Christopher Chippindale

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Chippindale, Christopher. 1993. Ambition, deference, discrepancy, consumption: the intellectual background to a post-processual archaeology, in Andrew Sherratt & Norman Yoffee (ed.), Archaeological theory: who sets the agenda?: 27—36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A post-processual archaeology is, by the definition of its name, something that arises out of a processual archaeology. Post-processual archaeology itself is a reflection, in our own little discipline, of the larger post-modern movement that has so influenced academics and intellectuals in the 1980s; the modern movement in archaeology itself seems to have been provided, in large measure, by the American school of the New Archaeology, and by contemporary work in Britain. As post-processual has arisen both out of and against processual, so it has come largely to be shaped by processual habits — either to develop those manners further, or to turn against them. A great deal has been written about the character of post-processual archaeology, by the pps themselves and now by their several critics; some of that debate is now conveniently brought together in Preucel's excellent edited collection (Preucel 1991), to which this book adds more. This paper therefore looks not at post-processual by itself but at four elements in the intellectual climate within archaeology of which post-processual is a part.

I chance to have been in the University of Cambridge, the place where the p versus pp argument has been most openly fought, at some busy periods: first as an undergraduate student 1970–73 when David Clarke held an intellectual initiative; and again from 1982 onwards, as a graduate student and in junior staff positions, in the era when pp has arisen there.

Like all participant observers, I have an interest in the matter — two interests, in fact. As editor of a journal, Antiquity, that wishes to keep in close touch with new, valuable and influential work, I want to understand where the subject is going, so what my journal publishe s properly reflects what good people are interested in. As a researcher myself in fields where post-processual is already an influence, I want to see how the intellectual topography of that landscape may be changing.

Adequately defining post-processual would take most of a paper: there is a recent argument about just what pp actually is in Bintliff (1991b), Thomas & Tilley (1992) and Bintliff (1992). I take post-processual as primarily referring to the ideas of the Cambridge radicals, as these were first displayed in Hodder's survey Reading the past (1986), subtitled Current approaches to interpretation in archaeology, developing ideas from his earlier writing (e.g. 1982a; 1982b; 1982c) with two edited books (1987a; 1987b); and in Shanks and Tilley's black book Re-constructing archaeology (1987a), subtitled Theory and practice, and red book, Social theory and archaeology (Shanks & Tilley 1987b). Important in the early critical literature were Gardin (1987), Barrett (1987), Earle & Preucel (1987), and Patrik (1985). For the American group, who may appear to be first cousins to the Cambridge radicals, there was to start with Leone, Potter & Shackel (1987), and Leone & Potter (1988). The literature has grown at an astonishing rate in the years up to the writing of this published paper in April 1992, but the essential character of the pp school has not — in my view — changed in that period.

I have divided my remarks under the four headings of my title: ambition, deference, discrepancy, consumption. To indicate the way in which these character traits are those of the larger discipline, rather than the exclusive concern of the pps, I illustrate them with examples from scholars of p, of pp and of uncommitted persuasions. Points which are near to self-evident are made briefly; others demand justification at some length.

I begin with ambition. Embree (1987) provides an elegant proof that archaeology is the most fundamental, intractable and important of all empirical disciplines. Its special place at the most difficult end of a range of studies arises from the complexity of the subject-matter that it addresses in relation to the paucity of reliable empirical evidence with which it is able to work. Embree remarks (1987: 76):

The discrepancy between ambitious and preposterous, between ends and means, between ideals and reality, has shown itself in a thousand patronizing cartoons, and in two tendencies in the archaeological literature that have run side by side for decades.

The ambitious tendency sees archaeology as the great human story, the large historical study across so many millennia in which those recorded activities of literate peoples which historians are able narrowly to observe are only the last curiosities. That is why Gordon Childe called his studies of later European prehistory not just The dawn of European civilisation (Childe 1925) but What happened in history (Childe 1942); it was these rather distant events, to be grasped from archaeological materials, which could explain how Man makes himself (Childe 1936). Notice the years when these last two books were published, times when there were pressing reasons for a European to believe that more contemporary historical events were what mattered in the world.

