by Hugh M. Lewis

1. Archaeology is what Archaeologists do (in situ.)

2. Different archaeologists are always doing something differently (in different settings.)

The object of this brief essay is to step for the moment beyond the arena of the on-going debate about the status of Archaeology and archaeological knowledge in the world. The reason for doing this is in order to define from a larger perspective the outer delineation of archaeological knowledge in the understanding of process, context and the empiricism of science. The call for a genuine archaeology of archaeology stands in contradistinction to the role of archaeology as a cross-disciplinary endeavor serving one agenda or another. This call is an important one, I believe, from the standpoint of the identity of Archaeology and its place and role in the larger world. It is especially important for those who are called archaeologists to seek their own identity in this world relative to other disciplines and professional interests. Archaeology has frequently been made the pawn of political ideologies, socio-economic constraints and cultural-symbolic attitudes, sometimes willingly or unwittingly. Its strength and survival as a coherent discipline in a contemporary world that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the patterns of the present will be found in its discovery and forging of a common ground of knowledge and understanding that can transcend the role of science as disinterested inquiry in service of other's ends.

Before proceeding, it is important to highlight C. P. Snow's contradistinction between the Sciences and the Humanities in his classic work The Two Cultures. The social sciences in general, including History and Archaeology, stand in an anomalous position in this debate, as these areas represent both aspects of the so-called hard sciences as well as vital components of the Humanities, as in literature, philosophy, art, and religion. This puts fields like Archaeology upon the horns of a dilemma that has fostered a crises of theoretical and methodological identity for many practitioners, and this basic dilemma informs a great proportion of the dialectical articulation of the field in professional forums of publishing as well as in the academic departments in which they are variously situated. I would go further to claim that this fundamental dialectic, one of nature and culture, goes even deeper in its symbolic roots of human consciousness and identity, and possibly underlies most theoretical and methodological diatribe that influences thought and praxis in this field today. I would claim, as Snow suggested, that the social sciences in general, and fields like Archaeology in particular, are in effect a third academic culture that has arisen in an intermediate position in relation to the rise of the natural sciences in preeminent importance in dialectical contrast to the traditional humanities. I would claim furthermore, that just because the social sciences tend to occupy an intermediate position in the landscape of academic knowledge, they are no less scientific, or no less concerned with the central objectives of science, than are the physical or biological sciences in general. There is no real paradox in this statement, as the sciences themselves can have entirely humanistic dimensions as well.

Our ability to step beyond the boundaries of the central dialectic informing Archaeology rests in the understanding and application of an approach in the physical sciences to the problem of determinacy and uncertainty upon fundamental levels. Niels Bohr made the connection between complementary modes of explanation in his famous essay "Complementarity and Causality" (1958) and he has suggested that the status of knowledge in the physical sciences is basically the same as that for the study of both biology and human culture. The dialectic can be framed another way, distinguishing between analytical reductionism on one hand and synthetic (or synergistic) holism on the other. The ability to step beyond the bounds of a dialectic such as that which informs Archaeology rests on the capacity on one hand to engage the terms of the dialectic, in as an objective and self-evident manner as possible within our limited language capabilities, and on the other, to fit the entire dialectic within a relativistic framework that construes its relationships to other forms of knowledge that condition it in critical if under-determined ways.

Before proceeding with my argument, I want to briefly retrace what I see to be the fundamental history and reason for this kind of dialectic in Archaeology. In a general sense, archaeological thought tends to superimpose the symbolic order of today upon the framework of the past. Archaeologists do this because they share in a culture, not just in a professional academic culture of archaeology, but in a larger cultural world in which this archaeology is situated. At no period of the history of archaeology does archaeology stand or occur completely apart from the culture history of its own making and its own contemporary world. Often, the ideological or paradigmatic commitments of our logic are transparent to us as culture bearers, much less how these kinds of implications may affect the work we do or the world we seek or find in the past tense.

