Hodder Ian, Hutson Scott. Reading the Past

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Embodied archaeology

and Bender (1993, p. 275), Br

uck (2001, p. 660) interprets

the variability of deposits in the ditches at Mount Pleasant,

Dorset, as a ‘cacophony of voices’, each telling a different tale,

not necessarily orchestrated by a dominant power.

The limits of the body

uck’s account of Mount Pleasant depends on the capability

of distinguishing the individual activities that contribute to

the formation of each deposit. Discerning individual actions

and lives located in particular times and places is of utmost

importance because individual negotiations are central to un-

derstanding how actors draw upon long-term structures in

the practices of daily life (Hodder 1999, pp. 136–7; Meskell

1998a). However, the same individual subject can take on dif-

ferent identities (Thomas 1996, p. 180) and an individual is

itself a larger whole constructed from individual events. We

cannot assume that the multiple acts and identities of a sub-

ject will always amount to ‘an individual’ in the sense of a

distinctive pattern of behaviour associated with a single body

(Hodder 2000, p. 25). Finally if places, things and people mu-

tually bring each other into being, how can we detach the

individual from these places and things?

Thus, we come across a paradox in the definition of indi-

vidual. In previous editions of this book, the word ‘indivi-

dual’ was used abundantly and uncritically as a synonym for

agency. We now recognise the complexity of the individual

and the unhappy sense of atomisation that the word implies.

In an attempt to clarify our stance on the individual, we in-

clude in this chapter a closer look at the silhouette of the self.

Are there boundaries to the body, and if so, where are

they? Piaget and Lacan both thought that when born, humans

have no sense of limits: the self incorporates the whole world.

Piaget presumed that infants could only see in two dimensions

because the retina is two-dimensional. Three-dimensional vi-

sion would have to be learned. Until infants learn this (which,

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according to Piaget, happens at about 18 months when chil-

dren locomote independently), they have no depth percep-

tion, which means that there is no distance between the self

and the world (Butterworth 1995, p. 90). This situation is

called ‘adualism’. Lacan argues that before children learn lan-

guage – before they come under the sway of symbols – their

bodies are without zones, subdivisions or differentiations.

The body and the universe are integrated into a smooth, seam-

less surface. When the body is socialised, the symbolic order

cuts this surface, separating the body from the other, and

localising pleasures into specific zones (Fink 1995, p. 25). In

that they are subject to direct empirical refutation, Piaget’s

ideas have been most roundly dismissed. A variety of obser-

vations show that even at birth, and perhaps before, infants

are able to differentiate themselves from the surrounding en-

vironment (Butterworth 1995; Russell 1995). For example,

newborns distinguish their own cries from those of others.

Despite their critique of adualism, ecological psychologists

still stress that the body is formed in dialogue with other

things. Infants need a parent to be able to sit upright, and

the floor to stand erect. ‘The dialogical self exists from the

outset in the inherently relational information available to

perception’ (Butterworth 1995, p. 102). Dialogical notions of

self and body receive support from a variety of positions.

Within psychoanalytic theory, object relational theorists as-

sert that ‘it is only through an intimate relationship with

primary caretakers...that a sense of difference between self

and others is at all possible’ (Elliott 1994, p. 64). From a

very different stance, Bourdieu (1977, p. 11) uses dialogical

metaphors to describe social action: ‘In dog fights, as in the

fighting of children or boxers, each move triggers off a coun-

termove, every stance of the body becomes a sign pregnant

with a meaning that the opponent has to grasp while it is

still incipient.’ In encounters with other people, we semi-

consciously read the way in which the other person carries

herself. We communicate our own sense of footing in relation

to the other through postures (of deference, authority, etc.).

To converse successfully with a person we must coordinate

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ourselves through continuous though non-reflexive adjust-

ments: the listener periodically nods the head, mumbles

things like ‘hum’, or ‘uh huh’, and senses the appropriate mo-

ment to interject. Charles Taylor (1999) calls these sorts of dia-

logical interactions ‘harmonising’. These examples show how

we harmonise bodily with our surroundings and with other

people. They also question the subject–object dichotomy, in

which the reasoning mind is said to be completely detached

from its surroundings.

In ethnography, the relational or sociocentric view sees the

self as decentred; as stretched along various interpersonal rela-

tionships. Maurice Leenhart (1979 [1947]) produced a classic

statement of the relational self in Do Kamo, his ethnography

of the Canaque of New Caledonia. Amongst the Canaques,

the kamo or ‘personage’ is poorly delineated: ‘He is unaware

of his body which is his only support. He knows himself only

by the relationships he maintains with others. He exists only

insofar as he acts his role in the course of his relationships.