The preposterous tendency, with its eye more on the means, sees archaeological materials as limited and therefore limiting. So much has been lost! The task of the archaeologist must be to chronicle the ruins, hazarding only a cautious and occasional guess as to what they are the ruins of.

Some regions and periods are famously sparse in their evidence, others overwhelmingly rich. Yet there is no simple correlation between large ambitions and large materials. Those brave enough to face the Lower Palaeolithic seem concerned to build large views of large issues; those with the overwhelming quantity of artefacts and encircling historical sources from Roman Europe seem less concerned with the biggest questions. If anything, it looks rather the reverse: perhaps those with poor sources are obliged to look to the large issues; perhaps those with good sources never need to look to the large issues. Each tendency can regard the other as absurd — inflating castles in empty air, or mindlessly stamp-collecting. The art-historical traditions, growing out of connoisseurship, offer especially for Classical archaeology a third tendency — the study of the qualities immanent in the object themselves, to which the archaeological questions of context and interpretation are often secondary.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1954) famously said, forty years ago, 'the archaeologist is digging up, not things, but people'. Now Wheeler, like the rest of us, dug up things and nothing but things — however much he may have wanted to dig up people. The closest he got was human bones, bones like those from the war-cemetery at Maiden Castle that could be linked directly into the drama of invasion, battle, death and subjugation as the Roman military swept over Britain. Wheeler dug up things, and then inferred from the things to the people: here the battle was fought, here the soldiers fell, here they were buried, here we now find their bones. The recent re-examination of Maiden Castle is cautious in identifying these burials as amounting to a war-cemetery at all (Sharples 1991)

Ambition has been a conspicuous commonplace of the archaeological scene certainly since the time around 1968, the annus mirabilis of the New Archaeology, as the year when its American and English founding texts were published (Binford & Binford 1968; Clarke 1968). An immediate cause is a real and well-founded sense of achievement: we do have so much more information, more varied and more reliable, than colleagues of previous generations. The career and funding framework, increasingly competitive, rewards large ambitions.

In Cambridge at least, it was at this same period of the late 1960s and into the 1970s that the ambitious tendency took decisive command. The engine of Cambridge archaeology then was competition between two ambitious tendencies. In the bone room, Higgs and Jarman led bands of Higlets into one school of truth: in their economic view, an ecological/evolutionary determinism, as summarized in Wynne-Edwards (1962), was combined with the simple and robust field-methods of site catchment analysis and a concern with the plant seeds and animals bones, the stuff of past human survival, rather than the made world of artefacts (Higgs & Jarman 1969; Higgs 1975). At Peterhouse, David Clarke made the new synthesis of an analytical archaeology, with its formal mathematics, numerical taxonomies and systems theory explanations. Each tendency respected the other and would work in the other's world: Higgs co-wrote a conventional account of Pleistocene artefacts (Coles & Higgs 1968), while Clarke made the most compelling of the ecological/economic case-studies (Clarke 1972). The common thread was the optimism of their ambition, an optimism that was shared in the parallel movement of the American New Archaeology. Notice — and it is more than a coincidence — that 1968 was the year that unreasonable ambition took wider command in American society: you could levitate the Pentagon, if only enough people with enough faith surrounded the place and tried to levitate it. Notice — and this is important for post-processual attitudes — that if the Pentagon declined to be levitated, that was not because the ambition seemed defective to those who held it, but simply because too few people had too little faith to move than particular mountain.

Archaeological ambition, as it has now settled down to a routine of the trade, has two variants. Each begins with a large aim, which the best method of study does not seem able to deliver. In the ambitious tendency, the end is declared to have fulfilled the ambition, although it has patently failed to do. In the preposterous tendency, the venture is declared to be impossible.

A characteristic example of ambition patently unfulfilled is the proposal that prehistoric British society experienced, towards the end of the third millennium BC, a distinctive social upheaval. The Neolithic society is seen as egalitarian, structured by kinship and worshipping its ancestors. The Early Bronze Age society is seen as stratified, with petty chiefs ruling their fiefs by their individual power. The model for this transformation is the classic band–tribe–chiefdom–state sequence of social evolution, and some distant ethnographic analogy is, or used to be, sought in Hawaii. This belief is so general now that it has by degrees been transformed from a reasonable a priori expectation into a 'factoid', that is, something which is treated as if it is an uncontroversial fact when it is falls far short of certainty. Even Tim Darvill toes the line in his splendid book on Prehistoric Britain (Darvill 1987).