The basis for this approach to an archaeology of archaeology stems from the development of natural systems theory as an approach to organizing scientific worldview, knowledge and praxis in the modern setting. Scientific knowledge has grown vastly complex and specialized in the last few decades of the twentieth century especially. No single human being is capable of comprehending, in a universal manner, the entire genius that modern science represents. This general situation of the status of scientific knowledge in our world has foisted upon us, as scholars and as human beings, a primary problem and a responsibility to resolve the problem. Science leads to a form of knowledge that alters the reality upon which it is based, and this knowledge therefore creates a general sense of metaethical responsibility.

Natural systems theory arose as an antidote the central problems created by the contemporary status of knowledge in the world. These problems I would claim to be the following:

1. the issue of comprehensiveness of knowledge,

2. the problem of coherent worldview and an accurate sense of reality that is rooted in science

3. the problem of the integration of reality and scientific knowledge upon multiple levels

4. the problem of the physical, biological and anthropological relativity of scientific knowledge

5. finally, the problem of the role of humankind in the articulation, advancement and preservation of knowledge, as well as of the system itself upon which this knowledge is based and to which it refers

Finding the provenience of an archaeology of archaeology within this framework rests with the realization that natural patterns in reality are stratified upon different levels, and that the cultural systems created by human beings occupy their own unique place in the larger scheme of things, as well as the resulting structures that humans have produced that did not previously occupy a place in this grand scheme, but have come to have a logical and teleological reality in the relationship between the human being and its environment. Thus, the stratigraphy of the landscape of knowledge comes to take on a similar kind of depositional patterning as the natural stratigraphy of the geological landscape. It has its own complex history and follows its own chaotic future of development.

Before proceeding, the foremost aspect of human systems is the inherent derivative and elaborative complexity of the patterning and relationships of their phenomenal event structures and state-path trajectories. All structures are inherently underdetermined, and this entails that no formulaic law-like properties can be found applicable to human systems without exception and elaboration. It also entails as well that social science fields like archaeology will probably never achieve the degree of theoretical unification or comprehensiveness found for instance in biology and to a lesser degree in the natural sciences, because: 1) it is impossible to study ourselves in a disembodied manner, therefore it is impossible to separate what is natural from what might be culturally constructed; 2) the social sciences confront the dilemmas of the anthropological relativity of knowledge in a direct way; 3) our symbolic language of science is intrinsically insufficient to the task of scientific theory construction upon this complex, derivative level of reality. The result is that paradigmatic unification within the social sciences, including archaeology, becomes an ideological impossibility (or, put another way, only possible ideologically). Whatever scientific comprehensiveness does develop in any of these disciplines, will be only partially paradigmatic and incomplete at best.

The basis for human systems theory, as this is provenienced within a larger natural framework, is in understanding the dynamics of the anthropological construction of reality. Humans have elaborated symbolic culture as a result of their evolution that intermediates in all ways their relationship to their environment. This has lead to a process of the symbolic displacement of biological control mechanisms and brain-based behavioral patterns that have tended to close the life-worlds of our precursors. This pattern is reflected in our language, in our social relations, in our thoughts, and in our actions. As a result of this process, we have come to elaborate and depend upon an increasingly sophisticated and differentiated cultural world that has both material and mental components and that is both technological and ideological in orientation. Humans have constructed their own cultural realities that are unavoidably symbolic in function and expression. From a natural systems standpoint, it can be said that human system are extremely complex and undetermined as systems--they therefore tend to be chaotic in their pattern.

I would claim that in the understanding of human systems that is important to an archaeological perspective, we must consider the stratigraphy of human knowledge as much as we consider the stratigraphy of the unknown past that is embedded in the ground beneath our feet. This sense of noetic stratigraphy is as important to the analysis and interpretation of site evidence and provenience as much as it is important to framing archaeological knowledge within a larger landscape of learning and action. In the definition of an archaeology of archaeology, I would claim that archaeologist should pay attention to the relationship between several principles of human systems in general:

1. Culture is psychologically internalized & behaviorally shared.

2. Culture is symbolically isomorphic between internalized representations and externalized manifestations, including material culture.

