Hodder Ian, Hutson Scott. Reading the Past

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Archaeology and history

over the long term. If we want to understand the contextual

belief systems of people at one moment in time, in order to

understand their society (or ours), how far back do we have to

go? Do the meanings change, but always in relation to what

went before, as a continuous process?

Almost by definition, those who are interested in the con-

tinuity of cultural meanings over the long term tend to be

interested in the particular. If each phase is to be explained

separately, in comparison with other societies, the unique his-

torical development is played down. But for those interested

in cultural meanings, cross-cultural generalities have to be

proved, not assumed, so emphasis is placed on understanding

the particular in its own terms. We have already seen that all

archaeology is concerned with the particular historical con-

text to some degree, and Trigger (1978) has shown that, on

the other hand, history involves generalization. But in both

archaeological and non-archaeological studies it is particular-

ist studies combined with a concern for the ‘inside’ of events

which have led to the most profound and far-reaching state-

ments on the nature of the relationships between meaning

and practice.

An important study of such relationships over the long

term is Max Weber’s (1976; first published in 1904–5) analysis

of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit

of capitalism. Although this is not an archaeological example,

we intend to discuss it at some length for reasons which will

become clear below. Weber begins with a particular prob-

lem to which he gives a particular answer. His question is

‘why does capitalism emerge in western Europe and not in

other parts of the world?’ Some form of capitalism existed,

he suggests, in China, India, Babylon, but the particular ethos

or spirit found in Europe, which laid the basis for the mod-

ern capitalist ethic, was lacking. Weber identifies this ethic

as ‘one’s duty in a calling’, whatever that profession might

be. Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling

could be linked to other specific and peculiar forms of ratio-

nalism found in Western culture, as seen in music, law and

administration as well as in the economic system.

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Weber suggests that the distinctive character of Western

capitalism is linked to (though not in any direct sense caused

by) the rise of various forms of ascetic Protestantism, espe-

cially Calvinism. Data are quoted which show that business

leaders, owners of capital and skilled and technical grades of

labour are overwhelmingly Protestant in western European

countries of mixed religious composition. Catholic tradition-

alism was authoritarian and did not sanction the pursuit of

gain at the expense of others; its greater ‘other-worldliness’ in-

hibited capitalist enterprise. Calvinism, however, sanctioned

‘this-worldly’ asceticism. Individuals were born into an ap-

parently unalterable order of things, and predestination led a

person to ‘do the works of him who sent him, as long as it is

yet day’ (Weber 1976, p. 156).

In his analysis Weber is specifically arguing against Marxist

historical materialism in which the forces and relations of

production are primary. Not that he ignores such factors or

even thinks they are unimportant, but he wishes to give equal

weight to an idealist notion, that an historically specific set

of ideas influences the way people organize their society and

economy. His concern is to examine the subjective meaning-

complex of action and to emphasize that ‘rationality’ is sub-

jective, in relation to particular ‘ends’ or ‘givens’. He suggests

that every artifact can be understood only in terms of the

meaning which its production and use have had or will have

for human action.

The Protestant asceticism is seen as developing over long

stretches of time, and as being regenerated through encultur-

ation so that it becomes taken for granted. Ultimately the

formation of rational jurisprudence inherited from Roman

law played a role in the development of a specific Western

type of rationalism. The origins of the capitalist spirit can

be traced back to a time previous to the advent of capitalism

(p. 54), and the Puritan emphasis on continuous bodily or

mental labour is partly derived from the fact that ‘labour

is...an approved ascetic technique, as it always has been in

the Western Church, in sharp contrast not only to the Orient

but to almost all monastic rules the world over’ (p. 163).

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But Weber does not see this set of ideas developing on

its own. Rather, the material and the ideal are integrated, so

that to explain each action or social product it is necessary

to consider both the historical context of subjective mean-

ings and the practice of daily life. The religious ideas change

partly through debate amongst religious leaders, but also in

relation to, but not dominated by, the totality of social con-

ditions, especially economic ones (p. 183). Richard Baxter, a

writer on Puritan ethics, ‘continually adjusted to the prac-

tical experiences of his own ministerial activity’ so that his

dogma changed in relation to practical activity (p. 156). Weber

continually notes the difference between philosophers and

religious ideals versus ‘the layman’, ‘the practical’, and ‘the

average’. Under Calvinism ‘The moral conduct of the average

man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic char-

acter [that it had in Catholicism] and subected to a consistent

method for conduct as a whole’ (p. 117).

