sharing proclivities of our Plio-
Pleistocene ancestors or sniffing around F. Bordes, drinking
his wine, and jousting with him over the interpretation of the
Mousterian, Binford, at least initially, addressed major
problems in prehistory.
Binford is also correct in insisting that there is an external
world out there, a reality, which the archaeological record-
however palely and imperfectly - reflects. His current
emphasis on the problems of interpreting that record, the
distinction between contemporary artifacts and the past
activities that produced them, middle-range theorizing, and
the like - all these mark a significantly more sober appraisal
of archaeology's ability to reconstruct the past than the
unrestrained optimistic evaluation of his and other new
archaeologists' writings of the late sixties and early
seventies. These trends have not - quite explicitly and
forcefully not - succumbed to the ultimate relativist or
subjectivist temptation: that reality is a chimera or, at least,
unknowable, and that one interpretation of the present or
past is as valid as any other. Some of the more unguarded,
hyperbolic statements of his post-processual nemesis,
Hodder, unfortunately have implied that this Pandora's box
should be opened, resulting inevitably, of course, in the
realization that Mr. von Daniken 's readings of prehistory are
as' true and meaningful as those of Mr. Hodder.
Overstated, malicious? Perhaps, but my criticism is
intended to polemicize and ruffle certain feathers. One
other significant limitation of Hodder's prescriptions for
reading the past should be noted: his vaunted idealism.
Methodological and theoretical difficulties beset the
realization of this goal. I have written about the latter before
(Kohl 1985), and, from my perspective, Hodder's more
recent writings only confirm my suspicions that, if we follow
his advice, we enter a world of cultural mystification, or
what R. Fox labels "culturology," a world in which peoples
differ simply because they differ, their cultures irreducible
Platonic essences, givens that somehow exist outside the
stream of historical experience. Let me cite Hodder
himself:
But to claim that culture is meaningfully constituted is
ultimately to claim that aspects of culture are irreducible
... The cultural relationships are not caused by anything
else outside themselves. They just are.
Moreover,
If we say that meanings are context dependent, then all
we can do is come to an understanding of each cultural
context in its own right, as a unique set of cultural dis-
positions and practices. We cannot generalize from one
culture to another. (Hodder 1986: 4, 6)
Additional comment might not be necessary. Here I have
not parodied Hodder but quoted him directly. This view not
only will not take us very far in understanding the past, but,
I would argue, is simply wrong and mystifying, treating
culture as something not produced and constantly made,
remade, and sometimes even consciously invented, by
human groups in specific historical situations for specific,
partially ascertainable reasons. Archaeologists should
consider meaningfully constituted cultural explanations for
certain phenomena, including long-term regularities often
traceable in the archaeological record; but our task only
begins, not ends, with the identification of specific cultural
patterns (sec Wolf 1984).
Methodological objections also are apparent to this call
for getting "inside" the real meaning of archaeological data.
Philosophically, R. G. Collingwood may make a more
attractive guru for understanding the human past than
C. Hempel, but the strictures Collingwood advocates are
often too difficult for historians to apply, much less archae-
ologists who always must interpret mute, meaningfully
ambiguous artifacts. This difficulty has been well stated by
A. Gilman:
The problem is that past ideas are represented as such
through symbols, which are by definition arbitrary with
respect to their referents ... For prehistory, where no
such bilinguals (as in ethno- or historical archaeology)
exist, how are the symbols in the archaeological text to be
read? (Gilman 1987: 516)
The point is not that cultural meanings, ideas, and values are
unimportant or can be treated satisfactorily as epiphenomena
to more basic material conditions. I also suppose it is useful
for us to he reminded of M. Weber's famous (if contested)
hypothesis on the significance of the Protestant for the
emergence of capitalism and to be told how unsatisfactorily
archaeologists, including (perhaps even especially)
Marxists, treat things ideological. All this is fair enough, but
it does not solve the problem of interpreting meaningfully
ambiguous material culture remains - except, of course,
through various sleights of hand, subtle introductions of
historical or ethnographic examples posing as prehistoric.
We are once more confronting a world of relativism where
my interpretation of meaning is as valid as yours.
