The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
The future of archaeology
PH: When Ian Hodder started up the Haddenham Project in the Fens in the early '80s it would be, I suppose, he asked me, Glynis and Pete Rowley-Conwy to go and see him. We had a meeting to go up, and he said he wanted to talk to us about strategy for environmental work. The one thing I thought was quite interesting is that if you look at Ian's career, there's always been a part of it that wants to establish trench credibility, quite unrelated to his theoretical pretensions. The interesting thing about Haddenham is that it's the first time he's actually ever tried to bring his theory to bear on practice. In the past, he's always shied away from that. We went along and we gave him advice on what we thought was the right thing to do, and he said 'What I'm really looking for is something really novel, that no one's ever done before', which I thought was fairly interesting in its own sense, in that it implies a technique-driven approach to doing field archaeology -- which is disturbing. But subsequently, he asked me to work on the bones from the site. My reply to him was 'Look, if you get someone like me to do at the bones, I will basically look at them from very much one perspective, which is the sort of things you know about -- I look at it in terms of land use and animal management -- but given your theoretical interests, you, presumably, want it to be looked at in different ways', and I suggested to him that a perfect scenario would be to get Chris Tilley involved as well. I talked to Chris about it, and Chris was very happy with the idea that I would identify the bones and the two of us would analyse them but from completely different perspectives, so that Ian would get his radical post-processual perspective and he'd get a boring old 'environmental determinist' perspective from me. Ian vetoed that, which I thought was telling.
MCG: That sounds ideal!
PH: He said he wasn't interested.
MCG: Did he explain why?
PH: No, he didn't. I think part of it, at least, was that there was a schizophrenia in his early work: his theoretical work very divorced from his field work. With the field work he was just desperate to establish his credentials as a field archaeologist, which is very conservative in the sense that promotion has been built on digging sites and producing site monographs. He was hedging his bets.
MCG: He was still operating within an infrastructure of accreditation. It was very traditional.
MFL: It reminds me of Allison Wylie's criticism of much of post- processualism, in that she says that few have asked how data have become 'theory-laden'. In the sense, they seem to expect all the data already to have been analysed, so that they can pronounce judgement upon it. Do think there's an element of that in what he's doing? You would provide an analytical method that would give him that data he would interpret.
PH: Possibly. This is a very, very indirect answer to your question, but [there is one thing] that always struck me as interesting about European prehistory. Andrew Sherratt wrote his paper in 1981 claiming that there was a 'Secondary Products Revolution'. I reckon that that is one of the most important papers written in European prehistory; I also think it's essentially untrue, if one can use such conservative terms as true and untrue. The interesting thing is that he notion of a Secondary Products Revolution is related to shifts in settlement patterns and therefore related to shifts in residence and all sorts of knock-on effects for material culture. It's actually been picked up very widely: Steve Shennan uses it, Julian Thomas uses it. I read something even today....
MFL: It may be one of the most widely referenced articles in European archaeology.
PH: Yes, and basically lots of people who are operating out of a broadly post-processual framework of interpretation are very happy to assume that model is true. Now, to know whether there ever was a Secondary Products Revolution or not, you need to have good biological methods, to know whether dairying and wool harvesting were going on. So it seems to be very ironic that one of the things that one is castigated in the post-processualist literature for pursuing -- because it's far too boring and determinist and all the rest of it -- actually underpins much of the literature -- the assumption that we know that to be the case.
MCG: Do you think that almost practical naiveté -- an unwillingness to engage at that level -- that has characterised post-processual archaeology for too long? Do you think it's now changing? Do you see work that's changing that?
PH: I think inevitably there's a fusion. Just take our department. In some ways I think it's a very good example, because, I think, the great achievement of Sheffield, as compared to Cambridge, we have people who occupy pretty much the whole range of between hard-line post-processual attitudes to hard-line processual, or even pre-processual, attitudes, and they all manage to talk to each other. I think one of the reasons that happens is that people are actually much happier to borrow theory and method as appropriate, rather than being too laboured by labels.
MFL: I feel that I should mention that this whole discourse has probably now changed that we're operating under the gaze of John Barrett.
[Laughter]
PH: I think that's quite appropriate, since I'd like to say something about John Barrett.
[Laughter]
After I came to Sheffield and long before he came here, John Barrett came to a seminar, a lunchtime seminar. I can't actually remember what the seminar was, but basically he was talking very generally about archaeological theory and method, and he was castigating Binford, as I guess he's obliged to do, and I was very struck by the fact that the rules that John was trying to set up for how one practises archaeology were very Binfordian. I tackled him with this afterward, and it didn't go down very well. But now he's here, and it seems to me very appropriate. I have many colleagues -- John [Barrett], John Moreland, Mike Parker Pearson, Mark Edmonds -- who, I guess, would identify themselves in terms of 'theory' with post-processualism... but we do still manage to talk about issues like how does one know something about what happened in the past, from the archaeological record. We manage to do it without passing each other like trains in the night. I think that's very important.
MFL: A moment ago you characterised yourself as an 'environmental determinist'. Do you think that is true, or are you just casting yourself as the opposition or as the sceptic in the department?
PH: No. I would like to think I'm not. If you read from a very early stage the whole post-processual critique of environmental-economic archaeology, it seems to me that criticism was essentially unfair, in that from the point when David Clarke and his students were influenced by ecological archaeology, the notion that nature determines culture had ceased to be a necessary precondition for identifying a bone!
* * *
I would say very categorically that I do not believe in environmental determinism; I don't think you have to look very far to see that people conduct different [economic] strategies.
MFL: So you were just being Hodder's gadfly, in that anecdote you just told us?
PH: Well, yes. The label 'environmental determinist' is certainly not one that I would willingly apply to myself, but I think there is a problem, or there certainly has been a problem in the past, in the post-processual critique in the assumption that anyone who looks at a bone or a seed is an environmental determinist. I would say that's far from true; I think it's a very cheap form of argument.
MCG: Do you think that as a result of the setting up of dichotomies within departments and, particularly, between different areas of disciplines which has not been helpful in the development of theoretical and practical methods?
PH: I think that's absolutely true. I can't speak for many departments: I know a bit about the Cambridge department and that these divides, which have always been strong, can be very unhealthy. I think Sheffield's very different, and I think a very good example of the difference, of both directions, comes from about five years ago, when Ian Hodder came to give a seminar in Sheffield, in the evening, and he was taken by the seminar organisers to the pub, where John Moreland was conducting a seminar with the environmental MSc students. Ian Hodder was shocked that John Moreland should be giving seminars to environmental MSc students. He told John,'Look, what are you doing giving a seminar to that group?', and I thought that told you lots about the difference between the two institutions, because to us it never seemed remotely odd that John had been deliberately brought into that course to bring in another view -- other than that offered by people like myself and Glynis who taught the course.
MFL: To promote debate.
PH: Exactly. I thought the fact that Ian found that so incredible spoke reams about Cambridge, and ultimately, it's why Sheffield is a much better place to be than Cambridge.
Copyright © assemblage 1998