He is situated only with respect to them. If we try to draw

this, we cannot use a dot marked “self” ’ (p. 153; cf. Strathern

1996, p. 89).

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have presented a paradigm of embodi-

ment (Csordas 1990) that overcomes the traditional under-

standing of agents as individualised actors disconnected from

the worldly contexts and lived experiences that bring them

into being. In doing so we have challenged dichotomies be-

tween self and other and mind and body. Where does this

take us in archaeology? Br

uck (2001, p. 654) has emphasised

the sociocentric nature of the self while Thomas (1996, p. 86)

has emphasised the shifting boundaries of the physical body: a

hammerstone can be seen as an extension of the arm. Mithen’s

(1998b, pp. 181–4) discussions of material culture come pecu-

liarly close to what Haraway (1991) would call the cybor-

gic nature of modern humans. In the Upper Palaeolithic, for

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example, humans use material culture to extend the mind, ex-

panding the possibilities of information storage. An embod-

ied archaeology, however, would not treat material culture

merely as a tool wielded by a module of the mind, as Mithen

does. Rather, it would emphasise that the self is continually

forged and reforged through its relations to material culture.

This recalls the discussion in the previous chapter of how

objects gain agency through their relation to human actors.

Because of the dependence of self and embodiment on the

physical world, archaeologists are well situated to explore

changing embodiment through time – to write histories and

prehistories of the body. Where this has been most successful,

as in the account of private lives in ancient Egypt (Meskell

2002), there is a full linking of general theories about em-

bodiment, and a detailed reconstruction of the diverse daily

practices in which different individuals participated. There

is a recognition of the need to discuss unconscious practical

engagement with the world. But in Meskell’s account there is

also a careful attempt to explore conscious and unconscious

understandings of people and objects. We have noted at a

number of points in this chapter that embodiment does not

simply come about through bodies interacting with objects

and persons. How we interact with people (such as moth-

ers) or objects (such as the landscape, the house) depends on

historical circumstances and the values given to mothers and

landscapes. Our embodiment is orientated – we engage with

the world in a particular way, which endures or changes his-

torically. It is the particular historical orientation that con-

tributes to the way the world, and ourselves, have meaning.

We have already come a long way in our search for adequate

theories of agency and meaning, and accounts of embodiment

are clearly central. But we have paid less attention so far to

the way in which we as historians and prehistorians interpret

and make sense of past meanings in the present. This will be

the task of the following chapters.

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7 Archaeology and history

In this chapter it will be argued that archaeology should re-

capture its traditional links with history (Deetz 1988; Young

1988; Bintliff 1991; Hodder 1987; 1990a; Knapp 1992; Morris

1999). Unfortunately the term ‘history’ is used with a variety

of different meanings by different people, and it is first nec-

essary to establish what we do and do not mean by the word

here. We do not mean the explanation of change by reference

to antecedent events; simply to describe a series of events

leading up to a particular moment in time is a travesty of the

historical method. Neither do we mean that phase n is depen-

dent on phase n-1. Many types of archaeology involve such

a dimension. Thus many social evolutionary theories expect

some dependence in the moves between bands, tribes, chief-

doms or states, or in the adoption of agriculture (Woodburn

1980). In the application of Darwinian-type arguments, the

selection of a new social form is constrained by the existing

‘gene-pool’. In systems theory the ‘trajectory’ of a system is

dependent on prior conditions and system states. Each trajec-

tory may be historically unique and specific in content, but

general laws of system functioning can be applied. Within

Marxism the resolution of conflict and contradiction is emer-

gent in the pre-existing system, as part of the dialectical pro-

cess of history.

History, in all such work, involves a particularist dimen-

sion, but it also involves explaining the move from phase n-1

to n according to a set of universal rules. As such, the his-

torian remains on the outside of events, as a natural scientist

records experimental data. But history in the sense intended

here involves also getting at the inside of events, at the inten-

tions and concepts through which the subjectivities of actors

are constituted. The historian talks of ‘actions’ as well as be-

haviour, movements and events. Collingwood (1946, p. 213)

provides an example. Historians do not just record that Caesar

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crossed a river called the Rubicon on a certain date – they talk

of Caesar’s defiance of Republican law.

