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A History of Archaeological Thought. By Bruce G. Trigger. 500 pp., 50

illus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. £37.50 (cased),
£14.95 (Paper).An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. By Helge
Kragh. 235 pp., 7 gs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987
(rst paperbound edition, 1989). £9.95.

John C. Barrett

Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society / Volume 57 / Issue 02 / January 1991, pp 211 - 212
DOI: 10.1017/S0079497X00004576, Published online: 18 February 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0079497X00004576

How to cite this article:

John C. Barrett (1991). Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 57, pp 211-212 doi:10.1017/S0079497X00004576

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 REVIEWS
A HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL THOUGHT. By Bruce G.
Trigger. 500 pp., 50 illus. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989. £37.50 (cased), £14.95 (PaPer)-
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE. By
Helge Kragh. 235 pp., 7figs.Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987 (first paperbound edition, 1989). £9.95.
Currently displayed in the Glasgow City Museum and Art
Gallery is a large fragment of a marble frieze representing a
'winged deity' from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud.
It was collected and brought to Britain in 1853 after being
sawn from its original matrix, and it is on loan to the museum
from the British Rail Pension Fund. What might we say about
such an artefact? That it represents an example of the kind of
monumental frieze, depicting aristocratic and godly activities,
which so often characterizes the monumental architecture of
the early city state; that this single fragment characterizes the
destructive activities of many European collectors who sys-
tematically looted the antiquities of these countries through
which they travelled; or that it represents the way art objects
and antiquities are now taken to represent a more secure
long-term financial investment than do the world's stock
markets?
Archaeologists do not only dig up residues from the past.
They discover possible ways of thinking about a range of
pasts, and they argue about how they may assess and validate
their ideas concerning those pasts. They agree that these
activities of thought and of assessment are possible because
they can identify material residues which survive from the
past. However, we place those residues in a range of different
historical narratives, and those narratives are of our own
making. In my opening example this single artefact might
enable us to consider the monumental architecture of the early
city state, an aspect of European imperialism, or the operation
of our modern financial institutions.
Let us now make two observations about the nature of
archaeological practice. First, archaeological practice
depends upon the assumption that we can identify material
remains which derive from the pasts we wish to investigate,
and that we can further identify the processes which created
those material residues because certain elements of those
processes are not unique to the past. In other words, those
historical processes to which we refer in our interpretation of
the material record are also part of our own experiences and
understanding of the contemporary world. The past may be
very different but, unlike mythological pasts, it is not entirely
foreign to our own experiences. In this way we can interpret
the material record by reference to our contemporary under-
standings of the nature of the human, physical world.
Archaeology therefore depends upon the agreed identification
of an archaeological record and upon uniformitarian assump-
211
tions through which that record may be understood. The
second point is that the validity of our interpretations of the
past cannot be evaluated against the past itself (for that no
longer exists) nor can it be assessed against absolute truths
about humanity because our understandings of what it is to be
human are open and are contentious. Archaeological narra-
tives may therefore be numerous and at times conflicting, even
when they are about the same material; this is not a 'problem'
needing some final resolution, because such discontinuities
are simply an essential feature of those many traditions of
knowledge which include archaeology.
If this perception of archaeology is accepted then it follows
that the historiography of archaeology can be approached in a
number of ways. For example, we may trace the limits of
archaeology's defining parameters — namely the acceptance
of a material record and of uniformitarian assumptions — as a
means of demonstrating where this tradition of thought sep-
arates itself from other historical traditions such as oral
testimony and mythology. As we have argued, this will delimit
a discipline of archaeology which contains a wide and varied
range of historical interpretations. This variation may, in
turn, be ordered as representing a progressive development of
ideas, from an origin to the present 'state of knowledge'. As
Kragh shows, in an excellent text book on the historiography
of science, such an approach will weld often disparate tradi-
tions of thought into a single sequence, simply by ignoring
those traditions which cannot be included in such a sequence,
and by translating the conceptual terms of earlier traditions of
thought into terms which are recognizable by the modern
reader. (For example, Newton never formulated his second
law of motion as f = ma; this is a 'modernized' version of an
original terminology which appears almost incomprehensible
to us today.)
Trigger has written a substantial work on the history of
archaeological thought in which he sets about to demonstrate
the way the archaeologies of any period arise within wider and
determining social contexts. The point may be expressed
slightly differently. If we understand the past by employing
assumptions about the uniformities of the world, then those
same assumptions, often unstated and unexamined, will also
be employed to guide our contemporary actions. The
languages of justification will be the same; a belief in progress
will be reworked in evolutionary models of the past, and the
politics of nationalism and racism will make a cultural-
historical archaeology comprehensible. Trigger identifies a
number of intellectual traditions which he takes to character-
ize the history of archaeology from the European Renaissance
to the present day. It should come as no surprise to find those
traditions embedded within the history of a claimed European
hegemony, not because the recent political and economic
history of the West determined the kinds of archaeologies