Certainly, it is reasonable to think of social complexity increasing in prehistoric Britain from scattered bands of hunter-gatherers in the immediate post-glacial to the ordered and well-populated petty states that are historically recorded by the Latin sources for Britain. If you choose to believe that social evolution must follow the band–tribe–chiefdom–state sequence in orthodox order, then it is a fair first guess that British tribes might turn chiefly somewhere in the middle of this time-span: bands in the Mesolithic? tribes in the Neolithic? chiefdoms in the Bronze Age? states in the Iron Age? But is there actually sufficient evidence for their turning this particular way at this particular time?

I doubt if there is.

In Darvill, and before that in the Edinburgh exhibition catalogue, Symbols of power at the time of Stonehenge (Clarke, Cowie & Foxon 1985), which told the same social story, a contrast is made between a tribal Neolithic and a chiefly Bronze Age. A variety of lines of evidence are used, for example:

The egalitarian treatment of the Neolithic dead in megalithic tombs and long barrows is contrasted with the differential treatment of Bronze Age dead, only a few of whom are given the splendour of round barrows and grave goods;

in 1968 Atkinson (1968; also 1972) showed that the Neolithic population of Britain arrived at by assuming that all dead were buried in monumental structures was quite impossibly low — and that even before radiocarbon calibration stretched the prehistoric chronology rather more; it follows that only a small proportion of the Neolithic population had this special treatment in death, just as in the Bronze Age only a small proportion had a special treatment.

The building of henges in the 'chiefdom' phase is taken 'to symbolize power and prestige' (Darvill 1987: 92) of those chiefly individuals who showed their wealth through personal ornaments and fine objects; the building of causewayed camps in the earlier 'egalitarian' period is a communal matter, not taken to symbolize anyone's power or prestige;

causewayed camps are of broadly similar form — circular in plan with encircling ditches — require broadly similar labour investment and seem as equally domestic and undomestic in their artefactual evidence as henges; no distinction is offered to show why the first type goes with an egalitarian society, and the second with a stratified society.

The considerable changes in monuments and artefacts between 3000 and 2000 BC are seen as diagnosticof a fundamental break; yet the equally considerable changes between 1500 and 600 BC — during which the pattern of society 'completely altered' (Darvill 1987: 108) — are said to demonstrate no 'discontinuities in the development of society';

no coherent theory is offered to link the artefactual transformations to social transformations, and therefore no reason is offered as to why the first artefactual changes amount to demonstration of a social discontinuity but the second do not.

And so on.

Signs of strain are evident in Darvill's schema, as British society reaches beyond tribalism and achieves its first chiefdoms by 2500 BC; yet — after 1900 more years of upward mobility — contrives by 600 BC still to be at a stage of 'tribes and chiefdoms'. Prehistoric Britons, having risen so far in their social evolution, are obliged to mark time for two millennia until the next stage arrives, of being swallowed up by a larger empire.

There may well have been Wessex chiefdoms. Reliable evidence may well exist, overlooked or unrecognized. But they have in no way been demonstrated. Meanwhile they exist only as 'factoids'.

The Edinburgh exhibition of 1985, Symbols of power at the time of Stonehenge, and its catalogue (Clarke, Cowie & Foxon 1985) took this line of reasoning a step further. The proposal was made that the change in the 3rd millennium BC from the building of chambered monuments to henges represented a shift in ideology and social control — 'the re-writing of history, a re-interpretation and manipulation of the old order to justify the new' (Clarke, Cowie & Foxon 1985: 41). Empirical evidence was offered in support of this proposition. The 're-writing' of the old monuments was said to take three distinctive forms — re-modelling or re-use, demolition, and abandonment. Each one of these was interpreted in the Edinburgh exhibition as a proof of that kind of social transformation, and that political use of older monuments. Re-modelling or re-use of a monument was the new ideology showing its force: it appropriated the old. Demolition was the new ideology showing its force: it destroyed the old. Abandonment of a monument was the new ideology showing its force: it spurned the old. But pause and think. These three kinds of attitude and act are practically the only things that can be done with an obsolete structure; it is what has been done before, during, and ever since the third millennium BC to every built thing which is no longer useful. You can see just these three attitudes in what is now inflicted on old textile mills across Europe and north America. Any or all three responses indicate only that the structure is going out of use, for some reason. The reason may be a radical social transformation; it may be one of many other things.

