Hodder Ian, Hutson Scott. Reading the Past

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Archaeology and history

design; where stone was used, the construction was sim-

ple and inexpensive. Even the official central buildings in

the forts were not uniformly of stone, and the barracks

were of the cheapest, wooden hutments which in some

cases had thatched roofs.

From this evidence, Collingwood moves to an interpreta-

tion of purpose. ‘Both in construction and in organization,

then, the Antonine Wall bears the marks of a deliberate ef-

fort after cheapness, at the cost of a serious decrease in effi-

ciency’ (ibid., p. 142). This hypothesis is further supported by

showing that the wall is not well-sited strategically, and by

contrasting the Antonine Wall with a new frontier-line built

in Germany. ‘These various features of the Antonine Wall,

when considered together, seem less like a series of oversights

than parts of a deliberate policy, based on the assumption that

a powerful frontier-work on that line was not needed’ (ibid.,

p. 143).

Collingwood goes on in this study to suggest why a wall

of this type might have been built in this place at this particu-

lar time, relating his argument to further evidence about the

tribes and settlements in northern Britain. But for our pur-

poses, enough has been described to show the way in which,

by asking and trying to answer a series of questions in rela-

tion to detailed contextual information, a particular, one-off,

interpretation of subjective intent can be provided which is

plausible and which can be argued through in relation to the

evidence.

Collingwood’s reconstruction relies to some extent on

written records about the nature of the Roman army, and so

it may be useful to turn to a wholly prehistoric wall, that con-

structed around the early Iron Age settlement in Germany,

the Heuneberg. Merriman (1987) has shown how this wall

can be seen to have been built in order to gain prestige. In

answer to the question, ‘why was this wall built?’, archaeol-

ogists have noted the use of mud-bricks equivalent in style to

mud-bricks used in the Mediterranean. They also note that

in the north European cultural context such walls do not

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exist historically, and that climatically the conditions are un-

suitable. Other contextual information includes the exchange

of prestige items between the Mediterranean and this part of

Europe, the internal complexity of the Heuneberg centre and

the associated rich burial tumuli. All in all, the insight that

this particular wall was intended more for prestige, to provide

local standing, than for defence, seems plausible.

In their analysis of the Zapotec Cosmos in Formative

Oaxaca, Flannery and Marcus (1976) demonstrate that highly

symbolic representations on pottery can be traced to natural-

istic versions, and can thus be given meaning as fire serpents

and were-jaguars. Similarly, it has been argued (Hodder 1984a)

that many of the Neolithic tombs of western Europe mean

houses. The argument is supported by noting eight points of

formal similarity between the long tombs and contemporary

long houses in central Europe. The meaning of the tombs

as houses is then set within an appropriate social context. In

an analysis of Neolithic axe exchange in Britain (Hodder and

Lane 1982), it was argued that the axes had a subjective sig-

nificance beyond their utilitarian value because they were the

only artifact type depicted in tombs; they were often placed

in ritual contexts, as were symbolic chalk replicas.

None of the above examples is in any way remarkable –

they are simply routine archaeology – but that this is ar-

chaeology is important. In the above examples analogy with

ethnographic data may have influenced the choice of ques-

tions, the historical imagination and the theories espoused,

but in all cases the main aim has been to grasp the subjectiv-

ity of past contexts, and to understand the data themselves,

in their own terms.

Conclusion and critique

So archaeology needs to go back to go forward. In the course

of this chapter it has been found necessary to return to the pre-

New Archaeology, to recover culture-history and to recover a

coherent philosophical approach. We suspect that if one were

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to carry out an analysis of references or citations covering the

period 1950 to 1980, one would find a sharp break around

1965. The New Archaeology dubbed all previous archaeology

normative, descriptive, speculative, inadequate – it was time

to make a break and start anew. Both the culture-historical

aims and the interpretative methods were decried.

Of course there was much uninspiring culture-history, and

much bad archaeology. But the same was to be true of New

Archaeology, and will be true of all future archaeology. By

examining various ‘new’ approaches that have been tried in

archaeology over the past 40 years, we have shown that their

limitations derive precisely from the rejection of cultural

meanings, agency and history. By attempting to rewrite his-

tory as a natural science, knowledge accumulated in previous

years (except in some cases chronological schemes and basic

data descriptions) was set up as a straw man and knocked

down.

