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Textbook Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology 1St Edition Robert Chapman Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology 1St Edition Robert Chapman Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
Cover image: Working with Old Evidence: Insula IX of the Roman town of
Silchester, excavated in 1893 by the Society of Antiquaries (bottom left,
reproduced by permission of Reading Museum), and re-excavated from 1997
(images by Alison Wylie, right, and by permission of Michael Fulford and Amanda
Clarke, top left).
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements viii
Bibliography 217
Index 243
List of Illustrations
Table
Figures
The planning for this book and for its companion, the edited volume
Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice (Routledge,
2015), began in 2010, when a grant from the Leverhulme Trust,
sponsored by Bob Chapman, made it possible for Alison Wylie to spend
six months as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Archaeology at
the University of Reading (UK). We thank the Leverhulme Trust and
the staff and postgraduate students of the Department of Archaeology
for their support, as well as the University of Washington for granting
the leave that made this extended visit at Reading possible.
We also thank colleagues in the many departments of Archaeology
and of Philosophy in the UK who hosted Leverhulme lectures and
seminars in 2010, and the colleagues who participated in a workshop
on ‘Material Culture as Evidence’ that we convened in Reading in June
2010. This workshop was made possible by generous support from the
Leverhulme Trust and the then School of Human and Environmental
Sciences at the University of Reading. The feedback on these lectures,
and the discussions generated by the workshop and a seminar series
on evidential reasoning that we convened in the Department of
Archaeology at the University of Reading, were crucial to shaping our
vision for these two collaborative ‘evidence’ projects: Material Evidence
and now Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology. We especially thank
Richard Bradley, Mike Fulford and Gundula Müldner for presenta-
tions in the Reading seminars, and all the contributors to the Reading
workshop and to Material Evidence for incisive analyses and inspiring
examples of archaeology-in-practice that pushed our thinking about
evidential reasoning in more ways than we can credit. Alison Wylie
thanks, as well, her Archaeology colleagues at the University of
Washington for a vigorous and enormously helpful discussion of a
FAALS presentation she gave on the Leverhulme ‘Evidence’ project
when she returned from Reading (Friday Afternoon Archaeology
Acknowledgements ix
They are visible evidence of the cultures and civilisations which have
passed away, of the marvellous achievements of human genius and
art which have been ruthlessly mutilated or destroyed. They enable
us to see once more a fragment of what civilised man has achieved in
earlier ages and in other lands, to lift the veil that hangs over his life
and mental powers in the distant past. (Sayce 1923/33: 9)
The cases we discuss in the chapters that follow bring into sharp
focus the scaffolding of various kinds – ladening theory, background
knowledge (tacit and explicit), technical skill, social networks, insti-
tutional infrastructure and vigilant reflexive critique – required to
make archaeological observation possible and to put the resulting
data to work as evidence. Neither these data nor the evidential claims
based on them constitute a self-warranting empirical foundation, and
yet they can powerfully challenge and constrain the reconstructive
and explanatory claims we project onto the cultural past. This is
the paradox of material evidence: that ‘traces don’t speak’. Material
evidence is inescapably an interpretive construct; what it ‘says’ is
contingent on the provisional scaffolding we bring to bear. And yet
it has a striking capacity to function as a ‘network of resistances to
theoretical appropriation’ that routinely destabilizes settled assump-
tions, redirects inquiry and expands interpretive horizons in directions
no one had anticipated – a capacity acknowledged by even the most
vigorously anti-foundationalist critics within archaeology (Shanks and
Tilley 1989: 44).
This paradox of material evidence lies at the heart of archaeology. It
has been the catalyst for ongoing creative innovation, methodological
and conceptual, that has generated some strikingly transformative
insights into the cultural past, but at the same time it is a perennial
source of epistemic pessimism. The question we take up in this short
book is, then, how are the successes realized? And how are specific risks
of error, distortion, elision and the arbitrary projection of expectations
most effectively countered? We proceed on the conviction that consid-
erable wisdom is embodied in the creativity and skilled practice of
archaeologists that is only made explicit when trouble arises, typically
in the context of close-to-the-ground debate about specific cases. We
also take inspiration from a caution issued by David Clarke in the
mid-1970s: this wisdom is not likely to be well captured by idealized
accounts of ‘scientific’ (or historical) practice constructed by philoso-
phers in response to their own internal debates and modelled on what
is often a simplistic understanding of fields that lie at considerable
Introduction: The Paradox of Material Evidence 7
and on many fronts, while others are a sobering reminder of the falli-
bility of the archaeological enterprise. But even the most problematic
examples are double-edged; however much they illustrate pitfalls, they
also throw into relief what could have been done, and what can be
done in the future, to counteract the ever-present risks of local and
systematic error. Together with more hopeful cases and those of mixed
success, they illustrate why polarized debate about the epistemic status
of archaeology is fundamentally misconceived. Material traces and
the methods archaeologists use to constitute them as evidence are
just too diverse and open-ended to sustain categorically pessimistic
or optimistic conclusions. They require case-by-case assessment, a
matter of concretely grounded reflexive analysis that is itself a crucial
dimension of the bootstrapping practices we find characteristic of the
best of archaeology.
Notes
1 Schliemann’s (1875: 323; see also Trail 1995: 111) report on his discovery
of Priam’s hoard in May 1873:
empirically verified’ and ‘nothing has been added’ (p. 2); the inferential
standard she invokes here is what philosophers would describe as ‘truth-
preserving deductive entailment’.2 As she points out, when this level of
certainty is realized, the conclusions drawn are really nothing more
than ‘a paraphrase of empirical observations’ as these are presented in
the premises of the argument (p. 2). If archaeologists adhered to such
a standard, she asks, how could they ever grasp the form of life, the
animating aesthetic sensibilities and social relations of, say, Trobriand
Island society as described in rich ethnographic detail by Bronisław
Malinowski? No matter how ‘perfectly conducted’, the archaeological
excavation of a Trobriand village could never carry archaeologists any
distance towards an understanding of the complexity of Trobriand
society, nor even give them a very robust understanding of the agricul-
tural practices, local economy or demography of these communities; ‘it
would obviously be impossible’, she concludes, ‘to understand the relics
of the Trobrianders from the evidence of the material remains alone’
(p. 3). She then draws from this example a quite general lesson that she
refers to as the Diogenes problem. Quoting Mortimer Wheeler, she
observes that ‘the archaeologist may find the tub … but altogether miss
Diogenes’ (p. 2; Wheeler 1950: 130) and, moreover, may have no way of
ever knowing what they have missed.3
Smith’s argument for this conclusion depends on two sets of claims.
While she emphasizes the epistemic and methodological challenges
that archaeologists face working with an incomplete material record
of the cultural past, she also invokes a more fundamental, ontological4
problem that arises from the nature of the subject of inquiry. She
argues that, by their very nature, the cultural subjects of interest
to archaeologists must elude understanding; the relationship that
holds between surviving material traces and the social contexts and
actions that give them cultural significance is radically unstable.
Although Smith does not develop this point in any detail, she invokes
a ‘normative’ or ‘ideational’ conception of culture: the view, most
systematically developed in an archaeological context by Walter Taylor,
that culture is a ‘mental phenomenon’; it consists of community norms
Archaeological Evidence in Question 17
Crisis debates5