The Edinburgh exhibition took ambition one stage further in its labels, by seeming to know what prehistoric people said to each other. The display panel explaining that shift from chambered monuments to circles and henges read in part:

No evidence at all was offered for the last part of this statement, with reason.

The habit of dealing with these dubious entities can be spreading. Andrew Sherratt, an editor of this volume, was talking about the morphology of European megalithic structures a few years ago (Sherratt 1988). He had played around with site plans, found Kinnes had already invented the best game in a fine earlier paper, invented some evolutionary schemes to set shapes in order, and gave one scheme a fancy and elegant name. His scheme happened to have simple box-shaped plans at the beginning and, a couple of millennia later, simple box-shaped plans right at the end. Then he set out what he thought was going on: people were consciously reviving and re-making the same form as at the start of it all. Pause again, reader, and think again. How does one distinguish with the evidence available in prehistory the conscious revival of a structural type from the chance repeating of a simple shape that would easily arise in any case? Perhaps the distinction could be made, but I do not begin to know how; and I doubt if Sherratt knows either. A method to distinguish chance repetition from conscious revival would indeed be a joy in making sense of the patterns of European prehistory.

There are good reasons why a book for a wide audience and an exhibition drawing a wide public should offer a full kind of archaeological knowledge. These display-windows of what archaeology has to offer are not places to under-sell ourselves, but nor is it useful to declare we know much more than we do.

The factoids of the ambitious tendency, with its egalitarian Neolithic tribes and socially stratified Bronze-Age chiefdoms, provide a real obstacle for the future. What research interest and funding will address that social question, and make possible a real discovery, when it seems clear already? And if by some remarkable new work, that discovery is made, it will not excite those of who have already been 'known' this for a decade.

The converse attitude to ambition is more visibly a post-processual habit, early and still best displayed in Ian Hodder's Reading the past (1986). Its starting propositions are (Hodder 1986: 1):

The bulk of the book explores a range of approaches and judges whether they can answer these requirements, which seem reasonable to me. Hodder's book, which apologizes for the limited range of approaches it covers (1986: x), nevertheless encompasses materialist, systems, formal-analytical, generative-grammar, structuralist, Marxist, indigenous, feminist, processual, ethnoarchaeological (plus 'other alternative Western archaeologies'), approaches together with his own contextual. Each is set out, and then — his own included — shown to be inadequate. Gardin (1987: 322) summarizes the procedure: 'Hodder's account of the various approaches listed above is therefore double-edged: first come definitions and examples, with an emphasis on the kind of insight gained along each line; then critical comments follow, showing that the outcome regularly falls short of the requirements stated in chapter 1, with respect to meaning, individuals, history.' All of the approaches failing to live up to the expectation placed on them, Hodder duly notes that 'archaeology now appears hopelessly difficult' (1986: 178).

In another view none of the approaches has 'failed'. No single approach can tell all; each may offer some insights, some progress towards the stated ambitions. One can equally say that each approach lives up to expectation, so archaeology appears splendidly easy. Again it is a matter of attitudes in the archaeological community. If the archaeologists say what they do is preposterous, then others will believe them.