Astoundingly enough, the optimism of some post-
processual archaeologists even exceeds that of the early new
archaeologists. It is better just to lower our expectations,
adjust to reality, and accept, to some provisional extent, the
assessments of more sober evaluations of the archaeological
record, such as those long ago advanced by C. Hawkes and
E. Leach. Knowledge of the past still can advance, and our
reconstructions of it will only ring true if we are attuned, as
sensitively as the evidence permits, to considerations of
intentions, meanings, cultural values, and the like. In other
words, a basic unifom1itarian principle must be invoked: our
understanding of the past must resemble our understanding
of the present, and a world in which meanings, cultural
l.imit.\ to a post-processtwf 17
differences, and beliefs play only an inconsequential,
secondary role is an incomprehensible world, not the one in
which I live. For me, this is the ultimate objection to the
"animalism" of the new processual archaeology: the con-
temporary world is not exclusively shaped by demographic
and environmental factors, an external reality that makes me
strongly suspicious that the past was either. If we should
consider prehistory as an extension of history, the ultimate
duree, and if we need intellectual gurus for guidance,
I suggest we read practicing historians who have reflected
soberly on their craft and the limitations of their data.
M. Bloch and E. H. Carr strike me as far better guides for
archaeologists than Collingwood.
Processual and post-processual archaeology compared:
continuities as progress or regress?
Such suggestions are perhaps too sensible, commonplace;
our critical edge is no longer sharp. Clearly, we have not
sufficiently followed Shanks and Tilley's dictum to reflect
critically "upon archaeology as a discipline in the present."
We will conclude not by contrasting, but by comparing post-
processual to processual archaeology. Certain features must
be shared, for, as noted above, when considering processual
and post-processual archaeology we are dealing with
phenomena largely of the Anglo-American world of
scholarship and research.
How should we analyze this social reality critically'!
We cannot here cast our analysis so broadly as to review all
the distinctive, relevant shared features of British and
American culture evident in the new and post-new archae-
ology. We can only briefly examine some common
characteristics internal to the discipline itself. Perhaps we
can profitably proceed as structuralists, following one
fruitful means for reading the past that Hodder advocates?
Let us try:
Processual archaeology:post-processual archaeology ::
Binford:Hodder :: materialism:idealism :: etic:emic ::
Hempei:Collingwood :: testing hypotheses:reading the
past:: Academic Press:Cambridge University Press (and
now perhaps Blackwell's) ... ad nauseam.
This approach may have limited possibilities for a truly
critical social analysis, but it has uncovered a certain
symmetry: post-processualists define themselves in opposed
relation to their processual forbears. Fashions in Anglo-
American archaeology resemble one another - however
inverted the forms they assume.
Perhaps, a literary critical analysis, a deconstruction of
the canonical texts ofprocessual and archae-
ology, will take us further? Certain shared stylistic traits can
18 Philip L. Kohl
easily be traced: the polemical, combative styles of Binford
and Hodder; the rushed, relevant, urgent prose of Watson,
Redman, and LeBlanc, on the one hand, and Shanks and
Tilley on the other; a certain style of preaching, akin to
religious proselytization, carried out with the certainty that
one has been blessed with special inspiration and insight for
predicting or reading the past; the usc of little archaeological
vignettes or examples, as opposed to extended analyses
of significant prehistoric problems, to illustrate one's
insight; a rush to publication and an admitted ability to get
published all types of articles from graduate student seminar
reports to the personal recollections of remarkably young
scholars.
Behind such shared traits, the critical analyst perceives
broader social forces at work. These range from the structure
of the publishing industry in the Anglo-American world
(dominated, of course,- by profit-making capitalist consider-
ations) through the ways in which knowledge is produced
and sold in British and American universities to the most
significant criterion of all: how academic careers are
established and lifetime sinecures obtained within these
universities. Far Jess than in countries with centralized
research archaeological institutes, like France or the former
Soviet Union, is there any real structural imperative actually
to dig. If one simply writes enough and in a polemical and,
above all, sufficiently innovative style so as to convince a
publisher that this material will sell, and be assigned for
graduate and undergraduate instruction, one has fulfilled
one's duty to the profession and to oneself. Here it is relevant
to relate an anecdote illustrating the immense structural
difference separating the praxis of continental European/
Soviet :1rchaeology from American archaeology.
Soviet archaeologists who visited Washington, D.C. in the
spring of 1986 to attend the third USA-USSR archaeological
symposium were informed on the last day of the conference
that their work was tradition-bound, tied to cultural-
historical reconstruction of the sort Americans engaged in
roughly half a century ago. Further, in the words of this
concluding critique, relative to their Soviet colleagues,
American archaeologists peered through more theoretical
"windows of observation" on the past. Rather than being
humiliated at this assessment, one Soviet archaeologist was
overheard to ask - not rhetorically, but sincerely - a
colleague who had visited the States before, "Do American
archaeologists ever excavate?"