The spirit of capitalism was born from the spirit of

Christian asceticism. The dogma went into everyday life,

began to dominate wordly morality, and played its part in

building the modern economic order. However, the practical

consequences may be unintended. Thus the religious reform-

ers of Calvinism and other Puritan sects were concerned to

save souls; the pursuit of worldly goods was not an end in

itself. The purely religious motives had cultural and social

consequences which were unforeseen and even unwished for

(pp. 89–90). The results were often far-removed from and

even in contradiction to all that the religious reformers were

trying to attain.

We see, then, in Weber’s account, the dialectical relation-

ships between theory and practice, between idea and mate-

rial, and the same emphases on social action (purposeful be-

haviour), unintended consequences and contradictions that

were identified in preceding chapters. Here however, because

a long historical context is provided, the equal contribution

of ideals and values is identified. In the short term, in the

instant of action, Bourdieu’s habitus appears dominated by

the conditions of existence, but over the long term, and in

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Reading the past

contrast with other historical sequences, the social and eco-

nomic conditions are themselves seen to be generated within

sets of cultural meanings.

Through time, Weber records, the relative dominance of

religious ideas and the social economy varies. Initially, the as-

cetic tendency of Puritanism led to social action and allowed

the further development of an economic system, forms of

which already had been in existence. Certain aspects of cap-

italist business organization are considerably older than the

Reformation (p. 91), but it was the religious changes which

allowed the new economic order to develop. In addition,

Puritanism was ‘anti-authoritarian’, leading to fanatical oppo-

sition of the Puritans to the ordinances of the British monarch

(p. 167).

So, at first, ‘the Puritan wanted to work in a calling’, and

religion directed the capitalist enterprise, but now ‘we are

forced to do so’ (p. 181). Through time the rational order

became bound to the technical and economic conditions of

machine production. Today these material conditions ‘deter-

mine the lives of all the individuals who are born into the

mechanism’ (p. 181), and the religious basis has been lost.

We have discussed Weber’s account at some length because

his work contains many of the aspects of historical interpreta-

tion for which this book searches. There is a full consideration

of contextual meanings, an account of how these meanings

develop and can be understood in their own historical terms,

and the location of the individual in society. Weber argues

against functionally deterministic relationships, and sees indi-

vidual action as the building block of social totalities. The so-

cial whole is full of tensions, divisions, and contradictions, and

individuals variously interpret the world(s) in which they live.

Despite the emphases on the contextual and specific, Weber

does not lapse into sceptical relativism and particularism – he

thinks that it is possible to understand other people’s subjec-

tivity. One need not have been Caesar in order to understand

Caesar. The mind can grasp other contexts and other mean-

ings, as long as it pieces together the ‘spirit’ of other times

from individual segments of historical reality rather than

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imposing the formula from outside (p. 47). Equally, having

carried out such detailed interpretation, generalization is pos-

sible both within historical contexts and between them.

As Giddens (1976) points out, much of Weber’s data and

interpretation have since been questioned. It has not been our

concern here to demonstrate the validity of Weber’s account,

but to use the example to show how consideration of histori-

cal meanings, over the long term and in contrast to historical

developments in other parts of the world, points to the inad-

equacy of materialist and objectivist accounts and emphasizes

the importance of the subjective and particular.

While Weber’s account already provides some indication

of the relationship between idea and practice, it is perhaps

Sahlins (1981) who provides the clearest example of the way

in which the types of approaches outlined by Bourdieu and

Giddens (see chapter 5) can be applied to the long term. In

Hawaii, Sahlins recognizes sets of preconceptions and ideas

which are part of action. For example, mana is a creative

force that renders visible the invisible, that gives meaning to

goodness and godliness. The divine mana of chiefs is manifest

in their brilliance, their shining, like the sun. On the daily

level, such notions orientate actions, as habitus, but they are

changed in practice, in ‘structures of the conjuncture’. No-

one can ever know exactly how a particular event or meeting

will be played out in practice. The intended and unintended

consequences of action lead to reformulation of the habitus

and of the social structure.

More clearly, at moments of culture contact, as when Cook

came to Hawaii, two opposing habitus come into conflict in

practice and radical change may ensue. Sahlins shows how,

on their arrival in Hawaii, Cook and the Europeans were

perceived within traditional frameworks, were seen to have

mana. But in the playing out of practical scenes from differ-

ent viewpoints (Hawaiian and European), unintended conse-

quences rebounded back on these perceptions, causing con-

tradictions and conflict. Ultimately Cook was killed as part

of these processes, and mana became transferred to all things

British, leading to social reordering within Hawaii.