Even before ambition was so visible, there was deference in archaeology, deference to those many disciplines who have reached a higher degree of understanding than has timid archaeology. Deference, for whatever reason, is embedded into the disciplinary foundations since the beginning. Classical archaeology defers to art history and to the written sources. American archaeology is the perpetual junior in an unequal partnership with a generalising anthropology. Prehistory, since its beginnings a century ago, has thought of itself as wanting to become a science, an attitude affirmed again by the spirit of the New Archaeology. Insofar as 'science' is systematic knowledge almost all academic disciplines are science. Unfortunately, the word is ambiguous in English; as well as Wissenschaft, it means more narrowly that knowledge expressed in universal general laws on the model of physical sciences and especially of classical mechanics. But archaeology is not any old science; it is a historical study, and has the special features of a historical science, like palaeontology and historical linguistics, that addresses more-or-less remote historical events by means of the fragments which survive. It is unfortunate that so many views of archaeology as science have overlooked this, so that deference to non-historical physical and biological sciences remains strong among archaeologists of processual or no declared persuasion. To an extent this must be so, since archaeology has always been and must always be uniformitarian in its methods; in making sense of regularities in the past, it depends on knowledge of regularities in the present. The pressures of prestige and of funding encourage it. 'Archaeological science' sounds better than 'archaeology', and the academic world knows — and expects — things called 'science' to cost more. An unhappy side-effect are the studies in archaeological science that seem more to generate numbers than understanding; they may create many tables of the trace elements in ancient bronze objects, but the tables, it is found, cannot be reliably translated into a better knowledge in wider terms of what prehistoric metal-working amounts to.

There seems to be no good cause for archaeology to enjoy a low status. By its materials and its methods, archaeology has a partial and particular view of the world. So has each academic discipline. Archaeology addresses artefacts for the most part, and therefore has an artefactual view of the world. The geneticists have a wry joke: 'Human beings are the means by which DNA reproduces itself.' It is a statement equal to the usual one, that DNA is the means by which humans reproduce themselves. The archaeologist can offer a matching statement about the social world: 'Human societies are the means by which artefacts reproduce themselves.' This is not a whole truth, but expresses much about how the archaeologist sees human societies as they are reflected in the artefacts. Notice then how much archaeology may hope to offer for understanding of the contemporary world, as modern western society has more things, more material objects than other societies ever had. Here, then, is one of several ways forward from a cultural cringe, to apply material knowledge to the modern material world, which archaeological knowledge can offer once it shakes off its deference.

Distinctive in the post-processual programme is a reaction against the deference to physical science seen in a processual archaeology. Instead there are offered new deferences, among them to contemporary social theory, and in particular to Giddens's body of theories about 'structuration' (Giddens 1977; 1979). Archaeology, once it has been much improved in this way from its present sad intellectual state, will rise to take its proper place, where it 'can contribute to debate within modern social theory' (Hodder 1986: 178, from the closing sentence of Reading the past). Much contemporary social theory, abstract in its concepts and ideas, does not address the place of the material in the western world. In endorsing Hodder's hopes, I would think that the particular contribution of archaeology is to work with the material — not to re-mould itself after another, abstract ideal. However universalizing itsown ambitions, social theory of the 1980s, like earlier social theory, carries much of its force from its capacity to make sense of the particular aspects of society in its own time. Freud's insights, intended to be universalizing, can now be seen as arising in large part from the particulars of bourgeois life in turn-of-the-century central Europe.

Giddens's theories are being imported into post-processual archaeology as a general prospect of society, therefore applicable to all societies that archaeology addresses. In the reality, of Giddens in his home ground of sociology, you find a more probable proposition — a body of work addressing the particular character and structures of recent 'post-industrial' societies, in terms of that rather full body of information about them which is available for study. Reading and hearing Giddens, I am struck by the elegance and fluency with which his ideas articulate with the exceptional aspects of the society we inhabit as members of a prosperous western university, and by a distinction he chose to make in response to questions. If required to divide all the range of human societies into just two categories, he would place in one category the western societies of the last century or two — so remarkable and peculiar are they — and in the other, all the other human societies their have ever been. This places almost all societies that archaeology studies into the category other than the one Giddens addresses.

One can notice a further characteristic of Giddens's work. His 'structuration' was developed in the 1970s as a reaction to the idea of the 'industrial society', which depended on the cosy belief that capital and labour could live in harmony for mutual prosperity and advantage — a tolerable idea in the somnolent 1950s but clearly a hopeless proposition at a time when workers and students had been fighting the forces of capital on the streets, and the very foundations of capitalist nation-states could be made to tremble. Essential to structuration and allied theories has been a central role for conflict as the driving force of social change. The 1990s provide a different stage, not just in Britain, as they begin quietly with capital and (un)organized labour in peace or truce, the trade-union forces of organized labour in retreat, the radical left everywhere on the decline as a mass political force, and Stalinist communism collapsed into ruin. The rhetoric of the intellectual left is no longer heard, that our societies have reached a final stage of 'late capitalism' which will surely bring their collapse through their overwhelming contradictions. Now instead is to be the time of market forces and the old ideals of liberal democracy. The 'industrial society' model, of a coalition of interests of capital and labour, begins to ring true again.

