Ian Hodder says archaeology is bullshit. My reply: “Bullshit!”

In a remarkably bad short paper in the current SAA Archaeological Record, Ian Hodder makes a number of statements that equate to the claim that archaeology is bullshit (Hodder 2018). “Bullshit” is a term that refers to speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. Liars care about the truth and try to hide it; bullshitters don’t care whether their speech is true or false. Harry Frankfurt (1986, 2005) published the major works on bullshit, although antecedents can be found back to Plato and Orwell (1946 (1968)); see also Cohen (2002).

Hodder’s first dubious claim is that “the most important public value and function of archaeology is its role in place- and history-making” (p. 43). That is, archaeology is primarily about heritage, identity, and cultural achievement. It is about the present, not the past. Most archaeologists disagree with this. Archaeology is about the past. That is why we carry out excavations, surveys, artifact analyses and dating—to reconstruct and learn about human society in the past. Hodder’s first claim may be wrong and regressive, but it does not qualify as bullshit.

Hodder then gets to his main point: “much of archaeology uses the past to play out the contemporary preoccupations of dominant groups and to regurgitate the present in their interests … I have become tired of archaeologists just mirroring present concerns and theories” (p.43). The bad guys here are people like me, who study inequality, sustainability, or some of the other “grand challenges” we have identified for the discipline (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b). Archaeologists go for headlines and not for local context, we are told; “This is what I mean by a post-truth archaeology or fake history.” (p. 44).

The concepts post-truth and fake news are typically applied to current affairs to refer to the kind of disregard for the truth captured in Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit. As Kathleen Higgins (2016) noted in Nature, “post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation … scientists and philosophers should be shocked by the idea of post-truth” (p. 9). So, Hodder is suggesting that people like me and my co-authors (Kohler et al. 2017), or the grand challenges crowd (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b) are blatantly lying about the past. We are (knowingly, I guess) just projecting the concerns of the present—the “preoccupations of dominant groups”—back to the distant past.

I am not surprised that someone like Ian Hodder would characterize research by someone like me as post-truth and fake news. To make such an accusation, however, one must have workable concepts of science and truth in order to know that they have been violated. But, Hodder shows in this article (and elsewhere) that he has a faulty understanding of science. Like other post-processual archaeologists, Hodder thinks that science consists of discovering “universals that are singular in their unique law-like characteristics” (p. 43). In a recent paper in Antiquity (Smith 2017), I note how Hodder's post-processualist colleagues like Matthew Johnson (2010) criticize the concept of science in archaeology by employing a 50-year-old (outdated) definition of science and explanation. Science is not necessarily about universals and it is not necessarily about laws. It is about a rigorous search for evidence and explanation by constantly testing claims and hypotheses.

Contrary to Hodder’s assertion, those of us who use archaeological data to study phenomena such as sustainability, inequality, or political systems in the past do not adhere to the post-processualist caricature of science. Instead, we employ current concepts and epistemologies. These are aptly summarized by philosopher of science Daniel Little’s list of three epistemic features of science:

1. empirical testability

2. logical coherence

3. an institutional commitment to intersubjective processes of belief evaluation and criticism (Little 1995)

For additional statements of the nature of science in relation to archaeology and the other social sciences, see (Smith 2017), (Wylie 2000), (Gerring 2012:11), (Bunge 2011), (Little 2009). Or see some of my prior posts on this topic, including:

Science, social science, andarchaeology: Where do we stand?

Why is it important to strive for a morescientific archaeology?

Why is a scientific archaeology so hardto achieve?

Because Hodder has a faulty understanding of science, he has little basis for criticizing the scientific claims of other archaeologists. A look at the journals that my colleagues and I publish in (Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS-One, etc.) shows that the “big question, big data approach” that Hodder dislikes (p.44) does indeed conform to contemporary scientific standards. So, just what standards are we violating that would warrant the labels post-truth and fake news? Hodder has none to offer.

I turn the tables here and characterize Hodder’s article as bullshit. He evidently does not know the nature of science, and thus his critique shows a disregard for the truthfulness or rigor of our work. His paper is post-truth, fake news, bullshit.

Bunge, Mario

2011 Knowledge: Genuine and Bogus. Science and Education 20: 411-438.

Cohen, G. A.

2002 Deeper into Bullshit. In Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, pp. 321-339. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Frankfurt, Harry

1986 On Bullshit. Raritan 6 (2): 81-100.

2005 On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Gerring, John

2012 Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Higgins, Kathleen

2016 Post-truth: a guide for the perplexed. Nature 540 (7631): 9.

Hodder, Ian

2018 Big History and a Post-Truth Archaeology? The SAA Archaeological Record 18 (5): 43-45.

Johnson, Matthew

2010 Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Blackwell, Oxford.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright, and Melinda Zeder

2014a        Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79 (1): 5-24.  http://dx.doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, and Melinda A. Zeder

2014b        Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122: 879-880.