3. Culture is socially transmitted and learned.

4. Culture is historically transient and developmentally dynamic.

In the larger context of history, of a history of people dealing with other people, of conflicts and exchange between different groups of people, there is a clear sense that the alleged inherent conservativism of culture does not hold in the proverbial structure of the long run. Even cultural groupings that are relatively isolated from the mainstreams of humanity experience differential drift in terms of their cultural features. In the long run, all cultures a historically ephemeral. (By history I refer to the study of the larger structure of the past, whether prehistoric or literate.) Archaeological history(or, more to the point, the prehistoric study of the Past) provides the most comprehensive framework possible within human systems theory, including the broadest empirical foundation, for the framing of the social sciences. The study of culture and society is therefore properly embedded within this larger "historical" framework. Beyond this, we can say something like the following:

5. Culture is constructed, therefore the artifacts of culture are the evidence of this construction process.

6. Culture is symbolically arbitrary--there are no necessary predeterminations to the pattern of its expression.

7. Culture is always environmentally situated--it is materially constrained in basic ways by its larger bio-geophysical context, which can include other groups of people as well.

8. Culture leads to socio-environmental circumscription, and increasing probabilities for conflict as well as for systemic integration.

We can see then the unique place that Archaeology plays in this elaboration of human systems theory. Archaeology in method primarily concerns the recovery and record of human artifacts and naturfacts in situ, in context to other forms of information relative to the site and its location in a larger setting. There are basic fundamental methods that are common to most if not all archaeological sites, and the basic means for recording, translocating, preserving, dating and analyzing the significant remains of a site are now standard practice. If we are to believe Thomas Kuhn's argument on the paradigmatic revolutions in science, then we must see that archaeology has come to define itself as normal science through its standard field practices and techniques. It is in the other, interpretive end of archaeology that the real issues arise.

Archaeology in theory is primarily concerned therefore with the interpretation of these material remains within the context in which they were originally discovered, and within a larger set of contexts that includes knowledge from other sites, other places, other times, other peoples, and from other disciplines of knowledge as well. Archaeological theory is thus preoccupied with the drawing of critical inferences from the observable relationships within and between the material data they discover, and that’s forthcoming from the detailed analysis of this data using various techniques and standards, and applying these inferences both to the construction (not reconstruction) of a past world and to understanding the constructions of the present and possible future.

The problem with drawing inferences from archaeological data is that most of this data is mute as to the actual histories leading to their deposition and to the actual realities of the people that created them in the first place. Every artifact, even a primitive stone tool, has at least one or more symbolic dimensions to their construction, functional existence, deposition and provenience, but this symbolic dimension is cast in cultural contexts and frameworks that have long since gone. We end up with only incomplete pieces of a larger jig-saw puzzle as to the people who made, used and lost the things found in the ground.

It is not that inferences cannot be made, but that, especially when the data is scarce and the gaps in the record large, as in the case of the paleontological record of early hominids, they are made with a certain inherent uncertainty or indeterminancy for which there is no other antidote except for improved, vigorous reasoning or ratiocination on one hand that does not exclude the vital role of speculation and intuition in hypothetical construction, and an improved empirical record upon which to work, on the other.

Beyond inference structures, there is model building and heuristic problem solving that is tied to the challenge of representing in simplified, limited terms what seem to be unlimited and complex realities. I would claim that archaeological models, like the methods upon which they are usually based, tend to be quite conservative and data-bound. It is only in the overextension of symbolic reference, usually drawn from some present, if implicit point of reference, that archaeological model building tends toward speculative disaster when it strays very far beyond the narrow world of the dig itself. This is generally not the fault of archaeology, except when it becomes a constraining culture, so much as it tends to be the fault of the archaeologist who constrains the culture in anthropologically unenlightened ways.

Finally, archaeology in archaeological practice concerns the operationalization of research projects and agendas, and the larger articulation, rationalization, presentation and interpretation of the role and practice of archaeology in the larger contemporary world as well as in the past worlds that it attempts to construct. In this we can only observe that human beings are far from perfect, and that the Past as an idealized present always serves as an ideological mirror, and rationalization, for the present.