In attempting to reconnect archaeology to history and to

reintegrate old and new, many will feel that we have gone too

far towards the contextual and speculative. A common reac-

tion to claims that we must interpret subjective meanings in

the past is to point to problems of validation, to inadequate,

mute data. In fact, however, it can be argued that all cultural

reconstruction depends on imputing subjective meanings to

particular historical contexts. In this chapter, procedures as

outlined by the Annales school, cultural history and histor-

ical anthropologists such as Sahlins and Hamann have been

discussed.

These procedures are of course not flawless and we would

now like to discuss some of their shortcomings. First, we

will have to be critical about the unity and breadth of such

things as mentalit´es. Advocates of the New History, such as

Foucault, are sceptical of the possibility of connecting many

events to a single principle, meaning, spirit or worldview.

New Historians are instead sensitive to the divisions, limits

and ruptures that disperse seemingly related events or actions

into multiple, perhaps overlapping but never congruent series

of meanings (Foucault 1972, pp. 7–10). Thus, principles – such

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as Celtic spirit, Protestant ethic and European inventiveness –

which seem to give a common ‘face’ or flavour to a period may

not be very coherent or common. At the least, this means that

when Collingwood encourages us to ‘think ourselves into’ the

past, we must recognise that at any historical place and time

there will be many pasts to think into.

Second, the possibility of ruptures forces us to rethink

notions of historical time. This chapter contains many per-

spectives on time. From a phenomenological perspective, we

viewed time as a continuous stream or flow. This arises from

the notion that human actors always live in a present, which

is given meaning through reflection on the past and anticipa-

tion of the future. We used this view to challenge the value

of origins research, in which meaning arises from abstract di-

visions of time demarcated by the analyst. However, seeing

time as continuous has the politically dangerous effect of nat-

uralising the present. To combat oppressive ideologies and

institutions it is important to be able to pinpoint their origin:

if we can show that they have a beginning, we ensure that

they can have an end. On the other hand, if we accept the

notion of ruptures and origins, we renounce kinship with the

past and jeopardise the possibility of understanding ancient

people. Of course, post-structuralists use this reasoning to ar-

gue that ‘people’ as we know them are a recent fabrication.

We discuss this issue in the following chapter.

We have also viewed time as multiscalar. Braudel proposed

three time scales. It is perhaps more accurate to suggest that

there are as many time scales as there are social processes,

and in each event or each process, multiple time scales may

intersect. Furthermore, time scales may be either linear or

cyclical. There is a tension between time in the sense of a

scale – an abstract calibration device existing independent of

the lives being measured – and the perspective of lived time

given above (Gosden 1994; Shanks and Tilley 1987, chapter 5;

Thomas 1996, pp. 31–5). This tension reminds us that no time

scale is universally valid: people create their own sense of time

through the specific rhythms of daily life and their particular

understanding of past, present and future. Temporal existence

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is therefore socially structured and culturally relative (Knapp

1992, p. 14).

Another objection commonly raised is that to say a wall

was built because someone intended to build a wall is hardly

getting us very far. Certainly if no more than this was be-

ing claimed we would have got little further in one direction

than Flannery’s (1973) Mickey Mouse Laws did in another.

But to discuss purpose and intention as deriving from a par-

ticular culture-historical context, linked into a framework of

social action, is not simply to describe the data in a new way;

additional information is provided. The interpretation goes

beyond the data – if it did not the problem of validation would

hardly arise. In the two ‘wall’ examples provided, construc-

tion took place in order to minimize cost in terms of garrisons

and labour, and in order to gain social prestige. Both these

interpretations add to the data.

Rather than allowing historical archaeology to become a

‘new’ natural science (Rahtz 1981), there would be benefits in

transposing many of the methods and assumptions of histor-

ical archaeology into prehistory. In this chapter we have seen

that history of the ‘inside’ of events, considered over the long

term, provides us with the potential for a fuller understand-

ing of social change, of the relationship between structure,

idea and practice, and of the role of the individual in society.

The archaeological data, with its unique access to the long

term, can contribute to many contemporary debates concern-

ing society and social change. For example, how resistant are

subjective ‘ways of doing things’ to major social and techni-

cal upheaval? What is the relationship between gradual and

sudden social change? By asking questions such as these, we

can allow the particularity of the archaeological data to put

its own case.

