Current Trends in Archaeological Theory


Kevin L. Callahan


  "Blest be the man that spares these
      stones.
  And curst be he that moves my
      bones"
          -Wm. Shakespeare's epitaph

PREFACE

This paper is divided into two parts. Chapter One is a general survey and 
background discussion of  theoretical developments in the discipline of 
archaeology in the twentieth century, and synthesizes the epistemological 
trends of culture-history, processualism and post-processualism. Chapter 
Two is a survey and discussion of developments in the sub-discipline of 
rock art studies and summarizes current theoretical trends.

CHAPTER ONE

DEVELOPMENTS IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY AS A WHOLE - EPISTEMOLOGY AND CULTURE-
HISTORY, PROCESSUALISM, AND POST-PROCESSUALISM.

Epistemology is concerned with how we know things. In archaeology there has 
been considerable discussion recently about epistemology and the need to 
consciously and deliberately explicate the assumptions underlying how we 
approach the study of material culture and how we reconstruct the past. 
This problem can be thought of as the problem of archaeological inference 
(Watson 1990). Can archaeologists accurately and safely infer past behavior 
and past beliefs and ideas from presently existing and possibly  transformed 
objects?

The history of how archaeology has been done in the twentieth century might 
be summarized into three broad approaches: description, explanation, and 
interpretation (Trigger 1989). These are now incorporated as primary phases 
in most contemporary archaeological excavation. The culture-history approach 
described and ordered artifacts in chronological sequences using stratigraphic 
excavation, stylistic seriation and eventually dendrochronology and radiocarbon 
dating. This descriptive approach dominated most of the Twentieth Century and 
produced as its final work product, charts and maps of cultures based upon 
artifacts, and cultural sequences and chronologies based upon excavation of 
stratigraphic layers. 

Although it  certainly described change over time of  artifacts and inferred 
cultures based upon changing artifact styles, its critics during the period 
of the New Archaeology, led by authors such as Lewis Binford (1962,1965,1968,
1972), argued that culture-history did little else. The New Archaeologists, 
who in a "toned down" form became the processualists, argued that meaning was 
rarely self-evident and the epistemology of the culture-history approach had 
simply assumed that history was all that we needed to know. The data and facts 
meant something historically and were viewed as fairly self-evident in meaning. 
The culture-historians were criticized by processualists because description 
alone was considered  insufficient to explain the meaning of artifacts. The 
New Archaeologists argued that archaeologists could be easily misled and could 
not know and explain what facts meant unless they became "scientific" and used 
the deductive-nomological or hypothetico-deductive methods of  hypothesis, 
testing, modification  and retesting until finally an approximation of the 
truth was achieved. The philosophy and model underlying this approach was 
logical positivism derived from the Enlightenment thinkers who answered the 
question of "how we know what we know" by arguing that we can only really 
"know" something if we use the methodology of science. The New Archaeologists 
asked what all those facts excavated by the culture-historians meant. They 
argued that so-called facts do not exist apart from theory and to understand 
and explain facts, archaeologists must interpret facts in light of theories 
and abstractions. They were also interested in asking new questions about why 
there was change over time, what the forms of social organization were, and 
what the adaption to the environment was by these societies i.e. what was the 
environment like and how was food and the other necessities of human life 
obtained. The New Archaeologists wondered how we could know that we were not 
just making it all up - a concern taken up by the post-processualists like 
Hodder (1986), Shanks (1987) and Tilley (1982) that followed. 