The central effort of an archaeology of an archaeology to step beyond revisionism of the past in terms either of the present or that are either entirely false or fictional, entails that it adopts a neutral and objective attitude toward the data that represents the past, and that seeks in its interpretation a credible middle ground that may nevertheless have room enough for speculative and hypothetical models to be queried and evaluated. It entails an honest and open approach to the data, as well as to the entire project of doing anthropology, that allows us to interpret the "facts" in the data for what they are in and of themselves, and not for what we wish to make of them.

To proceed one step further, relating archaeology to the other social sciences in particular, archaeological knowledge as well as anthropological knowledge owes a debt to the archaic old European culture history approach, not for its supposition of "Geist" at the hub of the wheel of culture, but for the exhaustive philological preoccupation with the excoriation of minutiae and its analysis in reference to larger contexts of knowledge and data, both emic and etic. In this regard, archaeology serves both in the hermeneutical interpretation of artifacts and their contexts, and in the critical evaluation of these artifacts and construction of these contexts. This is a practice that is standard to archaeology that it shares, more or less, with the disciplines of anthropology, history, and even, dare I say, philosophy and religion (or at least folklore, maybe.) It is what I would say comprises the hermeneutics of reason and the systematic exploration of meaning in the world. Textual hermeneutics combines with artifactual hermeneutics to create a larger framework of for the critical evaluation of the past in situ.

It thus becomes apparent that an archaeology of archaeology rests upon the common ground that archaeologists can find between themselves and the rest of the world, in terms of what they do, say and think, that is in situ with the past that they seek to represent by means of their data constructions. This common ground is found not just in sharing the same or related sites, or in sharing the same or related cultures of the past or the present, but in sharing the same basic culture of archaeology that has developed as a science and a humanity with all its complexities and uncertainties, that has its own unique sense of history and development and role in the world. It is through the realization of this shard culture that archaeologists can bring the past back to life as if it were but yesterday.

Finally, in closing, I wish to return to the central dialectical issue, and to address the interdisciplinary status of archaeology in the landscape of modern knowledge. Archaeology shares its culture with a larger realm of knowledge than just itself. Astronomers and physicists sometimes turn to archaeology to find evidence for ancient star-gazing and prehistoric star-charts and a deeper understanding of the heavens that was rooted in ways of knowing. Biologists also sometimes turn archaeologist, not only in the recognition of humankind as a kind of mammal, but in terms of the ecology and landscape that the past provides. Anthropologists and archaeologists have long dwelled within the same academic corridors, more often like bickering brothers who none-the-less stand up for one another in a pinch. Archaeology occupies a unique provenience within this larger landscape. It has its neighbors and its kindred.

Archaeology comes into its own when Anthropology uses the models and constructs it provides in order to discuss the past of the peoples of the world that it studies in a meaningful manner. Archaeology can inform Anthropology upon the significances of the past for the present as much as anthropology has been used to inform archaeology of the significances of the present to interpret the past. In the larger sense of the past, there is no necessary dividing line between history and archaeology. Archaeology interpenetrates historical accounts. The dialectical variation found in Archaeology, the effort to provide new insights and dimensions of meaning into the record of the past, is a sign of the productivity and health of the profession that does not remain stuck on anachronistic formula.

The beginning of an archaeology of archaeology is not so much an excavation of the stratigraphic history of the discipline, though this may be a part of it. Archaeology will find itself in the recognition that in human systems, culture is first and foremost always a shared and constructed reality. This entails that cultural transmission does not conform to biological, ecological, mechanical or geological principles, so much as it conforms to its own sense of order in the symbolic mediation of reality and in reciprocities between different people. These other variables only intervene in the central processes to muddle up our models. It is in the sharing of culture that we find the reality of archaeological culture, as well as the rise and fall of great civilizations. This applies to the current culture of archaeology as much as it applied to the first cultural groupings of our ancestors. If we are to accept Thomas Kuhn's history of science that determines that paradigmatic unity is based upon a consensus of agreement of basic knowledge within a field of inquiry, then we can find a common paradigm of archaeology in its basic methods, in its basic theoretical models and model building that are tied to the constructions of the past, and in its common purposes to which it is frequently used in relation to the present.