This book began with the question, how do we get at past

cultural meanings? We have gone to and from materialism

and back again. Throughout, the core of the reconstructions

attempted within any ‘ism’ has been seen to be based on

weakly developed arguments about cultural meaning. Within

the materialist systemic-processual approach, it was assumed

that, for example, burial is for social display, so that in con-

ditions of challenged norms of succession burials will reflect

status rivalry (p. 28–9). To interpret the function of burials in

this way we must make assumptions about what they meant

to the people at the time. Equally, a head-dress can only mark

social affiliation (p. 28–9) if it is perceived by those involved to

have had meaning in these terms. It might be counter-argued

that, whatever the artifacts meant, they still had the suggested

functions. Yet it is difficult to see how an artifact can have a

social function (such as burial for social display) if the meaning

is not appropriate to the function (as when death or material

accumulation comes to be seen as ‘dirty’, ‘uncultured’).

As a result of this inadequate approach to meaning we

turned in chapter 3 to structuralism, but here it was found

that meaning content was often imposed without care. Units

of analysis were defined a priori, symbols were given mean-

ings (male or female, for example), the symbols were assumed

to function very simplistically according to Saussure’s semi-

ology (cf. semiotics, chapter 3), and assymetries were inter-

preted (as ‘organic’, for example). The structuralist method

was non-historical in the sense that symbolic structures were

assumed to be timeless: little attention was paid to how

such structures maintained their stability, what could cause

them to change, and what generated them in the first place.

Furthermore, this method provided few guidelines as to how

one might reconstruct the subjective meanings in which the

structures are built.

So we returned to materialism. In chapter 4 it was shown

that in most Marxist analyses of material culture it is again

the functions that are examined (to mask social reality etc.)

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rather than the meaning content. In other words, meaning

content is subsumed under ideology, and too often the func-

tion of the ideology (as an instrument of domination) is given

more attention than the content of the ideology. A second

problem with traditional Marxist approaches in archaeology

is that individual actors are too often presumed to be duped

by dominant ideologies. In chapter 5 we showed how the

development of practice theory and the incorporation of no-

tions of resistance and agency into archaeological theory and

practice have remedied this shortcoming. Nevertheless, bet-

ter accounts of social strategy, intentionality and the logic

of practice provide a necessary but not sufficient account of

meaning. As we explain in this chapter, meaning often resides

in structures of the long term, what we might call ‘mentalit

es’.

In this case, where the vitality of meaning exceeds the time

scale of an individual life, we require an account of the repro-

duction of meaning over longer historical periods.

Chapter 6 addressed the agent as a subject: subject of the

world and subject to the world through the body. The con-

sideration of embodiment provided models of how meaning

can be experienced, thus filling in one of the key gaps in struc-

turalism. Yet, like practice theories, theories of subjectivity

and embodiment must be supplemented by an approach that

can account for the fact that the formation and re-formation

of meaning occurs on a time scale that exceeds the life of any

one body.

Even within approaches not discussed in this book, subjec-

tive meanings are assumed in the minds of people long dead.

For example, the economy of a prehistoric site is often recon-

structed on the basis of bone residues (chapter 1, p. 15). But to

assume that bones discarded on a settlement bear any relation

to the economy is to make assumptions about how people

perceived animals, bones, discard etc. In many societies com-

plex social meanings are attached to domestic animals, bones

and dirt. To assume that the bones are not transformed cul-

turally is to assume that ‘they’ had attitudes not so dissimilar

to ‘ours’. As a further example, if we say that the population

at a certain site was probably about ‘x’, there is hidden in

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this statement a reconstruction of meanings in the minds of

people long dead. Since we cannot directly ‘see’ the popula-

tion in the past, we have to infer it from, for example, set-

tlement space. Of course we can bolster our argument with

cross-cultural evidence. But even if we could show that all

societies today have a predictable relationship between popu-

lation size and settlement area (which we cannot – see Hodder

1982d), to use such information to interpret the past is still

to make assumptions about peoples’ attitudes to space in that

particular historical context. How much space individuals or

groups need or think they need for certain activities is, at

least partly, a question of symbolism, meaning and intention.

As Collingwood (1939, p. 133) and Taylor (1948) noted, it is

almost impossible even to describe archaeological data with-

out some interpretative terms implying purpose, like ‘wall’,

‘pottery’, ‘implement’, ‘hearth’. While Neolithic polished

stone axes were thought to be thunderbolts their utilitarian

functions (to cut down Neolithic trees) could not be eluci-

dated by mere analysis. It is only when we make assumptions

about the subjective meanings in the minds of people long

dead that we can begin to do archaeology.