The New Archaeologists thus began to look to science and positivism for the 
way to say something with relative certainty about the past. With the 
scientific model of epistemology underlying their efforts, they began to 
search for covering laws for past societies that would be analogous to the 
covering laws found in physics or chemistry. Unfortunately, as the post-
processualists pointed out, the New Archaeologists have never been able to 
find a single covering law that was of any real importance. The post-
processualists, led by Ian Hodder (1986, 1989), and drawing on the post-modern 
movement and literary theory, looked elsewhere to literary studies - for a 
new model or trope for archaeological epistemology. Post-processualism 
questioned the assumptions of unbiased observation underlying the epistemology 
of positivist science. Arguing that theory preceeded seeing or perception, 
contextualists maintained that "science" was an ideology that filtered 
perception. Positivist science was itself called into question. Rather than 
looking for covering laws, post-processualists argued in favor of the 
importance of historical particularism, and a recognition of the presence in 
the archaeological record of previously unstudied particular individuals and 
groups such as women and minority groups. The post-processualists argued that 
the meaning of artifacts was contextual, cultural, and cognitive or ideational.
  Artifacts were significant for more than simply the study of the adaption to 
an environment of a system that could be described in a flow chart. The 
interpretation of artifacts using a hermeneutic and contextual approach was 
argued for, and a perceived male bias in contemporary interpretions of past 
objects was criticized . Male archaeologists were argued to have privileged 
investigation of  what they found interesting as males, overlooking the 
subjects and contributions of women and minorities to past societies and 
cultures.

MARXISM, CULTURAL ECOLOGY, SYSTEMS THEORY, AND POST-PROCESSUALISM

Although there were a wide variety of theoretical approaches to archaeology in 
the twentieth century, the foundational ideas are few and are arguably variants 
on Marxist ideas articulated in the nineteenth century. Karl Marx wrote that:


In the social production which men carry on, they enter into definite 
relationships that are indispensable and independent of their will; these 
relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their 
material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production 
constitutes the economic structure of society-the real foundation, on which 
rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite 
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life 
determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual 
processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their 
existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their 
consciousness ( Marx 1906).
Material conditions influence the non-material. Unlike the later archaeological 
simplifications of his ideas, such as cultural ecology, Marx recognized that 
the relationship between technology, social organization, and ideology was a 
dynamic one and dialectic in nature. People in pre-industrial societies 
buffered themselves against starvation by organizing themselves in shifting 
social organizations that responded in better or worse ways to changes in the 
environment. In this manner the influence of Darwinian evolutionary thinking  
lies at the base of much Marxist thinking - including that of the Cultural 
Ecologists. The materialism of Marxism, of course, tends to focus on the 
economic and environmental realm as driving the social system which responds 
and adjusts to that environment. In the case of ideology, religion masks or 
"opiates" the economic realities of unequal distribution of resources and 
differential access to the means of production. Both Marxism and cultural 
ecology share a profound materialistic view of human beings as economically 
"rational" thus often missing the influence of the "irrational" and  altered 
states of consciousness on the creation of ideology, the patterning of social 
organization, and superstructure. Religion may or may not be "the opiate of 
the masses," but "opiates" have arguably been at the heart of many religions 
that affected economic systems. Marx acknowledged that ideology and religion 
directly influence the economic base (Marx 1957). 

It has also been commonly observed that in times of economic stress, ritual 
and religious activity will increase. Recent studies of pre-industrial 
societies have indicated that most behavior is not focused on  economic 
activity either in hunter-gatherer societies or even in some agricultural 
societies. The industrialized nation states of the nineteenth century and 
the often two income post-modern workstyles of the information age are perhaps 
another matter. 

Kent Flannery in "The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations" (1972: 399-400) has 
noted the disaffection with purely ecological approaches that did not produce 
the hoped for explanatory power when applied to complex societies. Flannery 
viewed this failure to have been caused by the cultural ecologists’ focus on 
studying "techno-environmental matters" and the exchange of matter and energy, 
thus leaving the exchange of information to the humanists. Flannery cited the 
dangers of this development in theory by using as an example a perversion of 
a ritual regulatory mechanism that caused an evolutionary change in a Mexican 
village in Oaxaca. He argued for the incorporation of the study of "information"
 back into the ecosystem model of archaeology.