In this way, archaeology is asked — once more — to subordinate itself to an imagined ideal which is not a general theory of archaeology at all, but a particular theory developed with diligence and skill at a particular time to address alien questions that have vanishingly little to with those that archaeology addresses. Our odd society is full of parochial curiosities, most of which have an artefactual aspect. One can examine the place of bow-ties in pet-food factories (Hodder 1987c) — a curiosity of curiosities from our strange times — but should not expect it to be characteristic of common relations between things and people in all times and places, or in remote societies of a different nature.

Another post-processual deference is to Jacques Derrida, the master of deconstruction, whose distinctive contribution has been to take to the limit the observation from language that signs are arbitrary: the word for chimpanzee is related to the creature only by convention. If all signs, symbols and meanings are arbitrary, then all is arbitrary. There is no system. If that is the case, then archaeology is impossible: all the links that make up the uniformitarian method are severed. Here a special case, that of the text, is being made into a universalizing principle, and then applied to the subject-matter of archaeology, which is not text.

Both the ambitious and the preposterous tendencies, as they have been sketched, share the quality of discrepancy — between what is sought for, what is achieved, and what is declared. As well as new ambitions and new deferences, the post-processualists are importing new methods, many ultimately from literary criticism. They declare that artefacts are texts to be read, but they do not explain why artefacts and texts — which share so little in the way of observable characteristics — can or should be treated as if they are just the same thing. Perhaps this is part of deference: among the distinctive aspects that set western post-industrial societies apart from any others is the dominance of texts, and understanding of others expressed as texts, over all other kinds of knowledge. Texts and the study of texts has a corresponding dominance in thinking life.

Rather than proving the relevance of literary criticism, the post-processualists take the relevance for granted and simply set out to treat artefacts as if they were texts. Hodder (1986) calls his book Reading the past. Shanks & Tilley (1987a) offer, as their major case-study of the relationship between 'material culture and social practices' (1987a: 172–240), what they call an examination of 'the design of contemporary beer cans' from contemporary Britain and Scandinavia. They do seem to believe that is what they are exploring. It turns out they are not studying the artefact or its design in any way whatever; the many pages say nothing at all about the drawn-aluminium cylindrical can with its composite metal top and ring-pull opening. This container, the artefact, the piece of material culture, is not mentioned at all. The study is of, and exclusively of, the texts and the pictures that are printed as labels on the can. This is a study of the relationship not between society and a set of artefacts, but between society and a set of texts/pictures. Notice, also, that Shanks & Tilley's case-study addresses not just a text and its accompanying iconography, but a quintessentially modern class of text. Advertising, in any form, does not go back much beyond 1600 (Turner 1959). Labels for packets of food and commodities begin about 1700 (Lewis 1969). Packaging as a class of artefact begins in the early 1800s (Opie 1980). The artificial manipulation of 'images' to contrast brands of almost identical consumer products is particularly characteristic of this century, and its post-war years. No wonder the can designs may be amenable to a modern social theorist's and text-critic's analysis! No wonder the understanding it may bring seems much removed from an obvious relevance to a knowledge of ancient artefacts!

