Table Of ContentArchaeological Situations
This book is an introduction to theory in archaeology – but with a difference.
Archaeological Situations avoids talking about theory as if it was something you
apply but rather as something embedded in archaeological practice from the start.
Rather than see theory as something worked from the outside in, this book
explores theory from the inside out, which means it focuses on specific
archaeological practices rather than specific theories. It starts from the kinds of
situations that students find themselves in and learn about in other archaeology
courses, avoiding the gap between practice and theory from the very beginning. It
shows students the theoretical implications of almost everything they engage in as
archaeologists, from fieldwork, recording, writing up and making and assessing an
argument to exploring the very nature of archaeology and justifying its relevance.
Essentially, it adopts a structure which attempts to pre-empt one of the most
common complaints of students taking theory courses: how is this applicable?
Aimed primarily at undergraduates, this book is the ideal way to engage students
with archaeological theory.
Gavin Lucas is professor of archaeology at the University of Iceland. His main
research interests are in archaeological method and theory and the archaeology
of the modern world. He has published several books on archaeological theory,
most recently Writing the Past (2019) and Making Time (2021), both published
with Routledge.
Archaeological Situations
Archaeological Theory from the Inside Out
Gavin Lucas
Cover image: Cover image by Gavin Lucas
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Gavin Lucas
The right of Gavin Lucas to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-56545-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-56010-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09829-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003098294
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Boxes ix
Acknowledgements xi
Read This First 1
1 Who’s Afraid of Theory? 5
2 Doing Fieldwork 22
3 Making Records 53
4 Writing Up 84
5 Building a Case 115
6 Doing Research 141
7 Defining the Discipline 165
Coda: Theorizing Without Theory 192
Index 195
Figures
1.1 Some contemporary responses to the current state of theory 6
2.1 Section drawing showing the interpretive problems of an
interface: is the top of deposit 1203 a surface or a cut – perhaps
a horizontal continuation of the cut 1211? 26
2.2 A comparison of two context sheets (left: Cambridge
Archaeology Unit; right: Ardnamurchan Transitions Project) 27
2.3 Excavating the edge: Tony Baker excavates a second- and
third-century “corn dryer”, finding the edge of the clay
foundation from the flue’s infill deposit 31
2.4 Students planning with traditional tapes and paper (left) and a
total station (right) at the university fieldschool in Iceland 33
2.5 Recording sensory distances over which sound (human shout
and conversation, wooden whistle and stone striking) can be
heard and human body movements can be communicated 37
2.6 Different levels of community engagement 45
2.7 Andrew Dafnis, Homeless Heritage project, surveying Turbo
Island, Bristol, in 2010 48
3.1 The DIKW or data pyramid 55
3.2 The data trail 57
3.3 Map of excavations at Longstanton and Oakington, 5 km
northwest of Cambridge (Northstowe Phases 1 & 2 [2014–2019]).
