Download 1 Theory, theories, postulates, and hypotheses: are there theories in

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Theory, theories, postulates, and hypotheses: are there theories in archaeology?
Kit W. Wesler
Murray State University
Presented to the Symposium on Ohio Valley Urban and Historic Archaeology, Wartburg,
Illinois, 26 March 2011
I’ve been thinking a lot about archaeological theory lately. I’ve generally not considered
myself a theorist, but my current preoccupation has been stimulated by two things. One was
having to teach a method and theory class. I find it helps to think about something a little bit
before I go in to try to explain it to undergraduates.
The other stimulus was a review of a grant application, for which one reviewer said that
since I didn’t acknowledge agency theory, clearly I don’t deserve to be funded, because that’s
the thing to do now. So I revised the grant and said, “Okay, you want theory, I’ll slap you upside
the head with theory,” and in the process told a couple of reviewers why I thought their
comments were stupid. That’s probably not good strategy for getting funding, but it was fun at
the time.
I’ve run into this kind of thing before in both grant and publication reviews. I had a grant
reviewer write, “Wesler mentioned systems theory. I don’t like systems theory. Do not fund.”
And with NSF, one “do not fund” kills the grant. Or, I’ve had a paper reviewer say, “Wesler
doesn’t define historical archaeology as the archaeology of capitalism. Do not publish.”
I think these incidents violate reviewing ethics and that editors and granting agencies
should look beyond that kind of peevish reductionism, but that’s a rant for another time. I’m
more concerned about what it says about how archaeologists think about theory.
So now agency theory is the correct theory for studying complex societies, which, to
grant reviewers, means chiefdom societies, but as I’ve argued many times also includes the
literate societies that historical archaeology, broadly defined, is concerned with.
“Agency” in archaeology covers a wide variety of approaches. Tim Pauketat and Susan
Alt (2005) term the common ground of these several theoretical orientations a “historicalprocessual” school of interpretation, in which the goals are elucidating the specific culture
process of a past society and envisioning culture as the more or less intentional actions,
reactions, interactions and inactions of human beings who make choices for reasons which are
embedded in social, natural and perhaps supernatural environments. Such a perspective certainly
applies to the maintenance of power and inequality in a historic society.
Two aspects of the “agency” or “historical processual” school are particularly relevant to
my interests. First, even a casual reader should be impressed by the extent to which traditional
disciplinary boundaries are breaking down in the perspective of historical-processual approaches.
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For instance, archaeology of landscape as a socio-symbolic stage for human experience
developed in parallel with nearly identical concepts in historical geography.
Further, as Pauketat (2001) points out, the traditional divide in American archaeology
between historical and prehistoric archaeology simply dissolves in a historical-processual school
of archaeological theory. Historical archaeology has fully embraced that ideas of memory, social
and power relations, surveillance and resistance must be set alongside more functionalist (e.g.
division of labor, travel time) readings of historic landscapes.
The analyses resulting from the historical processualist school are narrative
reconstructions of particular sites and situations. In fact, as with much post-processualism, this
area of theory is not really theoretical. I ran across this quote from Umberto Eco recently, which
seems apropos: Eco realized “upon reaching maturity, that those things about which we cannot
theorize, we must narrate” (Bondanella 1997:125). This is when he turned to novels. It seems
that the historical-processual scholars have realized that they cannot theorize, and so turn to
narrative.
Critiques include a cogent objection that testability seems to be lacking in most case
studies (O’Brien and Lyman 2004). Here I support Hegmon’s (2003) idea of “processual-plus,”
that most archaeologists still believe that there must be ways of sorting better explanations of the
past from worse ones (for instance, indigenous development of technology as opposed to alien
intervention, or uniformitarian principles as opposed to divine agency) even as we recognize the
limitations of strict hypothetico-deductive practice.
Back in the optimistic days of the New Archaeology, Michael Schiffer, among many,
created a framework for archaeological theory, and he, Lewis Binford, and others spent a lot of
time on so-called middle range theory. Without going into a pedantic discourse, I think most of
those discussions failed to keep the terminology straight among theory, theories, hypotheses,
postulates, and laws. What I want to cite here is his division of archaeological theory into “three
great realms”: social theory, reconstruction theory, and methodological theory (Schiffer 1988).
Schiffer spent most of his time with methodological theory, which he called the principles for
defining and validating evidence. These led to his making explicit the relationships he called
correlates, the n-transforms and c-transforms of his behavioral archaeology.
Many of us have problems with calling this level of abstraction theories, even if they are
useful when made explicit. Statements such as “round things roll downhill farther than flat
things,” or “creamware is a correlate of late 18th century British colonial sites” are useful, but are
not very theoretically charged. They are the kind of statement that led Kent Flannery (1983) to
exclaim, “Leaping Lizards, Mr., Science!”
Ultimately, I think these kinds of statements, promoted as theories, are what jaded many
archaeologists about positivism, and led to the post-processualist abandonment of theories for
broad theoretical orientations of dubious testability.
