Reconstructing Archaeology

Name: Reconstructing Archaeology
Author: Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley
ISBN: 0203973461

by Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley

Your fifth book, Shanks and Tilly’s Reconstructing Archaeology is part of the post-processual movement. Can you tell us a bit about the field? Post processual archaeology is very much to do with the application of postmodernism to archaeological thought and the study of the past. Its an untidy bag of ideas, including neo-Marxism, feminist archaeology, cognitive archaeology, contextual archaeology, etc. But the most striking thing is that it is relativistic: Archaeologists are asking themselves “Who do we think we are? Why do we think that we, mostly American and European, largely white, male archaeologists, have the right to lay down the law and say that this is significant and this isn’t? Why should we assume that we own the past, because we have degrees in archaeology? Let’s listen to some other perspectives”. What did Shanks and Tilly bring to the field? Well Shanks and Tilly are excavating archaeologists as well as theoreticians. Tilly is associated with the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and he and Shanks wrote Reconstructing Archaeology in 1987 which was again a strongly post processionalist approach. The same team produced Social Archaeological Theory and that carries it on. Some of it is very Frenchified and theoretical – impenetrable playing with words rather than ideas. But some of it is extremely interesting. All through it runs this thread of relativism which is typical of post modernist thought. The emergence of World Archaeology is something that happened in parallel, quite suddenly and has roots in a lot of things we’ve been talking about. It’s actually a group of theories – in part a reaction to traditional colonial archaeology, an attempt to de-colonialise archaeology and produce a post-colonial approach to the past. But it’s more interesting than just being politically correct about imperialism. It has a vision, which comes quite close to post processualism, about the validity of many contesting interpretations. It started particularly with Peter Ucko, a Brit who worked for a long time in Australia in the institute of Aboriginal studies: an experience which really scarred him as it was just a bunch of whites telling Aboriginals what their past was. When Ucko finally left in a rage, he appointed an Aboriginal as his successor. Ucko’s basic perception was that archaeology is not just about the past it’s about now. Archaeology is not just about the dead it is equally about the living. It is highly political. The idea you can put archaeology in an ivory tower of academia, totally unpolitical and in complete scientific detachment, is crap. It is hugely political. It always has been.

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Neal Ascherson

"Your fifth book, Shanks and Tilly’s Reconstructing Archaeology is part of the post-processual movement. Can you tell us a bit about the field? Post processual archaeology is very much to do with the application of postmodernism to archaeological thought and the study of the past. Its an untidy bag of ideas, including neo-Marxism, feminist archaeology, cognitive archaeology, contextual archaeology, etc. But the most striking thing is that it is relativistic: Archaeologists are asking themselves “Who do we think we are? Why do we think that we, mostly American and European, largely white, male archaeologists, have the right to lay down the law and say that this is significant and this isn’t? Why should we assume that we own the past, because we have degrees in archaeology? Let’s listen to some other perspectives”. What did Shanks and Tilly bring to the field? Well Shanks and Tilly are excavating archaeologists as well as theoreticians. Tilly is associated with the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and he and Shanks wrote Reconstructing Archaeology in 1987 which was again a strongly post processionalist approach. The same team produced Social Archaeological Theory and that carries it on. Some of it is very Frenchified and theoretical – impenetrable playing with words rather than ideas. But some of it is extremely interesting. All through it runs this thread of relativism which is typical of post modernist thought. The emergence of World Archaeology is something that happened in parallel, quite suddenly and has roots in a lot of things we’ve been talking about. It’s actually a group of theories – in part a reaction to traditional colonial archaeology, an attempt to de-colonialise archaeology and produce a post-colonial approach to the past. But it’s more interesting than just being politically correct about imperialism. It has a vision, which comes quite close to post processualism, about the validity of many contesting interpretations. It started particularly with Peter Ucko, a Brit who worked for a long time in Australia in the institute of Aboriginal studies: an experience which really scarred him as it was just a bunch of whites telling Aboriginals what their past was. When Ucko finally left in a rage, he appointed an Aboriginal as his successor. Ucko’s basic perception was that archaeology is not just about the past it’s about now. Archaeology is not just about the dead it is equally about the living. It is highly political. The idea you can put archaeology in an ivory tower of academia, totally unpolitical and in complete scientific detachment, is crap. It is hugely political. It always has been."

Archaeology · fivebooks.com