Kohler, Timothy A., Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman, Christina E. Peterson, Aleen Betzenhauser, Matthew C. Pailes, Elizabeth C. Stone, Anna Marie Prentiss, Timothy Dennehy, Laura Ellyson, Linda M. Nicholas, Ronald K. Faulseit, Amy Styring, Jade Whitlam, Mattia Fochesato, Thomas A. Foor, and Samuel Bowles

2017 Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North and Mesoamerica. Nature 551: 619-622.

Little, Daniel

1995 Objectivity, Truth, and Method. Anthropology Newsletter, American Anthropological Association Nov. 1995: 42.

2009 The Heterogeneous Social: New Thinking About the Foundations of the Social Sciences. In Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, edited by Mantzavinos Chrysostomos, pp. 154-178. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Orwell, George

1946 (1968)        Politics and the English language. In The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell, pp. 127-140, vol. 4. Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2017 Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91 (356): 520-528.

Wylie, Alison

2000 Questions of Evidence, Legitimacy, and the (Dis)unity of Science. American Antiquity 65: 227-237.

Social media attack to blog post to journal article

figure from my paper

My paper, "Social Science and Archaeological Enquiry", was just released, online, by the journal Antiquity (last week, I think). It is volume 91 (356), pp. 520 - 528. You can find a copy here.   This is without a doubt the strangest journey to publication of any of my papers, so maybe it is worth telling. I have the Grateful Dead on in the background, which helps. The story begins with my attendance at a talk on the "new materiality" by Rosemary Joyce at the University of Colorado Department of Anthropology in late January or early February, 2016. I did not like the lecture, and I made some snide remarks about it in this blog, here.

The new materiality: Vacuous or just incomprehensible?

Looking back, I was perhaps a bit harsh in my tone, bordering on rudeness. Some students from UCB posted some critical remarks about my post on their departmental Facebook page.

You can see some of the posts from the Boulder group here.

I fired back and posted some more remarks on my blog. I was taken to task by the department chairman, in a rather rude ad hominen post, for shooting my mouth off without restraint, rather like a small child. You can find all this pretty easily if you are interested (note: it is not very interesting...). Nearly all of the criticisms from Boulder suggested that my speech was not valued. I was insulting; I was trying to spoil their special lecture; I should not say such nasty things about their distinguished visitor. Many people came along and liked their critical posts. I became a pariah to UCB Anthropology-Facebook. But not a word about the intellectual content of the lecture or my reaction to it.

I was dismayed, insulted, and demoralized by my first social-media hazing event. The comments to some of my blog posts discuss some of these issues. But to me, the key issues were--and are--scientific and intellectual. I found the whole approach of Rosemary Joyce's talk to be anti-scientific and thus detrimental to the advance of the kind of archaeology I advocate in this blog. I was particularly incensed at her argument that fields like archaeology had to choose between the humanities and the natural sciences. She claimed that, given the inadequacies of natural science, we should choose to follow the humanities. This is so wrong-headed, it drove me nuts.

My reactions led to me create a series of posts that clarified my views of science, social science, and the place of archaeology. Writing these helped me clarify my own views of the topic, and try to put them into a framework that would be clear to other archaeologists (ever wonder why i blog? This is a primary reason - it helps me clarify my thoughts).

Science, Social science, and archaeology: Where do we stand?

Pascal Boyer's view of science, social science, and the humanities

Why is it important to strive for a more scientific archaeology?

Why is a scientific archaeology so hard to achieve?

((you can get to the later posts from the first one))

After this whole event had died down, it occurred to me that I should present these ideas in a larger venue, in a streamlined and more efficient context. Why had no one called the postprocessualists to task for their outdated and inaccurate views of positivism and science? Why haven't scientifically-minded archaeologists shot back at the epistemological hogwash? So I sent off a short piece to Antiquity, and they accepted it. I was a bit nervous, wondering if it was entirely proper to put ideas from a blog post into a journal article. But this was not at all a literal re-doing of the blog. The basic message was the same, though. I came across the paper on archaeological theory by Julian Thomas, and found that none of the work I do - theoretical or empirical - would fit under his definition of "archaeological theory." So I contrasted it with the list of different approaches to archaeological theory given by Jarvie and  Zamora-Bomilla. I also continued some of the themes from my paper on archaeological arguments.

So the path of this article was:

- attended a talk I did not like
- wrote a snarky blog post about it
- was attacked on social media
- sharpened my thinking in a series of blog posts
- condensed and sharpened the ideas further for a journal paper

So, I figured that it was time for another blog post (this one). Perhaps I should give a bad lecture on the whole affair and complete the circle. Or maybe I should shut up and concentrate my efforts on publications, not blogs.

To quote my favorite rock band, "What a long strange trip its been....."

References:

Jarvie, Ian and Jesús Zamora-Bomilla (editors)
2011 Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Sage, New York.

Smith, Michael E.
2015 How Can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

2017 Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91: 520-528.

Thomas, Julian
2015 The Future of Archaeological Theory. Antiquity 89: 1287-1296.

Bad revisonist history: The postprocessualists invented household archaeology!