Elizabeth Brumfiel (1983) also suggested that ecological variables alone were 
insufficient to account for the formation of the Aztec state and a structural 
approach to the study of political dynamics or political ecology enhanced the 
understanding of how states emerge. The ecological approach of Julian Steward
 favoring population increase as the triggering mechanism for state formation 
was contrasted with that of Marx-Engels whose model "regards state formation 
as a process generated by particular sociocultural orders. Certain types of 
stratified societies for example, are said to possess an internal dynamic that 
exerts pressure for state formation even when the relationship between the 
human population and its environment is stable (Brumfiel 1983:261). Brumfiel 
felt that the "superior managerial capacity of state government" may have 
caused some states to form but that if states form in the absence of "a serious
disparity between population and resources" then internal forces within the 
system should be investigated (Brumfiel 1983:262-3). In the case of the 
formation of the Aztec state warfare was "rooted in the internal political 
dynamics of the pre-state politics" and centralization of authority occurred 
because "new political options suddenly [were] opened by the evolving dynamics 
of political interaction" including "the intensification of civil war, 
invasion, and shifting alliances" (Brumfiel 1983:266,270).  Brumfiel’s 
historically particular and politically detailed reconstruction of the 
formation of the Aztec state - full of human agency and historically specific 
political actors - ultimately seems more compelling and persuasive than the 
cultural-ecology hypothesis or Marx-Engels postulates or any of the state 
formation theories without similarly detailed supporting data.

A contrary and explicitly Marxist approach and conclusion was exemplified by 
Berbeck (1995) who argued that archaeologists working on state formation in 
Mesopotamia focused too narrowly on political organization and overlooked 
economic data. She concluded that: "Mesopotamian societies in the 6th millenium
 B.C. can be shown to be politically ‘stable’ but economically changing" 
(Bernbeck 1995:1). She also pointed out  that "change in the economic sphere 
need not necessarily be accompanied by change in the political sphere and vice 
versa" (Bernbeck 1995:1). Unlike Brumfiel’s study which was based partly upon 
ethnohistoric sources, Bernbeck unfortunately had only pottery, settlement 
patterns, building material, kilns and agricultural devices to work with.

William Sanders (1962:34) has argued for an historically particular cultural 
ecological approach in the study of mesoamerica civilizations, defining 
cultural ecology as "the study of the interaction of cultural processes with 
the physical environment." The environment was "an active, integrated part 
of the cultural system not a passive extra-cultural factor" (Sanders 1962:35). 
Mesoamerica was, of course, a diverse environment and the relationships between 
"environment, agricultural technology, and socio-political systems" were subtle
 (Sanders 1962:41). Although he favors the view that the development of 
civilization was a corollary development to urbanization occurring first in 
the humid highlands with intensive agriculture, he did not think that 
archaeological materials could yet resolve the outstanding conflict with the 
opposing view that it developed in the humid lowlands based upon slash and 
burn agriculture (Sanders 1962:42-3).

Interestingly, Karl W. Butzer (1980)  postulated that civilizations behave as 
adaptive systems rather than organic entities i.e. with a life cycle of birth, 
growth, and death. In his view civilizations become unstable "when a top-heavy 
bureaucracy makes excessive demands on the productive sector [and] breakdowns 
result from chance concatenations of mutually reinforcing processes, not from 
senility or decadence" (Butzer 1980:517). Citing the unique and very particular 
history of ancient Egypt, with information presumably from the hieroglyphic 
written histories, he concluded that the important systemic variables included 
1) "a progressive social pathology from a top-heavy and metastable 
sociopolitical pyramid," 2) leadership such as with the strong leadership of  
Ramses III [ramses3] (1182-1151 B.C), the first Ptolemies and the early Roman 
emperors, 3) foreign interventions, and 4) ecological stress from Nile behavior
(Butzer 1980:5). Butzer illustrates a cultural ecology approach that cites 
environmental stress as only one of many factors that in combination could 
cause a process of decline. His emphasis on other political events and 
historical particularity seems sophisticated and scholarly and recognized the 
complexity of the situation. It is not clear, however, how much of his 
information came from excavation archaeology and how much came from written 
texts. Whether or not the degree of focus and detail that Butzer achieved can 
be reproduced in the absence historical records is not clear.