The attitudes, drawn from literary criticism and deconstruction, have another aspect with which I am not comfortable. As an editor, I have become very conscious of the reciprocity within the research community of archaeologists: good people write things for Antiquity which I reject; I, in my turn, write as best I can and good journals like Man and Past and present reject my efforts. Each of us works and offers our work for criticism by others, whose work we criticize in its turn. Creative work and critical work go together, with their positive and negative moods. Literary criticism is not like that, because the critic criticizes without a matching obligation to create. Deconstructionists deconstuct, and do not feel obliged to construct. This critic's spirit is sadly evident in the post-processual literature of archaeology, in the thoroughness of the gloomy grumbling and the slightness of creative alternative that is offered. Shanks and Tilley (1987a: 107–8), for example, see natural scientists as involved in a single hermeneutic, for the 'inanimate objects' they study (whatever happendto biology?) have no human meaning; sociologists are involved in a double hermeneutic in that they live and work within a world of pre-interpreted meanings; and archaeologists are enmeshed in a quadruple hermeneutic. Hodder (1986) — whose writing has a cheeriness in the face of so much obstacle — has by his page 3 already reached the point of saying, 'the problem then becomes, not how do we study symbolism in the past?, but how do we do archaeology at all?' On his last page 'rather than taking the line that archaeology now appears hopelessly difficult', Hodder gives positive advice; after his book-length exploration of so many orthodox and alternative approaches, and the noting of their many and thorough inadequacies, archaeologists are inexplicably advised to return to their basic principles, and 'well-developed' methods of excavation and interpretation.

Stonehenge, object of scholarly interests over eight centuries, offers a unique opportunity to see how research attitudes have developed over the very long term. Exploring that long history of Stonehenge studies (Chippindale 1990), I was surprised to find how constant have been the research questions. The fundamental materials of archaeology do not change, nor the fundamental frames of reference. If one looks at the history of archaeology, and of systematic history and social sciences generally, one can see that there is a rather small stock of fundamental ideas with which they work. Very little contemporary work is entirely new; most revises and advances by means of refinements and revisions of old concepts. From its beginning archaeology has been concerned with classification, with time, with how assemblages come about, with relating the still lives of artefacts to the living lives of the people who made the artefacts, with the discrepancy between fragmentary evidence and complicated wholes. These and a small number of other questions are fundamental to the business. And there has arisen a correspondingly limited range of concepts and frames of thinking to address these issues, a few home-grown, some borrowed, the majority copied or adapted from other disciplines. They make a set which is not very large and which does not change or grow very rapidly.

One interest of mine is in formal mathematical methods, particularly in the geometry of shapes and the potential of generative geometrical grammars as a research tool. This is a fairly new field in non-archaeological studies of artefacts, and certainly a new field in archaeology. It has reached the stage of a small handful of papers, a conference session whose organizers were pleased to get an audience that at one point went over the number of 50; we have been hoping to get a book out. It looks like a modest idea, mostly for enthusiasts, quite technical, taking quite a lot of work; if we are lucky, it will be splendid for a very few archaeological questions, of some use for a fair number, and quite irrelevant to most. I would rather it was neither over-sold, nor discarded as worthless. But we are already too late. There in Reading the past is a little section entitled 'formal analysis and generative grammars' (Hodder 1986: 36–40). In these few pages it takes the work of Dorothy Washburn, a pioneer in the field, identifies some weaknesses in it which are specific to her approach, takes these to be characteristics of formal methods in general, dismisses them for that reason, and moves on to the deficiencies of the next approach, structuralism. So, even before formal methods have been tried, they have been declared wanting.

Looking at the pattern of archaeological work over the last twenty years, one can see a rapid turnover of ideas that come into fashion, are briefly modish, and are then ditched for their failings. The speed at which they come and go is disconcerting; when I spent a few years out of the business in the 1970s I missed one mode, optimal foraging theory, completely — it came, stayed and was sent on while I chanced briefly to be looking the other way. The trouble has not been in the ideas at all, but in the unreasonable expectations we have placed upon them, in our refusal to learn and sympathize with what they are about, and in our lack of patience to give them the time and attention they need to produce results.

Consider simulation. I see it as a valuable technique, with the inescapable strengths and weaknesses that any technique must possess. It received a brief flurry of interest and a book in the Cambridge New Directions series where these passing fancies are published (Hodder 1978b). In Hodder's view at the time the approach, when subjected to an 'optimistic yet critical' appraisal (Hodder 1978a), was said to 'offer the chance of taking the interpretation of archaeological remains onto a level where clear thinking and precise procedures are encouraged, yet where the archaeologist's imagination also plays an important role'. The papers in the book offer some useful case-studies. Then what happened? Simulation, out of fashion, does not figure in the large range of approaches that are tested and found wanting in Reading the past.