It was Schiffer’s realm of social theory that was most promising about the New
Archaeology, but the one that got the least attention. Schiffer himself could only offer tentative
comments, and basically admitted that he didn’t know how to pursue it, so he wandered off into
middle range theory and correlate land. He wrote, “The hope remains that the fragments of
social theory we see today one day will be subsumed by a more comprehensive theory;” note his
use of theory in the general, rather than theories as specific statements. He sniped a bit at the
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“newest” social theories, suggesting that they merely reflected the attitudes of the society in
which academia is embedded and would devolve into “an unproductive epistemological
relativism” if carried to their logical conclusions. These, in fact, were the post-processualist
theoretical orientations that grant and publication reviewers now require—and which, I
suggested above, are not really theoretical, certainly not in the sense that they generate testable
theories.
But if current theory is anti-theory, where is theory in archaeology?
This is where I have to go back to some first principles. Positivism, processualism, postprocessualism, structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology … these strike me as broad schools of
thought or approaches, and not as theory. More to the point, there’s a difference between theory
in this broad sense, and theories.
Let’s just take some dictionary definitions. From Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary:
“synonyms HYPOTHESIS , THEORY , LAW mean a formula derived by inference from
scientific data that explains a principle operating in nature. HYPOTHESIS implies
insufficient evidence to provide more than a tentative explanation <a hypothesis
explaining the extinction of the dinosaurs>. THEORY implies a greater range of evidence
and greater likelihood of truth <the theory of evolution>. LAW implies a statement of
order and relation in nature that has been found to be invariable under the same
conditions <the law of gravitation>.”
Those of us trained as processualists thought that laws were our ultimate goal, which we
would approach through testing hypothesis derived from, and confirming, theories. To this set of
terms I’d like to add one I haven’t thought about since 9th grade geometry: postulate.
“1 : a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a
train of reasoning.”
I’d like to distinguish a theoretical orientation like processualism and the other isms, from
a theory, from a hypothesis, and from a postulate. A theory is general statement about cultures
based on existing data, to be tested. There are reasons (for example from the historic or
ethnographic record) to believe this is true, and we can test it against archaeological data. A
hypothesis is a statement about how the theory should fit a specific case, like my own site, with
test implications. Tested and supported often enough, the theories become robust.
Given that distinction, the theoretical orientations begin with postulates. I suggest that:
The postulate for processualism is that culture can be modeled as systems.
The postulate for structuralism is that culture can be modeled as language.
There may be two postulates for Marxism, one, that culture is ideology; and two, that
culture is structured dialectically.
Phenomenology postulates that culture is human experience.
Historical-processualism postulates that culture is human action.
These postulates are the basis for further exploration and explanation of the
archaeological record, and can lead us in somewhat different directions. They are not, however,
theories, because they are not stated to be tested: they are the premises of trains of reasoning.
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So we clearly have theory in archaeology in the sense of theoretical orientations, but do
we have theories in archaeology? That is, are there some basic statements we can make about
culture and/or the archaeological record, that have been tested, and that stand up to the tests?
It seems to me that there is a single founding theory in archaeology: that the
archaeological record is related to human behavior. The relationship is not exact and requires
inference, but if we didn’t believe this fundamental theory, we couldn’t do what we do and make
it sound academic.
Lewis Binford (1962) made famous Leslie White’s dictum that archaeology is
anthropology or it is nothing. This grew out of the historical accident that North American
archaeologists and anthropologists were all studying Native Americans, so we got placed in the
same department in the university structure, often along with sociologists. This, in turn, led to
American archaeology using ethnography as our culture theory, and we picked up the positivist
spin as it swept through American social sciences. This led us into two problems. On the one
hand, culture theory based on ethnography is not necessarily suited to the archaeological record,
either in terms of correlates to ethnological typologies or in that the ethnographic record may not
fairly represent the range of societies that existed in the past. On the other, a bunch of
archaeologists never bought into the anthropological thing, and in fact were often trained to be
hostile to anthropology. These include Classical, Biblical, and Medieval archaeologists, and
some historical archaeologists trained in a humanistic historical tradition, who leave us with a
fragmented archaeology spread across numerous academic departments.
More recently, Binford said that archaeology is the explanation of the archaeological
record (Thurman 1998). This is a principle that all archaeologists should be able to get behind—
and the underlying theory is that the archaeological record is related to human behavior.
I suggest that we have other theories, also.
For example, there are theories of socioeconomic organization.
1. The complexity of a society’s archaeological record is related to the complexity of the
society.
2. Socioeconomic complexity can be measured by:
a. Settlement hierarchy.
b. Relative investment in public and monumental works.
c. Complexity and hierarchy of burial pattern.
d. Diversity of assemblages.
.. and the above measures are directly related.
I use these theories all the time, but I rarely make them this explicit.
In class, I often cite a body that I call cemetery theory.