SYSTEMS THEORY, PROCESSUALISM, AND POST-PROCESSUALISM
Systems Theory, borrowing much from information theory (developed to apply to 
businesses and  computers, but also living organisms), claimed like Marx, that 
there were three levels or subsystems of society: the ideological or religious,
 social organization, and technology (Flannery 1968, 1972). Each had a function
 and the structure of the network of relationships and feedback loops could be 
diagrammed with flow charts and arrows. The energy flow could be then observed 
and diagrammed in a metaphorical tribute to societies as computers or machines
that break down when the parts are not synchronized. The amount of information 
that flowed (in these pre-Internet societies) was a standard for how complex 
the society was. Systems theorists saw specialized states arising due to a need 
for information management. In this view change occurred from inside the 
machine. It was thought that through settlement studies and studies of 
hierarchies and wealth, correspondences could be made to reconstruct the 
society. Instead of Durkheimian organic and mechanical metaphors of society, 
the business and computer metaphor was adopted. 

Post-processualists would find this computer and machine metaphor for human 
organization to be lacking in a recognition of human cognition, historical 
particularity, and the importance of agency and habitus or the style that 
gives people a dynamic "feel for the game" (Bourdieu 1977; Hodder 1986,1989). 
Feminist archaeologists would also point out that this approach led to a kind 
of archaeology where the people being described were without faces or genders, 
were not particular individuals, and the particular local history was de-
emphasized (Tringham 1994, Conkey 1984).

Cultural ecology, "a term devised by Julian Steward to account  for the dynamic 
relationship between human society and its environment, and in which culture 
is viewed as the primary adaptive mechanism", simplified the Marxist model 
into the notion that base always determines superstructure or a kind of Marxism 
minus the dialectics (Renfrew and Bahn 1975). Where Marx had a recognized a 
dialectic process with ideology affecting economy, cultural ecologists saw a 
"one way conversation" where economy determined ideology. Perhaps the most 
extreme application of this view postulated that the Aztecs engaged in human 
sacrifice because of a "protein deficiency" rather than because of political, 
cosmological and religious ideology. With the theoretical shift towards looking
 more closely at societies’ relationship to the environment, Julian Steward 
(1955) and William Sanders (1962) methodologically began the more sophisticated
 settlement analysis that has come to be expected in contemporary North 
American archaeology. The postulation of a culture core, consisting of a 
constellation of subsistence and economic patterns that are the more basic 
features of a society, and the idea that social organization is secondary and 
an adaption is a kind of pared down version of the Marxist model (Marx 1906).

Cultural ecologists thought that the more successful the society, the larger 
the population would become, and that with the introduction of agriculture, 
social change was due to the combined effects of population, economy and 
environment. Karl Butzer (1980) viewed social conditions as dynamic, and social 
organization as primarily an adaptive system. Economy was the most important 
factor and sets of ecological opportunities that arose over time drove the 
system. The echoes of Darwinian organic bodies adapting to changing 
environments was a clear metaphor. Social organizations, like organic species, 
had to change with fluctuating environmental stresses and conditions, or 
become extinct in a ecologically linked world. Ecological crises adjusted 
population (ala Malthus) and reorganized the religion, ideology, and politics. 
This postulated an external cause for societal change and focused on the study 
of cultural interactions with the environment. The changing environment created 
a bounded set of choices or opportunities within which a culture had to operate 
to provide food and shelter or die. The population increases brought about by 
surplus energy generated by the agricultural revolution also drove social 
change and the development of complex societies and new state organizations, 
which were initially thought to have been needed to organize irrigation of 
the fields and to redistribute resources in times of environmental stress.