An archaeological fundamental is time, and the archaeological view of time is distinctive. Archaeology is both required to develop ways of dealing with time that suit its special considerations and enabled to offer its special knowledge of time to other disciplines. Yet there is little in the archaeological literature on this essential subject, and the habit of deference again sends us to look outside our own experience for better understanding. Not much is on offer from the harder sciences that seems relevant, nor from documentary history, but an exemplar has been spied in the ideas of the Annales school (if 'school' it be) of French historians. Accordingly there are now two books relating the Annales to archaeology, one edited again by Hodder (1987a) and one by Bintliff (1991a) (and a third imminent (Knapp in press)).

Annales is a large movement extending over several decades, a range of scholars working in diverse ways and with changing intent within some common ideas. Like many intellectual groups, it cannot fairly be reduced to a handful of phrases or rote methods. And Annales needs to be well understood, if its attitudes are to be grasped properly and applied archaeologically. Of course, a cartoon version of Annales can be sketched for the speedy: take one author from the Annales (Braudel), take one book (Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l'époque de Phillippe II), take one edition of that book (the later one that is conveniently available in an English translation), and let that stand for Annales.

Hodder's book is entitled Archaeology as long-term history, a phrase which echoes the longue durée, one of the phrases that commonly stand for Braudel. There is much reference in its introductory essay (Hodder 1987d) to the Mediterranean, and one to a 1958 Braudel essay on the longue durée. For the rest of Annales, nothing. Bintliff's book is more specific in its title, The Annales School and archaeology, and notices a little more, but not so much. Delano Smith (1992), reviewing it, remarks:

At least one could hope that the essentials of Annales would be made available to archaeologists in a book on the Annales and archaeology. Delano Smith (1992) again:

What has happened to Annales in these archaeological books, one post-processual and one processual in allegiance? It looks as if the Annales have suffered a consumption — picked up, played with, dropped. Clearly, nothing has been destroyed; like simulation or formal methods, an Annales approach to archaeology remains available to anyone who wishes to develop it. Work that builds on earlier study of the nature of time in archaeology (e.g. Bailey 1983) is likely also to use some of the Annales concepts. Yet it has lost a freshness in what has already been done; whoever works with Annales ideas in archaeology in the future may receive the response from a sated audience, 'We tried that already — several times! — and it didn't work.'

Consumption has another meaning, as a wasting and debilitating disease. I do not think consumption, the burning-up of ideas in this way, whether by the post-processualists or the rest of us, is likely to be healthy.

The tone of this paper is gloomy. It identifies unhappy or unhealthy tendencies that seem now to be established in the archaeological research community. The tendencies, not new in archaeology, are congruent with that post-modern fashion of deconstruction that has run through western intellectual life.

Despite them, I remain cheerful, but this is due less to what intellectuals have talked about in western Europe than in what intellectuals have done in eastern Europe. in a vivid metaphor, Timothy Garton Ash (1990) talks of an intellectual hypermarket in the west, its many shelves crammed with brightly packed ideas to be taken away by the trolley-ful, played with and discarded. Central Europe saw smaller, barer shelves, as it suffered harder times. Yet precious ideas, and respect for those ideas which are good, provided a moral strength that in the end brought down the Communist occupation of the central European countries and installed an intellectual, the absurdist playwright Vaclav Havel, as one of its presidents. That is a lesson for intellectuals in the west, archaeologists among them. The post-modern movement, and the fashions of deconstruction and processualists it embodies, is to an extent a game played by intellectuals for their own incomprehensible concepts of amusement, just as English persons of a certain type indulge in the incomprehensible performances and cruelties of croquet. The experience of central Europe shows these things to be more serious than games. If the archaeological concepts really are enduring and if archaeology is important, then the ideas we work with deserve better treatment than being tossed around in pursuit of ambition, deference, discrepancy and consumption.

Acknowledgements. A version of this essay was first written for, and presented at the TAG conference session from which this set of papers has arisen. It was revised considerably in April 1992, but within its original structure as that seemed to me the right framework within which still to work. I amgrateful to colleagues at the original TAG session and to Jeff Reid and referees for American Antiquity for comments.

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