1. The organization (complexity and formality) of a cemetery reflects the organization of the
society that created it.
2. Societies with high rates of infant mortality bury their youngest children separately, and less
formally, than their older members.
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3. Cemeteries reflect a level of sedentism and corporate identity.
4. Retainer burials are associated with the cusp of statehood: the most complex chiefdoms, early
states, or secondary states on the edges of state systems.
In general, I think these statements have been tested enough—whether explicitly or
implicitly—that we have some confidence in the truth of the statements. That is, they are indeed
theories. One thing I would like to note about these theories is that they can generate hypotheses
for almost any geographic and temporal field of archaeology, prehistoric and historic. They
construct archaeology as a seamless whole, not a set of independent archaeologies whose
practitioners rarely talk to each other across the boundaries set up by university organization and
the territories defended by journals and societies.
What other theories are there in archaeology? Where do we derive them? If archaeology
is a study of human society and societies, then we should be able to draw theories from social
science in general, testable against the archaeological record.
Just for fun, I looked back at a book published in the 1960s, by a couple of guys named
Berelson and Steiner (1964), called Human Behavior; an Inventory of Scientific Findings. They
compiled a set of “important statements of proper generality for which there is some good
amount of scientific evidence” (Berelson and Steiner 1964:5; emphasis in original) They wrote,
“these findings are the stuff of theory: the material of which theories are built” (Berelson and
Steiner 1964:660). They culled conclusions from social science studies of all kinds, and
presented them as “findings,” that is, statements that had been shown to be essentially true about
human behavior. In retrospect, this is an engagingly hubristic exercise. Much of the
psychology, for instance, would be laughed out of the room by modern clinical psychologists.
But some of them are not obviously flawed, and can be written as theories from which
hypothesis can be drawn, testable against the archaeological record.
I just want to pull out a couple of these, to give you an idea of what I mean. In the chapter
on economic institutions:
B1. The rise of industrialization affects the family; it undermines and finally
disintegrates relatively tight and large kinship groupings in simple societies, shifts the
distribution of power within the nuclear family, and changes marital patterns.
B1.1. The family patterns of the lower classes change more rapidly under
industrialization than do those of the upper classes.
B2. Industrialization undermines the traditional forms of social organization and
substitutes a system of stratification in which (a) there are more social roles to be filled than
there were before and (b) achievement on the job becomes increasingly important (as against, for
example, a traditional factor such as age).
From the communications chapter:
B7. The more openly or directly or actively the audience’s group identifications are
brought into play, the more these identifications determine response.
From the society chapter:
B6.1. Residential segregation within a city is greater for the extreme groups (the highest
and the lowest classes) than for the middle groups.
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B9. Technological innovations (inventions) tend to be developed and perfected in the
cities and then to spread to rural areas.
I can see each one of those statements, slightly modified, being a dissertation topic in
historical archaeology. We can derive hypotheses and test cases for specific sites we want to
work on. At the same time, these theories partake of the best elements of historical
processualism, inspiring the construction of narratives about the sites and peoples we study, and
also can be pursued within the various theoretical orientations and isms.
Mark Leone had a line in a paper from the late 1970s that has stayed with me all these
years. In his review of James Deetz’s (1977) In Small Things Forgotten and Stan South’s (1977)
Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology, he said something like: so we have Deetz with an
irreplicable humanism, and South with a sterile science, and where does that leave the rest of us?
Theories without theory can be as sterile as methods without theory. Theory without
theories is untestable. If we can keep them straight, maybe we can build a comprehensive
archaeology that includes all of us, after all. Thank you.
References
Berelson, Bernard, and Gary A. Steiner
1964 Human Behavior; an Inventory of Scientific Findings. Harcourt, Brace and World, New
York.
Binford, Lewis R.
1962 Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity 28:217-225.
Bondanella, Peter
1997 Umberto Eco and the Open Text. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Deetz, James F.
1977 In Small Things Forgotten. Anchor Books, New York.
Hegmon, Michelle
2003 Setting theoretical egos aside: Issues and theory in North American archaeology.
American Antiquity 68:213-243.
Leone, Mark P.
1979 Comments on Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology by Stanley South and In
Small Things Forgotten by James Deetz. Paper presented to the Society for Historical
Archaeology, Nashville TN.
O’Brien, Michael J., and R. Lee Lyman
2004 History and explanation in archaeology. Anthropological Theory 4(2):173-197.
Pauketat, Timothy R.
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2001 Practice and history in archaeology: An emerging paradigm. Anthropological Theory 1:
73–98.
Pauketat, Timothy R., and Susan M. Alt
2005 Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making. Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory 12(3):213-236.
Schiffer, Michael B.
1988 The structure of archaeological theory. American Antiquity 53(3):461-485.
South, Stanley
1977 Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology. Academic Press, New York.
Thurman, Melburn D.
1998 Interview with Lewis R. Binford. Historical Archaeology 32(2):28-55.