I was quite surprised recently to read that postprocessualists were responsible for developing the household archaeology approach. This is so wrong that I'm not sure where to start. I was reading William Fowler's introduction to a special section of the journal Ancient Mesoamerica (vol 25, no. 2, 2014, pp. 367-68). The section is called "Households make history in ancient Mesoamerica. Some of the articles are pretty good, and some are pretty bad.

After reviewing some aspects of postprocessual archaeology in an approving tone, Fowler states:
 "It should be clear by now why a true focus on households did not come into archaeology until the 1980's ushered in a concern with the individual, agency-structure, and practice. The emphasis on cultural evolution, complexity, and hierarchy in processual archaeology obscured the importance of the household and individual action." (p.368).

Problem 1: Chronology;  Household archaeology, with a "true focus on households," started before the 1980s. "Household archaeology" got its start in the 1970s. The Early Mesoamerican Village was published in 1976, describing work done in the early and mid-1970s (Flannery 1976). This was a highly empirical work, focusing on house form, household activities, and the integration of households into communities. (A personal note: this book, which I read during fieldschool at Cahokia in 1976, had the greatest influence on my research and career of anything I've ever read).  By 1980 research around the world was focusing on the house and household as units of analysis. The first major self-conscious synthesis of "household archaeology" as a distinctive approach was published in 1982 (Wilk & Rathje 1982), and by 1983 major syntheses of Mesoamerican household archaeology were appearing (e.g., Rathje 1983, Tourtellot 1983). By 1988, Mesoamerican household archaeology had arrived (Wilk & Ashmore 1988), but still with little influence from postprocessual archaeology.

Problem 2: Intellectual context of early household archaeology. These early studies in household archaeology rarely cited Hodder and cannot by any means be labelled as "postprocessualist" approaches. Postprocessualists typically offer a simplistic view of the theoretical landscape of archaeology, suggesting that strict Binfordian processualism was the only major alternative to postprocessualist thought. This seems to be Fowler's position. But the early household archaeology did not fall into either the processualist or the postprocessualist camps. The major theoretical inpetus came from the rational-choice models of households that were common in the social sciences and social history in the 1980s. The major theoretical and empirical synthesis of this approach was the volume Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Netting, Wilk & Arnould 1984). Robert Mc. Netting's comparative and theoretical work on households was particularly influential among the early household archaeologists. He participated in a number of archaeological conferences in the late 1970s, which was one reason his approach to households was so influential in archaeology (Netting 1977, 1982). Richard Wilk was also very important, since his archaeological background helped bridge the gap between archaeology and the realm of theoretical and comparative household studies. Netting and Wilk cannot be placed into either the processual or postprocessual camp, and neither can the early household archaeology approach.

Hodder didn't publish Symbols in Action until 1982, and his major statement of postprocessual archaeology appeared in 1985. The early household archaeology was able to free itself from the constraints of processual archaeology by adopting the rational-choice theoretical approach of Netting, Wilk and others. But its practitioners had little or  nothing to do with postprocessualist archaeology.

I'm not sure just when postprocessualist household archaeology got started. The earliest clear example in my database are some papers in Samson (1990). But since I don't consider postprocessual archaeology to be rigorous or useful, it is seriously underrepresented in my Endnote file. But in the case of the origins of household archaeology, you don't have to be a rabid anti-postprocessualist / anti-poststructuralist / anti-postmodernist like me to acknowledge that household archaeology developed and grew into a major archaeological topic without any influence from those approaches.

And if you really think that processual and postprocessual are the major theoretical alternatives in archaeology (as Fowler seems to think, and as Gillespie 2013:307 argues), then please read some works by Richard Blanton, or check my urban theory paper, or just read some social science literature outside of anthropology or archaeology.

REFERENCES

Flannery, Kent V. (editor)  (1976)  The Early Mesoamerican Village. Academic Press, New York.

Gillespie, Susan D.  (2013)  Early monumentality in North America: another comparative perspective for Africa. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 48(2):301-314.

Hodder, Ian  (1982)  Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hodder, Ian  (1985)  Postprocessual Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:1-26.

Netting, Robert McC.  (1977)  Maya Subsistence: Mythologist, Analogies, Possibilities. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by Richard E. W. Adams, pp. 299-334. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Netting, Robert McC.  (1982)  Some Home Truths on Household Size and Wealth. American Behavioral Scientist 25:641-662.

Netting, Robert McC., Richard R. Wilk and Eric J. Arnould (editors)  (1984)  Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Rathje, William L.  (1983)  To the Salt of the Earth: Some Comments on Household Archaeology Among the Maya. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, pp. 23-34. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Samson, Ross (editor)  (1990)  The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Tourtellot, Gair  (1983)  An Assessment of Classic Maya Household Composition. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M.
Leventhal, pp. 35-54. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Wilk, Richard R. and Wendy Ashmore (editors)  (1988)  Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Wilk, Richard R. and William L. Rathje (editors)  (1982)  Archaeology of the Household: Building a Prehistory of Domestic Life. Special Issue of American Behavioral Scientist vol. 25 (6).