*****

Anthropology is either a science or it is nothing. Anthropology contains history, but it is not history. Anthropology contains biology, but it is not this either. Anthropology may involve humanistic inquiry, but it is not subsumed by comparative literature or philological criticism. Anthropology shares synthetically and eclectically in many different disciplines, because Anthropology is an open system of knowledge, but Anthropology is not merely disinterested inquiry in the service of greater human inequality.

The central object of the science of Anthropology is the study of human reality in all its varied manifestations, especially from a cross-cultural and trans-historical frame of reference. These include the subjects of human biology, society, culture, psychology, language, knowledge, the problem of the past, and the predicament of the present and future, as well as a variety of other related issues. Anthropology involves also the social construction of reality, but reality as a human social construction is part of a larger natural universe.

The foundations of Anthropology as a distinct science are: 1. its inductive empiricism; 2. its cross-cultural comparativism; 3. its general anthropological relativism that takes many forms and guises; 4. its recognition of and control over ethnocentrism and other forms of bias; 5. its naturalistic descriptivism and social realism of explication. Many different methods and forms of analysis may be used in the process of ethnographic fieldwork and ethnology, but the basic method of participant-observation remains the tried and true mainstay of the ethnographic tool-kit, just as excavation remains the foundation of archaeological research.

The central issues important to the articulation of anthropological research remain the eternal verities of the human predicament, and include the psychic unity of humankind, the worldview problem, the problem of enculturation and cultural integration, human social organization and relation, culture transmission, change and dynamics, and the enduring features and tendencies of human nature that so preoccupied Shakespeare.

Archaeology is an intrinsic and inseparable part of anthropology that has as its primary interest the problem of the human past. Archaeology has contributed as much to cultural anthropology as the latter has given back to it. It has had a critical influence upon Anthropology in terms of its knowledge, its conceptual systems and theory and its methodological systems and tools, and the influence between Archaeology and Anthropology has always been reciprocal.

Anthropology has in the last decade especially lost both an objective sense of itself as a science, and a sense of its principle subject and object of inquiry, the human other. Anthropological research is founded upon the premise that it is not only possible to study the other in an objective manner, but that it is necessary to do so if we are to have a genuinely scientific understanding of the range of human variation and the common principles all people share in their behavior.

Anthropologists and Archaeologists alike share the same sets of ethical obligations to themselves, to one another as professionals, to the people whom they seek to study and understand, and to humankind in general for their knowledge. A part of this professional ethos is to the expert practice and articulation of their field as a value-free perspective on the human condition. This is an ideal that is rarely achieved. Anthropologists set their own professional standards whether in the field or in the department, and this includes preventing the misappropriation of their standards of practice by pretenders and amateurs.

The widespread loss of face for anthropology in the past decade has been due to a general failure of the field to realize its own professional sense and purpose in the world. To fail to recognize or acknowledge this general state of affairs in anthropology is to share by implicit denial in the problem itself. It has been due to the general promulgation of double-standards in hiring to academic positions and gate-keeping to academic forums that has entailed interference competition and privileged access. It has been the result of promotion of self-interests over the interests of the common good of the field. The net result has been not only a loss of potential knowledge about the world, but a loss of stature and credibility of anthropology as a legitimate scientific discipline in the world.

The crises of anthropology today runs deep and its symptoms are troubling evidence of a larger system to which it is attached that is failing to achieve significant progress in fundamental ways relating to alternative human development on earth. This comes as a grand paradox because anthropology as the first science of human reality stands in a strategic position to answer these kinds of problems that face all humankind.

Anthropology as a science remains as an institutionalized and corporate knowledge system greater than the professional people who practice it. No single anthropologist has a bottom line or a monopoly over the whole of anthropology, though many would undoubtedly strive to achieve this. Anthropological truth and knowledge therefore remain essentially independent of the institutional frameworks that appropriate and legitimize this knowledge. Anthropologists in the future would be wise and do better to remember this as they present themselves with more humility to the greater world around them.

There remains much we do not yet know about ourselves and one another. There is much that we have yet to learn and understand about our shared realities. This is the promise of the science of anthropology in our collective future.