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8 Contextual archaeology

Whatever questions one asks about the human past, even if

they are only about technology or economy, frameworks

of meaning intervene. After all, one cannot say what the

economy of a site was until one has made hypotheses or

assumptions about the symbolic meaning of, for example,

bone discard. This book has been a search for an adequate an-

swer to the question of how we infer past cultural meanings.

In chapter 1, we framed the question of meaning in terms

that called attention to two other issues: agency and history.

Subsequently, we explored various approaches to meaning,

agency and history.

The original task of comparing and contrasting the differ-

ent approaches in terms of their contributions to these three

issues has now been achieved and much of what was sought

has been found. Structuralist archaeology contributes to the

notion that culture is meaningfully constituted, but only a

theory of practice can explain how meanings impact people’s

lives. New developments in Marxist-influenced archaeology

and social theory have led to a more complete discussion of

the role of agency in society, and a consideration of embod-

iment helps us understand how agents experience the world

and how they are formed as subjects in the world. Finally, his-

torical studies provide an understanding of how these mean-

ings persist or change over time and how the actions of agents

contribute to the transformation or maintenance of long-term

structures of meaning.

In the previous chapter, we provided many loose glosses on

the word ‘meaning’. Meaning came in the form of (1) intellec-

tual, emotional or mystical currents; (2) the ‘inside of events’;

(3) belief systems; (4) ideology and symbolism; (5) collective

representations, and much more. We begin this chapter with

a more careful consideration of what is meant by ‘meaning’.

Then, we move to the question of how archaeologists actually

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reconstruct meaning in the past. In answering this question,

we wish to describe in greater detail what we have elsewhere

called ‘contextual archaeology’.

Meaning and understanding

Meaning can be defined in a number of ways – and is not

easily translated into other languages (Bloch 1995). We start

with the idea of meaning as making sense of a situation. We

have chosen the word ‘sense’ to highlight the contribution

of the physical, bodily senses. When something makes sense,

we might not be able to explain why. We simply sense it,

often without conscious reflection. We often become fully

conscious only of the things that don’t make sense (things

that our body cannot make sense of) or things that make

sense to us for the first time or in a new way. The ‘situation’

that we attempt to make sense of can be many things – an

action, a conversation, a text, an object, a field of objects,

etc. Since meaning is always of something, the differences

between these varieties of situations are not trivial; we will

try to illuminate them along the way.

Making sense of a situation implies that there is a dis-

tinction between a situation and the expression of meaning

about that situation (Taylor 1985, pp. 15–16). Thus, mean-

ing is not inherent in any situation. Meaning is relational; it

is a joint product of the situation and the person or people

for whom the situation is meaningful. Meaning is therefore

always for someone (p. 22). Even though the geometric pat-

tern of a snowflake contains astonishing coherence and sense,

the snowflake has no meaning until human subjects come to

experience it. In other words, meaning is agent-centred.

So far, our definition of meaning rests comfortably within

a phenomenological paradigm. The situations in which we

find ourselves – the items with which we come into contact –

carry no meaning of their own: meaning is continually pro-

duced through the working sets of relationships we establish

(Thomas 1996, p. 236). We may initially make sense of a spade,

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for example, from having used it to dig a hole (p. 65). Spade

may thus mean digging tool. But if we plant seeds in that hole,

we establish a relation between digging and planting. Mean-

ing is fluid, flexible and multiple, as the spade comes to mean

cultivation, or even regeneration, though to other subjects in

other relationships with other spades, a spade may mean ar-

chaeological excavation. We make sense (we build ‘structures

of intelligibility’) of the world through our active experience

of it.

Meaning depends on unique individual experience in the

world, but in addition to such individual meanings, it is possi-

ble to talk about social meanings. One such meaning is consti-

tutive (or intersubjective) meaning (Taylor 1985, pp. 38–40).

A constitutive meaning is the type of meaning that constitutes

a situation. Unlike individual meaning, constitutive meaning

does not refer to any of the specific senses of a spade (dig-

ging tool, gardening, archaeology, etc.). Rather, constitutive

meaning is the type of meaning that creates the common lan-

guage upon which all of these individual meanings depend,

thus enabling the practice of making any kind of sense in

the first place. John Searle (1970) provided the classic exam-

ple of constitutive meaning. In the game of chess, the rules

that define the possible movements of each piece constitute

the game itself. Without those rules (constitutive meanings),

there would be no game of chess as we know it. Other rules,

such as the time allowed to make a move, regulate the game

of chess but do not constitute it.