Processualists would incorporate this general viewpoint and continued to 
emphasize the importance of the processes involved with environmental and 
cultural change (Binford 1965). Later archaeologists would notice that a 
cultural ecology approach, where the economy for the most part determined 
everything else, resulted in the view that there was really no need to look 
at superstructure or ideology or religion because those were supposed to be 
in some sense "fictions" to mask the disparities of economic distribution. 
Why would archaeology need to study rock art or indigenous religious beliefs. 
Even Marx, from whence these materialist ideas originally came, indicated that 
things were not so one-sided (Marx 1957). The post-processualists pointed out 
that economics in social organizations may be  directly affected by ideology 
and religion. The economic base is in dialogue with ideology. Eventually there 
was also open rebellion against Christopher Hawkes (1954) postulation of a 
"ladder of inference" that made ideology and religion the most difficult 
subject to know from working with material culture. Cognitive processual 
archaeologists, like Colin Renfrew (1982), rejected the idea that 
archaeologists working to discover cognitive, religious, and ideological 
patterns in prehistory were simply engaging in any more "speculation" than 
an environmental archaeologist. 

Processual archaeology, a complex development in materialism, with many 
theorists and advocates, argued for a new recognition of the taphonomic 
processes in archaeology. Behavioral archaeologists, like Michael Schiffer 
(1983, 1988), argued against the assumption that artifacts were in situ 
"fossils" of bygone cultures, and pointed out the many natural and cultural 
transformation processes that made the earlier culture-historical data 
collection approach and Binford’s early statement (that artifacts were 
"fossils" upon which past reconstructions could easily be made), look 
epistemologically simplistic. 

With the development of post-modernism, archaeological theorists like Hodder 
(1986) and Tilley (1982) turned to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School,
 hermenuetics, and the post-modern critique of logical positivism. In their 
view, theory directly influences what is perceived (i.e. "I wouldn’t have seen 
it if I hadn’t believed it"). They also argued that science is itself a western 
ideology that has tended to silence and exclude minorities and women. Post-
processualists argued that today’s cultural setting directly affects our 
interpretation of the past i.e. we necessarily put ourselves in the past and 
see our mirrored image there. Adopting a relativist position, post-processualist
s argued that archaeology can never really "know" an external objective "truth" 
that was the past. There are only our own perceptions today to work with. This 
suggests that objectivity is more difficult than what was assumed by the New 
Archaeologists. If archaeology is concluded to be a projection of ourselves 
onto the past, archaeology is never truly objective. According to post-
processual archaeological theory, the same phenomenon of a multiplicity of 
meanings for objects, was also true of the makers of the material culture, 
who if they were here today to ask would give different contextual meanings 
or readings of the objects that they had made. Meaning would vary depending 
upon the person asked. Post-processualists argued that processualists had 
epistemologically assumed that simply by following a scientific methodology 
one could know something objective about the past in a relatively straight-
forward manner. 

Post-processualists thus questioned the underlying assumptions about human 
perception that were being made by science itself. Human beings perceive and 
filter facts and data in an individual and culturally particular manner (Gibbon 
1984). This recognition suggested the need for a cultural reassessment of 
archaeology itself, and led to the recognition by some of a kind of unreflexive 
ethnocentrism where "scientific" archaeologists tended to see what they wanted 
to see in the past, and necessarily turned the endeavor into a white male 
dominated one. Feminist archaeologists pointed to statements by men that about 
"Venus" figurines represented the cultural equivalent of Upper Paleolithic 
centerfolds. Feminist archaeologists looked at processualism and began asking 
the question: "Where are the women?" (Conkey 1984, Tringham 1994)

Post-processual archaeology, as expounded by Hodder (1986: 156-60), did 
recognize the contributions of processual archaeology in encouraging the idea 
that culture is adaptive and for incorporating systems theory, information 
exchange theory and the importance of environmental theory. Hodder also 
processualism’s contribution to archaeological method in raising concerns 
about problems with inference, sampling, and research design. Hodder’s 
contextual archaeology incorporated a dialectic use of Marxism and 
structuralism and attempted the "breaking down of dichotomies, set up within 
archaeology, between individual and norm, structure and process, ideal and 
material," and "subject and object" (Id.).