Throughout the approaches described in this book there

has been a refusal to face this unhappy situation directly.

Archaeologists have preferred to avoid the problem, and have

grasped the comfort of empirical science, a cracked and bro-

ken fac¸ade. We must now face the subjectivity of meaning

directly.

We take it to be the role of history to grasp the meaning of

human action (see also Morris 1999, p. 13). Our stance builds

from positions taken by a series of prominent 20th-century

historians. In 1929, Marc Bloch stated that ‘One could not

pretend to explain an institution if one did not link it to the

great intellectual, emotional, mystical currents of the con-

temporaneous mentalit´es . . . This interpretation of the facets

of social organization from the inside will be the principle of

my teaching, just as it is of my own work’ (cited in Burgi

ere

1982, p. 430). In the same year, Bloch and Lucian Febvre

founded the journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale,

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from which the renowned French Annales school of history

takes its name. Subsequent generations of Annales historians

shared Bloch’s concern for documenting mentalit´es, which

can be defined as contextual belief systems expressed in collec-

tive representations (myths, symbols), whose history is one of

subconscious growth (Bintliff 1991, p. 11), or perhaps simply

as ideology and symbolism within a cultural context (Knapp

1992b, p. 8). Like Bloch, Collingwood was also interested in

‘the inside’ of events. In talking about mentalit´es and the inside

of events, we do not mean to imply that we can approach the

subjective meanings which might have been expressed if we

could talk to people in the past. Like the habitus, the subjec-

tive meanings that concern us are not necessarily conscious

and would not necessarily come out in conversation. Further-

more a barrage of authors, from Bourdieu to Foucault, have

taught us that conscious representations (what people say) are

only part of the story. Our aim is to interpret the subjective

meanings in the sense of the structuring concepts and ideas

that were used to organise the recurrent material practices of

groups. These social and public ideas were used to constitute

subjectivities and they can be examined to see how they were

transformed historically through material and social practices

and through individual action and interpretation.

Today, a concern for the inside of events continues in

the field of cultural history (Morris 1999). Here, ‘historians

move...from being “fact grubbers” to being “mind readers” ’

(p. 13). Mentalit´es and mind reading would appear to link his-

tory with idealism. By idealism, we do not mean a view that

the material world does not exist: rather, the term as defined

earlier (p. 20) suggests that the material world is as it is per-

ceived. It has to be perceived before it can be acted on. Though

mind reading implies getting inside the heads of past actors,

we believe that meaning is public and social (Geertz 1973).

Therefore to get at a mentalit´e or the inside of events does

not mean getting inside someone’s head or some other form

of radical empathy.

Cultural historians like R. Chartier and Gareth Stedman

Jones (cited in Morris 1999, p. 12) maintain that all history is

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at least partly idealist. Earlier historians believed that it was

possible to use documents to distinguish how people in the

past saw their world from how that world really was, and,

in a silently Marxist fashion, to use the ‘real’ order of things

as a basis for explaining subjective understandings of them.

More recently, cultural historians maintain that we cannot

move from documents that present the world to how the

world really was because the documents themselves are re-

presentations. On the other hand, cultural historians recog-

nise that re-presentations of the economy, for example, do

not determine the economy. Though a historian learns about

the economy only through language and discourse, economic

processes are not prescribed by discourse alone. For this and

other reasons, historical idealism, like its close kin subjec-

tivism, cannot stand alone (see also Bourdieu 1990).

There are two aspects of history that we want to discuss in

this chapter. First, we wish to look at ways in which subjec-

tive meanings are regenerated over the long term in relation

to practice. Second, Collingwood’s historical method will be

critically examined.

History of the long term

The usual way in which archaeologists discuss developments

over long spans of time is to divide up their data into phases

and to discuss the reasons for change between the phases.

History is thus a discontinuous process, whether the approach

being followed is culture-historical (when the discontinu-

ities are invasions and so on), processual (systemic, adaptive

change) or Marxist (change from contradiction and crisis). As

we have seen (p. 62), structuralism does not cope well with

change.

While attempts have been made within these approaches

to blur the edges between phases (see for example Higgs and

Jarman 1969), there is little notion of history as a continuous

process, and few archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct

the way in which contextual meanings are related to practice

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