In an otherwise intelligent article, frequently cited for
noting.Anglo-American archaeology's tendency for joining
tardily different theoretical bandwagons, Mark Leone wrote
what I have always considered the silliest and, in a sense,
most tellihg assertion of the then actually new proccssual
archaeology.
. . . the reconstruction of events in the past is nearly
complete; it offers little in the way of challenge today.
And once the outline is in hand, there will remain nothing
more than the prehistoric analogues to those studies
produced in history under the rubric, "History of the
three-tined fork." (Leone 1972: 26)
There is no reason to refute the idiocy of this statement.
Anyone who has sincerely attempted to reconstruct the
prehistoric past appreciates that what we do not know or
understand always is far more impressive than what actually
has been discovered and plausibly reconstructed. Nor is it
sufficient to say, such were the follies of youth, that, of
course, there was much naivete evident, even predictable, in
those exciting days when a new archaeological paradigm
was forged. The same follies are being enacted today in a
different guise. One important thread of continuity linking
processual to post-processual Anglo-American archaeology
is the sort of casual dismissal, bordering on disrespect or
disregard, for what should be the primary archaeological
task: adequately accounting for- that is, reconstructing and,
as best we can, explaining - an ever-expanding, never
complete material culture record. Post-processual archae-
ology's frequent lack of concern with significant prehistoric
problems illustrates this tendency and is thoroughly
consistent with Leone's mistaken belief in a completely
known prehistoric past.
This is not a call to return to the trenches, to dig for its own
sake. Despite certain irritating self-indulgent, narcissistic
features, the self-conscious theorizing and epistemological
soul-searching characteristic of both processual and post-
proccssual Anglo-American archaeology has an undcniahly
positive, stimulating side. As it results in a more satisfactory
and complete account of the past, we applaud it. The
problem is that writing little books or editing collected
volumes for Cambridge University Press's New Directions
in Archaeology series should not. substitute for, but rather
complement, more traditional archaeological activities -
including, one hopes, uncovering new data through
excavations, materials that could significantly alter our
understanding of the past. The truly critical suspicion,
of course, is that what should constitute a subsidiary,
ancillary, part-time activity has become primary. Writing
papers for symposia is what we do to qualify as pro-
fessionally active archaeologists in the Anglo-American
academic setting.
To conclude, in reflecting critically upon processual and
post-proccssual Anglo-American archaeology, we arc
reminded of the immortal Yogi Berra's immortal words:
"It's deja vu all over again." That is, it is the central thesis

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..
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..
Ill)
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lit
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of this chapter that there is far greater continuity between
processual and post-processual archaeology than the
various proponents, opponents, or commentators on these
approaches have yet admitted. We have only been able to
suggest in the sketchiest terms that a satisfactory explanation
for the various trends in Anglo-American archaeology must
incorporate a sociological analysis of the way the discipline
is structured here and in England, the way knowledge is
produced, and the purposes to which it is put.
Unfortunately, academic disciplines do not always, nor
necessarily, advance. Sometimes, they get sidetracked or
structured around false problems, as is the case for theology,
for example, or all the mismeasurements of man that Stephen
1. Gould has so brilliantly and wittily recorded. The history
of reversals, false starts, even wrong directions, often takes
decades, if not centuries, to correct. When I was asked to
write this paper in 1988 on theory in post-processual
archaeology, I thought of medieval scholastic philosophy -
the fellows who sometimes debated the number of angels
who could fit on the head of a pin - as a potential source of
fruitful analogy with contemporary Anglo-American
archaeology. It would be fun to pursue this metaphor further;
almost certain to irritate and estrange, I would love to
sharpen my pen and proceed. In all honesty, however, the
comparison would be strained, far too harsh or, in the words
of this paper, critical. Processual archaeology has unques-
tioned merits, as do its post-processual successors. Our
purpose was to focus on the negative for self-praise is all too
evidently another shared trait of the new and the post-new
archaeology.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the
"Theory in post-processual archaeology" symposium,
organized by Dr. James Chiarelli, at the Society for
American Archaeology meetings in Phoenix, AZ, April
1988.
2 The phraseology is that of M. Conkey and J. Gero, whose
paper "Building a feminist archaeology" was presented
at the symposium in Phoenix. See now Conkey and Gero
(1991 ).
3 This important observation I owe to Elizabeth Brumfiel,
who offered many trenchant criticisms of an earlier draft
of this paper. I have tried to tone down some of my
parody of the new developments in post-processual
archaeology in light of her observations, though
Limits to a post-processual archaeology 19
probably not enough for her liking, nor enough to escape
her characterization of my being an "old fogey." Mea
culpa.
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