Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology

265 Pages·2016·2.03 MB·English

by  Robert Chapman

Evidential Reasoning
in Archaeology
Debates in Archaeology
Series editor: Richard Hodges
Against Cultural Property, John Carman
The Anthropology of Hunter Gatherers, Vicki Cummings
Archaeologies of Conflict, John Carman
Archaeology: The Conceptual Challenge, Timothy Insoll
Archaeology and International Development in
Africa, Colin Breen and Daniel Rhodes
Archaeology and the Pan-European Romanesque, Tadhg O’Keeffe
Archaeology and State Theory, Bruce Routledge
Archaeology and Text, John Moreland
Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians, Peter S. Wells
Building Colonialism, Daniel T. Rhodes
The Byzantine Dark Ages, Michael J. Decker
Combat Archaeology, John Schofield
Debating the Archaeological Heritage, Robin Skeates
Early European Castles, Oliver H. Creighton
Early Islamic Syria, Alan Walmsley
Fishing and Shipwreck Heritage, Sean A. Kingsley
Gerasa and the Decapolis, David Kennedy
Image and Response in Early Europe, Peter S. Wells
Indo-Roman Trade, Roberta Tomber
Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership, Colin Renfrew
Lost Civilization, James L. Boone
The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor, Charles F. W. Higham
The Origins of the English, Catherine Hills
The Remembered Land, Jim Leary
Rethinking Wetland Archaeology, Robert Van de
Noort and Aidan O’Sullivan
The Roman Countryside, Stephen Dyson
Roman Reflections, Klavs Randsborg
Shaky Ground, Elizabeth Marlowe
Shipwreck Archaeology of the Holy Land, Sean Kingsley
Social Evolution, Mark Pluciennik
State Formation in Early China, Li Liu and Xingcan Chen
Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne, Richard Hodges
Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval
and Early Modern Japan, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere
Villa to Village, Riccardo Francovich and Richard Hodges
Evidential Reasoning
in Archaeology
Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc
First published 2016
© Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie, 2016
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.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2527-7
ePDF: 978-1-4725-3469-9
ePub: 978-1-4725-2893-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Series: Debates in Archaeology
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).
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: The Paradox of Material Evidence 1
1 Archaeological Evidence in Question: Working between
the Horns of a Dilemma 15
2 Archaeological Fieldwork: Scaffolding in Practice 55
3 Working with Old Evidence 93
4 External Resources: Archaeology as a Trading Zone 143
Conclusions: Reflexivity Made Concrete 203
Bibliography 217
Index 243
List of Illustrations
Table
4.1 Comparison of proposed origins for individuals in the later
Roman cemetery at Lankhills School, Winchester, based on
archaeological and isotope analyses. 189
Figures
All artwork created by the authors.
1.1 Toulmin’s argument schema: components and conditions. 34
1.2 A generic archaeological example of an evidential argument. 35
2.1 Plan of 1938–9 excavations at Little Woodbury, showing
timber houses, as well as more than one phase of
‘overlapping and intersecting features’. 64
2.2 Little Woodbury in relation to Greater Woodbury and
features of the surrounding landscape identified by aerial
photography. 66
2.3 Conflicting evidential arguments: Collingwood and Bersu
on excavated features at King Arthur’s Round Table. 70
2.4 Example of a single-context recording sheet. 78
2.5 Example of a schematic matrix representing the stratigraphic
sequence in trench 1 at Gatas in south-east Spain. 79
3.1 Glastonbury Iron Age village, floor ii, mound LXXIV,
showing baked clay hearth. 109
3.2 Glastonbury Iron Age village, section of superimposed
hearths of mound LXXIV. 110
List of Illustrations vii
3.3 Glastonbury Iron Age village, timber substructure and
palisade south-west of mound V. 110
3.4 Clarke’s modular unit for Glastonbury Iron Age village. 114
3.5 (Left) Clarke’s proposed Phase IV structures for Glastonbury
Iron Age village; (Right) Clarke’s ‘tentative social model of
the structural pattern’ for his Phase IV of Glastonbury Iron
Age village. 115
3.6 Glastonbury Iron Age village, North–South section through
the middle of mound XIII. 123
3.7 Comparison of (left) Clarke’s ‘speculative’ environmental
reconstruction of the Glastonbury Iron Age village territory
and (right) Aalbersberg and Brown’s most recent
palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. 128
3.8 The search for non-random patterning in Bulleid and Gray’s
‘amorphous agglomeration’ of features at Glastonbury. 132
4.1 The Childers site chronology: multiple lines of evidence
with diverse warrants and backing. 153
4.2 Distribution of copper oxhide ingots and ingot mould in
the central and east Mediterranean. 167
4.3 Lead isotope analysis of oxhide ingots from Sardinia and
the Apliki copper ore source in Cyprus. 173
4.4 Lead isotope analysis: evidential arguments constrained by
multiple rebuttals. 176
Acknowledgements
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
Lecture Series), and her CHESS (Centre for Humanities Engaging
Science and Society) colleagues at the University of Durham for
rigorous debate about ‘robustness’ reasoning and the inspiring example
they set as philosophers of science actively engaged with science
practice and policy.
In the course of writing this book we realized that we were not alone
in our frustration with the positions and debates we characterize as
dead ends in thinking about evidential reasoning, and that many of
our intuitions about more promising alternatives had been articulated
by intellectual forebears who, to varying degrees, have been read out of
our respective disciplinary canons. On the archaeology side, we have
been particularly influenced by David Clarke’s advocacy in 1973 for
building an ‘internal’ philosophy of archaeology, and inspired by the
example he sets for integrating philosophical reflection into research
practice. And on the philosophy side, we found in Stephen E. Toulmin’s
brief for attending to the Uses of Argument (1958) an articulation of a
philosophical stance that anticipates by several decades the pragmatic
turn we hope is successfully embodied in our case-grounded analyses
of evidential reasoning in archaeology.
Finally, we thank Martin Bell for suggesting we submit this book
to the Duckworth Debates in Archaeology series, the series editor
Richard Hodges for his enthusiastic support, Richard Bradley for
reading and offering constructive comments on drafts of Chapters 2
and 3, and Sarah Lambert-Gates and Rory Falconer for preparing the
illustrations. Charlotte Loveridge and Alice Wright at Bloomsbury gave
us encouragement and showed considerable patience with our several
delays to the book’s completion. Any errors or omissions are our fault.