When we declare that culture is meaningfully constituted,

we are referring to constitutive meaning. Before we attempt

to explain a pattern of discarded bones, we must first make

sense of the constellation of meaning that surrounds and con-

stitutes (1) the bones that we uncritically refer to as ‘discard’,

and (2) the practices that create such patterns. The concept of

constitutive meaning deployed here is not too dissimilar from

the kinds of structure discussed in chapters 3 and 5, and also

brings us quite close to Foucault’s idea of discursive forma-

tions. The way in which societies relate one topic to another

and draw boundaries around forms of knowledge actively

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constitutes the kinds of meanings and voices that are possi-

ble. It is in this sense, then, that Foucault (1986) can declare

that in ancient Greek society, which valued erotic relations

between men and boys, homosexuality did not exist. This is

because categories such as homosexuality and heterosexuality

are only thinkable – only possible – if sex is constituted in

such a way that its associations are with reproduction. Com-

pared to modern Western society, in ancient Greece what we

would refer to as sex was constituted as part of a very differ-

ent constellation of meanings and associations which render

the modern categories unintelligible. This discussion of sex is

productive in an unexpected way: it flags an important ques-

tion, first noted in the conclusion of the previous chapter, to

which we will shortly return. If constitutive meanings of past

societies are different from those of the archaeologist, do we

lose all possibility of making sense of past societies?

Returning to the notion of individual meaning, we have

thus far talked about meaning as making sense. Those ar-

chaeologists who work with an archaeological record that

is hundreds or thousands of years old are making sense of

societies and subjects that, because they are distant in time,

are quite ‘other’. Various writers have puzzled over this

particular situation, in which one subject (usually an ana-

lyst) attempts to make sense of another subject (the inter-

locutor/informant). This type of interaction between two

subjects is often modelled on a conversation, and within such

hypothetical conversations the idea of translation is com-

monly used to illustrate the nuances of meaning. We are fully

aware that a conversation is very different from the situations

of meaning faced by archaeologists. However, we will now

dwell on conversation and translation because they illustrate

a number of subtleties that enrich our discussion of meaning.

Later, we will show how a conversational model of meaning

can be adapted for the study of other forms of action and

their material residues.

We began with a distinction between meaning and the ex-

pression of meaning. This distinction tempts us to think that

when we translate meaning from the first language to the

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second, the meaning itself is actually contained in a third,

neutral language, and that the language of the informant and

the language of the analyst contain only the varied (and dis-

torted) expressions of that meaning. This is wrong (Gellner

1970). As we saw above, meaning is not outside of the language

of expression: language constitutes meaning. Translating is

therefore more than a mechanical act (Shanks and Hodder

1995, p. 6): it is not just matching words or sentences in one

language with words or sentences in the other. In learning

to speak the other language, we learn to live another form

of life (Asad 1986, p. 149). The notion that speaking requires

more than a mastery of vocabulary and grammar reminds us

of Geertz’s (1973) famous critique of ethnoscience: culture is

not a set of systematic rules or ethnographic algorithms that,

when followed, allow one to pass for a native.

In translating, we do not transpose meaning from one lan-

guage to another. Rather, we transform our own language to

accommodate the meaning. According to Walter Benjamin

(1969, p. 79), ‘The language of a translation can – in fact

must – let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of

the original not as reproduction but as harmony.’ To para-

phrase Rudolf Pannwitz, whom Benjamin quotes, our trans-

lations should not turn Hindi, Greek or Maya into English,

but should turn English into Hindi, Greek or Maya. In order

to retain the agent-centred intentionality of meaning, we must

‘transform our own language in order to translate the coher-

ence of the original’ (Asad 1986, pp. 156–7). But, as Gadamer

(1981, p. 384) notes, for a meaning to be understood in a new

language, that meaning must establish its validity in a new

way. Thus, in translation, two transformations occur: trans-

formation of the language of the analyst and transformation

of the meaning itself.

The creation of new meaning introduces two important

but vague terms – understanding and interpretation. Before

using these blunted terms, we need to sharpen them: to give

them specific definitions and use them only when these rather

technical definitions are what we have in mind. We define un-

derstanding, or verstehen, as the meaning that results from the

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