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There is much in this example which relates to Weber’s ac-

counts, but the more detailed work and greater awareness of

the problem of the relationship between structure and prac-

tice leads to a fuller understanding of how society and econ-

omy are embedded within subjective meanings but are yet

able to act back and change those meanings.

The variation between the work of Weber and Sahlins can

be paralleled in the Annales school, which has now had a

direct impact on archaeology (see Iannone 2002; Kirch 1992;

Last 1995; and articles in Bintliff 1991, Hodder 1987b, and

Knapp 1992a). Fernand Braudel, the successor of Bloch and

Febvre, categorised historical processes as occurring on three

different time scales: long, medium and short. The Annales

approach is quite relevant to archaeology because archaeology

can document change in all three scales and note dynamic

interactions between them.

Braudel’s first scale of process occurs over the longue dur´ee

and encompasses slowly changing structures, such as men-

talit´es, and long-term continuities, such as geography. Many

archaeologists have been successful in documenting and trac-

ing persistent, peculiar cultural values. Lechtman’s study of

Andean metallurgy provides an excellent example. Lechtman

(1984) notes that the lack of a ‘Bronze Age’ and an ‘Iron Age’

in New World prehistory may have resulted from the im-

portance of metals in warfare, transport and agriculture in

Europe, whereas in the Andes, for example, metals had a more

symbolic role in both secular and religious spheres of life.

Lechtman is thus interested in the specificity of a cultural

sequence in the New World, and she is drawn to a particular

set of cultural values which centre around the ritual and po-

litical significance of the colours gold and silver. Bronze was

a late development in the Andes – other metals were used to

produce the desired colours. However, another set of cultural

values prevented the Andean metallurgists from adding the

gold and silver colours to the surface of metal items. A tech-

nically highly complex method was developed so that what

was visible as colour on the outside of an object derived from

the inside. ‘The basis of Andean enrichment systems is the

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Archaeology and history

incorporation of the essential ingredient – the gold or the

silver – into the very body of the object. The essence of the

object, that which appears superficially to be true of it, must

also be inside it’ (ibid., p. 30).

Lechtman supports this argument by reference to cloth

production, which has the same ‘structure’ as the metal work-

ing (the design is incorporated into the cloth), and she shows

the way in which the cultural values had ideological func-

tions in legitimating domination within the Inca state. But

the particular form of that ideology, and of the clothwork-

ing, and the particular technical process of electrochemical

replacement and depletion, can only be understood in their

own terms, related to practice but not reducible to it. Ulti-

mately we will only be able to ‘explain’ the system of cultural

values by going back in time, in an infinite regress.

Others (for example Coe 1978) have also been concerned to

explore the particularity of New World culture as opposed to

the Old World. Flannery and Marcus (1983) have argued, link-

ing archaeological and linguistic studies, that Meso-American

cultures over thousands of years have adapted to local condi-

tions and undergone radical social change via a structured set

of meanings, including the division of the world into four,

colour-coded quarters and a ‘spirit’ termed pe. Although there

is little attempt in their study to examine how structure, mean-

ing and event are integrated, it is important that the ideational

realm is shown in this example to have long-term influence.

Furthermore, the ideational does not cause, or obstruct, or

become reduced to the effect of, practical action; rather it is

seen as the medium for action.

Within Old World archaeology, the vista has at times

opened up, of working backwards over the long term to find

the common cultural core from which European societies

and cultures developed – this has been the concern of lin-

guists and archaeologists involved with the Indo-European

problem. Childe, for example, envisioned his purpose in writ-

ing The Dawn of European Civilization (first edition 1925)

to be the understanding of the particular nature of Euro-

pean culture and the identification of the origin of that spirit

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of independence and inventiveness that led to the indus-

trial revolution. But we can also incorporate a more detailed

scale of analysis, trying to see how the different regions of

Europe have been formed, divided and diffused. Christopher

Hawkes, for example, has on a number of occasions noted

the ‘Western inhibition of furnished burial – or of burial al-

together’ (Hawkes 1972, p. 110) which leads to lack of status

differentiation being expressed in indigenous burial customs

in England (see also 1972, p. 113; 1976, p. 4). Such attitudes,

or at least descriptions of behaviour, in relation to burial,

are seen as continuing over the long term, and yet Hawkes

allows for cumulative change, as in his discussion of ‘cumula-

tive Celticity’ (1976) in which the Celtic style is traced back

to its origins in the Bronze Age. It was in 1954 that Hawkes

suggested a regional approach in which archaeologists used

an historical method of working backwards through cultural

sequences to find ‘things common to all men as a species, in-

herent in their culture-capacity from the start’ (1954, p. 167).