It was argued that Binford’s writings, however, did not describe a meaning-
laden process and ignored the power of individuals to create change (Hodder 
1986:157). The active social process of individuals improvising and creating 
culture was minimized. According to Hodder (1986; citing Greene 1987), in 
contextual methodology, "material culture can be interpreted as having 
different meanings to different groups at different times in the past" and 
the variability of text interpretations is linked to issues of power. People 
endlessly see things from different perspectives (Hodder 1986:160). Hodder 
saw structuralism with its "search for structures, codes of presences and 
absences, that lie behind historical and adaptive processes" as at odds with 
empiricism and positivism (Hodder 1986). He acknowledged that structure had 
different meanings to different structuralists, but argued that there is a 
reality behind measurable evidence, and for too long ideas, meaning structures,
 and ideology had been left out of the research by processual materialists 
who thought that archaeology could not carry out "palaeopsychology" (Hodder 
1986:163) Instead of looking at the meaning content of symbols, material 
symbols were merely being seen "as indicators of contact, cultural affiliation 
and diffusion." In Hodder’s view meaning was contextual and not universal and 
archaeologists who used Native Americans only for the purpose of testing 
general statements ignored the concerns of the people themselves. Critical 
Theory had argued that the myth of the "apolitical" scientist was basically 
just another ideology of power from which people need to be liberated. 

Hodder was optimistic about recovering historically particular meanings from 
the archaeological record because he thought that historical meanings were 
real and produced real effects in the material world that were coherent,
structured and systematic (Hodder 1986:164). Hodder also made explicit his 
agreement with earlier critiques of the assumptions of positivism by saying 
"it is false to separate theory and data, since the latter can only be 
perceived in relation to the former" (Hodder 1986:165). Post-processualism 
also showed a greater interest in the subjectivity of archaeologists and the 
effect of the social context of archaeologists on their interpretations of the 
past. With material culture being viewed as a material form of text, making 
use of linguistic codes, this "specific and concrete product, written to have 
effects in the world" could be interpreted for its historically particular 
meanings rather than simply being explained as evidence of trade contact, etc.


Philosopher, Linda Patrick (1985) in asking "Is There an Archaeological record"
 suggested  a possible synthesis of processualism’s concern to reconstruct and 
purify from distortion presently existing materials (and show the past natural 
conditions to which people in the past had to adapt), with post-processualism’s 
concern to interpret the meaning of past material symbols. "Structural or 
contextual archaeology draws inferences beyond those of new archaeology, moving 
from ‘material phenomena’ to ‘mental phenomena,’ analyzing artifacts and 
behavior in terms of culturally specific codes, and studying individuals’ 
symbolic and social strategies for living in groups and for tackling the 
environment in creative ways" (Patrick 1985:56). Patrick further suggested 
that the ubiquitous metaphor of an archaeological "record" - either a fossil 
record or a textual or historical record may not actually be accurate and a 
new trope may be needed that more accurately reflects what the epistemology of 
archaeological inference is actually about. 

Patrick also wrote an excellent summary of the major works in structuralism 
and semiotics since World War Two and their relationship and influence upon 
post-processual archaeology. This body of anthropological thought is in no 
small part what post-processualism has drawn from in formulating a model of 
archaeological evidence as a "body of material symbols" (Patrick 1985:40-44). 




An anthropological subfield begun in the 1950’s that 
archaeologists have not incorporated into their thinking, 
(for reasons that are not clear to me) was the development 
in anthropology of a body of work on proxemics (the proximity 
at which human social interactions take place) and kinesics 
(the study of energy use and motion by people - particularly 
as they facilitate communication). Hall (1959, 1977) and 
Birdwhistell (1970) for example, provide several books that 
would seem to have obvious implications for how megaliths were 
designed, would have been phenomenologically experienced, and 
the ancient social distances and mental templates that people 
had for prehistoric public gatherings.

CONCLUSION
In choosing a preferred theoretical approach towards 
reconstructing the past, the original Marxist outlook that 
incorporated a dialectic between superstructure and base and 
that was historically particular and detailed still seems more 
persuasive than the early cultural ecology or systems theories.
 This is not to say that the cultural ecologists’ concern with 
the environment is not an important component of archaeology,
 but it is only one part of the picture.  The cognitive 
archaeologists, post-processualists, and even the later 
cultural ecologists like Butzer, concluded that the ideational 
and religious realms were equally important and should not be 
overlooked in the attraction to the scientific methodology 
available for environmental reconstruction. Anthropological 
archaeology cannot leave out human agency, individual actors, 
ideology, religion and beliefs of the past. Patrick’s suggestion 
that archaeology may need a new metaphor to replace the idea 
that we are working with a "record" or "fossils" is interesting 
and bears further thought. She did not suggest a new metaphor 
for the field, but raised an intriguing question for the future.