 THE PREHISTORIC SOCIETY
which could be written, but because those archaeologies were
part of the intellectual programme through which Europe
came to define itself.
Trigger's survey is extensive, but is effectively limited to
European and North American archaeology. Certainly refer-
ence beyond these immediate horizons occurs and there is one
chapter dedicated to Soviet archaeology, but the publisher's
claim that this single volume offers a world-wide perspective
seems misplaced. However, this is not really the problem. A
more fundamental question is implicit within Trigger's overall
treatment of the history of archaeology. If we treat the
intellectual histories of Europe as evolutionary and progres-
sive do we not simply add a legitimacy to the European and
western claims for a political, economic and moral suprem-
acy? Are we not echoing the claim that capitalist liberal
democracy does indeed mark 'the end of history' ? Perhaps this
is what Trigger intended, but in a work dedicated to exposing
the social contexts behind those intellectual traditions which
it has chosen to describe, we might be forgiven for expecting a
more critical treatment of that work's own ideological
programme.
What then might we now ask of a future history of archaeo-
logical thought? One answer would be to write of those
historical traditions which do not recognize the existence of a
material record of a uniformitarian past, where the archaeo-
logical record means nothing, where the past is fabulous and
foreign and where the authority which makes these histories
acceptable is quite different from the rationalism of our own
intellectual traditions. Such histories will define the margins of
the discipline of archaeology and through them we may gain a
clearer understanding of the social contexts of our own
intellectual endeavours, for we will confront those for whom
our own work means little or nothing.
JOHN C. BARRETT
THE EXCLUDED PAST. ARCHAEOLOGY IN EDUCATION. Edited by
Peter Stone &c Robert MacKenzie. xxxiii + 314 pp.,
6 tables, 24figs.London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. £38.00.
This is powerful stuff. Identifiably from the One World
Archaeology Series, the book explores from an educational
angle numerous and often profound aspects of the past in the
late twentieth century. Its Foreword (compulsory, and com-
pulsive, reading by Series editor, the ubiquitous Ucko), Pref-
ace, Introduction and 25 chapters range round the world.
Much of the general message is stimulating, some of it tenden-
tious, and overall it is both challenging and, in many respects,
deeply disturbing. Prehistory in particular is undoubtedly at
bay on a global scale, however clever its practitioners are at its
disciplinary development, and every archaeologist, being by
definition an educator to some degree, should at least be
aware of the issues raised here. For many, they are already the
stuff of life rather than just of the past. 'Who decides the past?'
is not merely a nice question for abstract debate if you can
neither teach nor learn about your own cultural history.
The Excluded Past is one of the twenty-two volumes stem-
ming from the First World Archaeology Congress (Southamp-
ton, 1986) currently changing the face of the past in the
present, both as perceived and as receivable. It is very defi-
212.
nitely not, however, an already four-year-old odd-ball collec-
tion of papers bundled eclectically into a formless
Proceedings. The editors have produced a cohesive, landmark
book of permanent value yet with enormous potential for
influencing the 1990s. They have bullied, cajoled and com-
missioned to great effect, their efforts rewarded with a spec-
trum geographically from allfiveinhabited continents and, in
terms of contributors, from imperialists to indigenes and from
classroom teachers to international administrators.
The editors (p. 2) define 'the excluded past in a dual sense'
as 'the prehistoric past, which is virtually excluded from
curricula around the world, and the suppressed or denied past
of many indigenous, minority, or oppressed groups'. That,
however, is a concept limited to the issues of local access to a
particular time and to a particular area; there is actually a
third sense, to which Ucko draws attention (p. xvi). Exclusion
can also involve the denial of access, as exemplified in much of
British university archaeological education, of people in one
part of the world to knowledge of others' cultural history in
another part. Indeed, such denial can exclude not just chunks
of pastness about various parts and peoples of the world but
even extend to that concept of a world archaeology which is
considerably greater than the sum of its parts. 'World
archaeology is much more than the mere recording of specific
historical events, embracing as it does the study of social and
cultural change in its entirety' (p. ix).
Inevitably, and possibly deliberately, much of the tone and
some of the specifics will cause conventional hackles to rise.
Education, like heritage, is a highly charged subject, only a
short step from basic issues of politics and therefore of
concepts of statehood, the citizen, nationality and race. Cultu-
ral conditioning, alias education, is obviously crucial in the
practical application of any such concepts; Orwell knew what
he was at in writing 'Who controls the past controls the
future: who controls the present controls the past' (Nineteen
Eighty Four, 1949). In discussing many facets of the past, not
just archaeology, in contemporary education around the
world, the book, as its title implies, returns again and again to
questions such as 'what past?', 'Whose past?', 'Why is a
particular brand of pastness purveyed?', and 'When was the
past?'.
Even in conservative, outwardly stable Britain, like ques-
tions are currently only just behind public debate about the
nature and implementation of a government-imposed
National Curriculum, a curriculum where archaeology may
have achieved a foothold but prehistory could well in practice
be excluded. It is only a difference of degree, not principle,
that similar questions are raised in The Excluded Past of
perhaps less privileged countries, of possibly more overtly
divided communities, of even more centralised states; 'Educa-
tion and the political manipulation of history in Venezuela',
'The missing past in South African history', 'Education and
archaeology in Japan' are indicative chapter titles.
That such implied concerns, and indeed in some cases
outright abuse by any civilized educational criteria, are not
merely 'foreign' aberrations is quietly but devastatingly
demonstrated in 'The Black historical past in British educa-
tion', implicitly reiterating 'Whose past? About whom? For
whom?'. These are nice questions, and real ones too, requiring
answers now, not just by Third World governments and