‘It works as one peels onions; and so it reaches the final ques-

tion, has the onion in fact got a central nucleus at all or is it

just all peel?’ (ibid., p. 168).

Hawkes’ question about the onion touches on profound

issues of time and politics. With regard to time, we are in-

clined to answer that the onion is all peel. By searching for

origins and common beginnings, Childe and Hawkes imply

that the onion of prehistory has a core; that there are places

where time starts and from which beginnings emerge. If we

think about time ‘from the inside’ – in other words, from

the perspective of a living, embodied actor – we soon realise

that the temporal experience of life is continuous. Certainly

biographies contain critical events, and certainly people some-

times conceive of their lives as narratives with distinct stages

or phases, but acknowledging the unevenness of lived time

does not justify the use of a temporal scheme in which time

is separate from life and can therefore be measured in equiva-

lent units and divided any which way. Time is not an empty

container, existing independent of life; it is created by people.

Thus, for ‘Europeanness’ to have an origin, the origin must

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occur in a peopled time, which would seem absurd: can we

imagine a point in time when a nondescript person becomes

a European? The basic idea is that time is not so easily split

into stages, and without clean breaks in time, we cannot hope

to find clean origins. For this reason it may be preferable to

conceive of time not as a series of stages or steps but as a flow –

a stream (Hodder 1987b, p. 2).

With regard to politics, origins research has multiple

present-day consequences. One consequence is seen in the

practice of archaeology itself. Archaeologists who research

origins – of the state, for example – can give their work the

broadest scope of relevance and the most opportunities for

citation. Authors who write on later developments of the

state, regardless of geographic region, will need to cite the ori-

gins research to help contextualise their contribution (Wobst

and Keene 1983). Thus, writers who ‘get in early’ by affix-

ing their name to the origin of a topic can colonise the topic

as a whole, and, much like a tax, collect citations from the

widest possible network. More importantly, the search for

origins presumes essentialism (Conkey with Williams 1991),

as if there were an essence of Europe waiting to be exposed

in all Europeans once the superficial layers of difference have

been peeled away. When applied to humans, the notion of

essence justifies a Platonic scheme of ideal types, which has

motivated and continues to motivate genocidal episodes of

racism, nationalism and ethnic cleansing.

Few archaeologists have attempted to use the great ad-

vantage of their data – that it covers long time spans – to

contribute to questions about the flows of time over the

long term. Detailed historical studies of regional sequences

which involve interpretation of subjective meaning are few

and far between. We have already discussed (p. 29) the in-

teresting work of Flannery and Marcus (1976; 1983), while

Isbell (1976) has identified a 3000-year continuity in settle-

ment structure in the South American Andes, despite major

discontinuities in social and economic systems. Other im-

portant work of this type includes W. Davis’ (1982) account

of the principles or ‘canon’ of art identifiable throughout

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Reading the past

Egyptian history, Hall’s (1977) identification of principles of

meaning lying behind Hopewellian processes of economic

and political change and interaction, Bradley’s (1990) account

of long-term and widespread continuities in hoards and vo-

tive deposits in North and North-West Europe. In Europe,

many archaeologists are aware of remarkable patterns of con-

tinuity which link the distant past to the present, particularly

in Scandinavia, but few have made such questions the focus

of research.

Equally, diffusion is now little studied as a component of

cultural development. With diffusion decried as descriptive,

processual archaeologists placed the emphasis on local adap-

tive sequences. Yet within the framework of the questions

being asked in this volume, diffusion does have explanatory

power. It can help to explain the particular cultural matrix.

Objects or styles derived from other groups are given mean-

ing in their new context, but these new meanings may be

based on, and may bring with them, meanings from the old.

The new traits are selected and are placed within the existing

system, changing it. The aim should be less to classify differ-

ent types of diffusion (Clarke 1968), than to see, for example,

stimulus diffusion as an active social process working on and

within systems of meanings which develop over the long term

(cf. Kehoe 1979).

There is a danger that archaeologists will be content with

vague continuities in cultural ethics, falling back on the ex-

cuse of their fragmentary data without adequate consideration

of how structured internal meanings are actively involved

in society and in social change, and how they come to be

changed themselves. Braudel’s second and third time scales

help the historian focus on change. The second scale – the

medium term or moyenne dur´ee – encompasses economic cy-

cles, demographic trend and changes in socio-political struc-

tures. Change in such cycles and trends, called conjunctural

history, can be observed within decades or over many cen-

turies. The third scale is the shortest, dealing with individual

events in the lives of men and women. Braudel notoriously

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