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REFERENCES (Bernbeck 1962, Binford 1962, Binford 1965, Binford 1968, Binford 1972, Birdwhistell 1970, Bourdieu 1977, Brumfiel 1983, Butzer 1980, Conkey 1984, Flannery 1967, Flannery 1972, Flannery 1968, Gibbon 1984, Hall 1959, Hall 1977, Hawkes 1954, Hodder 1986, Hodder 1989a, Hodder 1989b, Leone 1982, Marx 1906, Marx 1957, Patrick 1985, Renfrew 1982, Sanders 1962, Schiffer 1983, Schiffer 1988, Shanks 1987, Steward 1955, Tilley 1982, Trigger 1989, Tringham 1991, Watson 1990) Bernbeck, R. 1962 Lasting Alliances and Emerging Competition: Economic Developments in Early Mesopotamia. American Anthropologis 64:33-44. Binford, L. 1962 Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28:217-225. Binford, L. 1965 Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. American Antiquity 31:203-210. Binford, L. 1968 Some comments on historical versus processual archaeology. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 24:267-275. Binford, L. (editor) 1972 Archaeological perspectives. Seminar Press. Birdwhistell, R. L. 1970 Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Bourdieu, P. 1977 Outline of a theory of practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brumfiel, E. M. 1983 Aztec state making:ecology,structure, and the origin of the state. American Anthropologist 85:261-284. Butzer, K. W. 1980 Civilizations: Organisms or Systems? American Scientist :517-523. Conkey, M. a. J. S. (editor) 1984 Archaeology and the study of gender. 7. Academic Press. Flannery, K. 1967 Cultural history vs. culture process: A debate in American archaeology. Scientific American 217(2):119-122. Flannery, K. 1972 The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399-426. Flannery, K. V. (editor) 1968 Archaeological systems theory and early mesoamerica. Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington. Gibbon, G. 1984 Anthropological Archaeology. Columbia University Press, New York. Hall, E. T. 1959 The Silent Language. Anchor Books, Garden City, New York. Hall, E. T. 1977 Beyond Culture. Anchor Books, Garden City, NewYork. Hawkes, C. F. 1954 Archaeological theory and method: some suggestions from the Old World. American Anthropologist 56:155-68. Hodder, I. 1986 Reading the Past. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hodder, I. (editor) 1989a Post-modernism, post-structuralism,and post-processual archaeology. Unwin Hyman, London. Hodder, I. 1989b This is not an article about material culture as text. Journal of Anthropological Anthropology 8(3):250-269. Leone, M. 1982 Some opinions about recovering mind. American Antiquity 43:4-20. Marx, K. 1906 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. The Modern Library, Random House, New York. Marx, K. a. F. E. 1957 On Religion. Progress Publishers, Moscow. Patrick, L. 1985 Is there an archaeological record? Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:27-62. Renfrew, C. A. 1982 Towards an Archaeology of Mind (inaugural lecture). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sanders, W. 1962 Cultural ecology of Middle America. American Anthropologist 64:33-44. Schiffer, M. 1983 Towards the identification of formation processes. American Antiquity 48:675-706. Schiffer, M. 1988 The structure of archaeological theory. American Antiquity 53(3):461-485. Shanks, M. a. C. T. 1987 Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Steward, J. H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Tilley, C. (editor) 1982 Social formation, social structures and social change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trigger, B. G. 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tringham, R. (editor) 1991 Houses without faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric agricultural remains. Basil Blackwell. Watson, P. J. 1990 The razor's edge: symbolic-structuralist archaeology and the expansion of archaeological inference. American Anthropologist 92:613-629.

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