The excavated areas revealed Middle to Late Iron Age, Roman
and fifth- to seventh-century CE settlements, alongside other
sites based on comprehensive trenching, geophysics and airborne
transcription program [2005–2007, 2020–2021]. What data can
you draw out from this map? 59
3.4 Extract from the CIDOC CRM pertaining to the category of
“thing”; what kind of ontology does this entail? 65
3.5 Vessel types used for liquid and semi-solid foods in the
Potomac typological system (POTS) which attempted to
connect emic and etic classifications by matching terms
from documentary sources (mostly probate inventories) with
excavated pottery forms 68
Figures vii
3.6 Conceptual oppositions structuring a medieval longhouse in
Dartmoor, England. Although not explicitly presented as a
structuralist archaeology, the influence of structuralism in this
example is clear 69
3.7 Making a pot: island of Sifnos, Greece 72
3.8 The Holywell witch bottle 74
4.1 The fragmentation and synthesis of the archaeological process 90
4.2 The architecture of the Rigny excavation archive 94
4.3 In the Virtual World of Second Life, Ruth Galileo stands on top
of Okapi Island, aka the East Mound of Çatalhöyük, Turkey,
surveying her team’s construction in 2007–2008 of Neolithic
houses (based on the South archaeological area) and, on the
right, the shelter over the BACH archaeological area 97
4.4 Principal genres in archaeology and their relation to
disciplinary knowledge 100
4.5 Principal modes of address in writing with hypothetical examples 106
5.1 Two views of archaeological knowledge. Left: jigsaw model,
where the goal is to fill in the blanks by simply accumulating
more pieces (induction). Right: crossword model, where the
goal is to fill in the blanks by ensuring coherence between the
pieces and correspondence with the clues 118
5.2 Diagram showing the structure of hypothesis testing in
Lucero’s example 120
5.3 Diagram showing the structure of IBE in Bogaard’s example.
Four hypotheses (H1-H4) are tested against three strands of
evidence. Ticks indicate the presence of evidence showing only
one hypothesis (H4) withstands all three tests 123
5.4 Diagram showing the structure of arguments adapted from an
example in Chapman and Wylie (2016). A claim of provenance
is made on the basis of specific data linked by warrants; note
the criticisms (rebuttals) which largely focus on the warrants as
the weak link in the argument 126
5.5 The hermeneutic spiral 129
5.6 The evidential relations and Peircean semiotics of fingerprints 133
5.7 Three types of binary thinking based on the nature of the
relation between two concepts 137
6.1 Working out the value of a plate using George Miller’s CC indices 151
6.2 Formal analogy between prehistoric stone gorgets and
contemporary potter’s tools 155
6.3 Jemez tribal member Aaron Tosa collecting obsidian and
ceramic samples at the ancestral Jemez pueblo of Kwastiyukwa 161
7.1 A pavement on Mill Road, Cambridge, England; like an
archaeological site, it is mix of multiple past events whose
material presence persists in the present 167
viii Figures
7.2 Drift matter in Eidsbukta on the Sværholt peninsula, Finnmark,
Norway 172
7.3 A tree growing around a sign in a park in north London, 2014;
for whom does this sign matter? 174
7.4 The swinging pendulum of archaeology between the sciences
and humanities 177
7.5 Diagram showing the different degrees of integration between
multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research 182
7.6 Different ways to align archaeology depending on which
aspect is privileged 183
7.7 The artefact as metaphor for two ways of looking at the
archaeological record: as loss or as transformation (objects not
to the same scale) 185
8.1 A plot from Google Ngram viewer using the search term
“archaeological theory”. How well does this reflect the status
of theory in archaeology and if it does, what does it mean? 194
Boxes
1.1 The Three-Paradigms of Archaeological Theory 6
1.2 Three Views on the Relation Between Facts and
Theory in Archaeology 11
1.3 Levels of Archaeological Theory? 13
1.4 Strong and Weak Theory 15
2.1 Total Recovery? 23
2.2 The Context Sheet 27
2.3 Following the Cut 30
2.4 Paper Versus Pixels 31
2.5 Gendered Fieldwork 34
2.6 Phenomenology and Fieldwork 36
2.7 Sutton Hoo in the Summer of ’39 39
2.8 Research-Driven and Development-Led Excavation in Europe 41
2.9 What Do You Mean by Collaboration? 44
2.10 Community Archaeology as Intervention 47
3.1 What Do Maps Do? 58
3.2 AI and Machine Learning 62
3.3 Open Archaeology and Conceptual Reference Models (CRMs) 64
3.4 Making a Pot 71
3.5 Artefacts or Belongings? 75
3.6 Digital Collections and Archaeological Prosthetics 78
4.1 Honouring Ambiguity and Dealing With Doubt 87
4.2 Rigny Excavation: An Online Excavation Report 93
4.3 Virtual Reality at Çatalhöyük 96
4.4 Storytelling on the Acropolis 107
5.1 Hypothesis Testing and Mayan Household Rituals 119
5.2 A Process of Elimination: Modelling Neolithic Farming Practice
in Central Europe 122
5.3 Networks of Trade and Networks of Inference: the Case of the
Copper Ingots 125
5.4 Hermeneutics at Haddenham: Evolving Interpretations of a
Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure 128
5.5 Bodies of Evidence or Silent Witness? 131
