Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice

383 Pages·2014·18.93 MB·English

by  Robert Chapman

MATERIAL EVIDENCE
How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories
of evidence?
Material Evidence: Learning from archaeological practice takes a resolutely case-based
approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges,
instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data
as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out
norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence.
Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material
evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with
cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent trans-
formation of landscapes over the long term. The contributors to Material Evidence
identify particular types of evidence with which they grapple and consider, with
reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims,
critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural
past.
Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars
are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and
as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One
of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best
practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer
archaeologists and those in related fields.
Bob Chapman is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of
Reading, UK. His research focuses on archaeological theory, Mediterranean later
prehistory, the development of human inequality, and the means by which this can
be studied with archaeological data. He has pursued these interests in fieldwork
projects in southeast Spain and the Balearic Islands, as well as in books such as The
Archaeology of Death (1981), Emerging Complexity (1990) and Archaeologies of
Complexity (2003). In recent years his research has turned increasingly to the use
of historical materialism in archaeological interpretation, especially in relation to
inequality and human exploitation. Running through this research activity has been
a strong concern for the nature of archaeological interpretation, working with
the complementary evidence of how people lived (e.g. what they produced,
exchanged, and consumed, centred on settlement evidence) and how they were
treated in death (e.g. their disposal, centred on burial evidence).
Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of
Washington, and Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. She is a
philosopher of the social and historical sciences who works on questions about
objectivity, evidence, and research ethics raised by archaeological practice and by
feminist research in the social sciences. Her longstanding interest in evidential
reasoning is represented by her book Thinking from Things (2002) and by her
contributions to Evidence, Inference and Enquiry (ed. Dawid, Twining and Vasilaki,
2011), How Well do ‘Facts’ Travel? (ed. Morgan 2010), and Agnatology (ed. Proctor
and Schiebinger 2008). In recent work she focuses on the role of contextual values
in science and on how research can be improved by internal diversity and by
collaborations that extend beyond the research community. These interests are
reflected in Value-free Science? (co-edited with Kincaid and Dupré 2007) and
Epistemic Diversity and Dissent (edited for Episteme 2006), as well as in essays on
stewardship and feminist standpoint theory.
MATERIAL EVIDENCE
Learning from
archaeological practice
Edited by Robert Chapman
and Alison Wylie
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie for selection and editorial matter;
individual contributions, the contributors.
The right of Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie to be identified as the author
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, 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.
Cover image: Rock and rock art – an example of material evidence in context,
photographed by Andrew Cochrane and Aaron Watson (copyright Andrew Jones).
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
Material evidence : learning from archaeological practice/edited by
Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Archaeology—Philosophy. 2. Archaeology—Methodology.
3. Material culture.
I. Chapman, Robert, 1949– editor. II. Wylie, Alison, editor.
CC72.M39 2014
930.1028—dc23 2014029219
ISBN: 978-0-415-83745-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83746-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73927-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton
CONTENTS
List of figures ix
List of maps xiii
List of tables xv
List of contributors xvii
1 Material evidence:learning from archaeological practice 1
Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman
PART I
Fieldwork and recording conventions 21
2 Repeating the unrepeatable experiment 23
Richard Bradley
3 Experimental archaeology at the crossroads:a contribution to
interpretation or evidence of ‘xeroxing’? 42
Martin Bell
4 ‘Proportional representation’:multiple voices in archaeological
interpretation at Çatalhöyük 59
Shahina Farid
5 Integrating database design and use into recording
methodologies 79
Michael J.Rains
vi Contents
6 The tyranny of typologies:evidential reasoning in
Romano-Egyptian domestic archaeology 92
Anna Lucille Boozer
PART II
Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of
external expertise and technologies 111
7 The archaeological bazaar:scientific methods for sale? Or:
‘putting the “arch-”back into archaeometry’ 113
Mark Pollard and Peter Bray
8 Radiocarbon dating and archaeology:history,progress and
present status 128
Sturt W.Manning
9 Using evidence from natural sciences in archaeology 159
David Killick
10 Working the digital:some thoughts from landscape archaeology 173
Marcos Llobera
11 Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology 189
Sara Perry
PART III
Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination,
and triangulation 211
12 Uncertain on principle:combining lines of archaeological
evidence to create chronologies 213
Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle
13 Lessons from modelling Neolithic farming practice:methods
of elimination 243
Amy Bogaard
14 Evidence,archaeology and law:an initial exploration 255
Roger M.Thomas
Contents vii
15 Law and archaeology:Modified Wigmorean Analysis 271
Terence J.Anderson and William Twining
16 Traditional knowledge,archaeological evidence,and other
ways of knowing 287
George Nicholas and Nola Markey
PART IV
Broader perspectives: material culture as object and
evidence 309
17 Evidence of what? On the possibilities of archaeological
interpretation 311
Gavin Lucas
18 Meeting pasts halfway:a consideration of the ontology of
material evidence in archaeology 324
Andrew Meirion Jones
19 Matter and facts:material culture and the history of science 339
Simon Werrett
Index 353
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FIGURES
2.1 Outline plan of South Lodge Camp 28
2.2 Outline plan of the later excavation of South Lodge Camp 30
2.3 A nineteenth-century photograph of the ‘Yak’s Quarter’ 32
2.4 Croftmoraig stone circle: (a) proposed structural sequence in 1971;
(b) revised in 2012 34
2.5 (a) General view of Croftmoraig stone circle. (b) View towards the
summit of Schiehallion 38
2.6 Midsummer sunset at Schiehallion viewed from the raised
ground behind the stone circle 39
3.1 The experimental earthwork at Overton, Wiltshire, excavated 1992 48
3.2 The Moel-y-Gerddi roundhouse at Butser 49
3.3 Excavation of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse at St Fagans, 2009 50
3.4 Plan of artefact distributions in the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse 51
3.5 (a) The wall line of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse. (b) The
wattle-and-daub wall of the Moel-y-Gaer roundhouse with a
decayed wood stake in the ground 54
4.1 Composite of single context plans of North Area, Çatalhöyük 62
4.2 Harris matrix of temporal succession of archaeological contexts at
Çatalhöyük 62
4.3 Hodder’s 12-point plan towards reflexive methods 64
4.4 Priority tour of the foundation trench excavations, North Area,
Çatalhöyük, 2007 68
4.5 Proforma recording forms in use in Building 77, North Area,
Çatalhöyük, 2011 73
4.6 Team seminar in preparation for publication, Çatalhöyük, 2010 75
5.1 IADB – part of a stratigraphic matrix and a composite plan 81
5.2 A facsimile context record in the IADB 86