refer to socio-cultural – explain here esp. about Binford and Clarke
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Intro
The relationship with history as a discipline was a prominent aspect of these recent developments. There was an initial disdain versus culture history seen as an extrinsic catalogizing without any real interest in the “process” that brought these elements into existence: hence Binford’s “archaeology as anthropology.” But this was a myopic attitude, which, paradoxically, may be said to actually underscore the value of historical understanding: it may be noted in fact how the initial negative posture by Binford while at the University of Chicago ran afoul of the very major progress done in those very years by colleaguse like Bob Braidwood (multi-disciplinary approach to food production) and Bob Adams (settlement archaeology).
The term “processual” archaeology applied as an afterthought to the “new” archaeology seemed to imply an alternative perception of history seen as a process conditioned by laws of behavior.
Interestingly, what followed did not introduce an appropriate term either: “post-processual” does not refer to a new methodological approach, but to a historical stage. It did, in fact reclaim an ideational dimension that rediscovered in some ways the “pre-processual” approach.
Clarke’s “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology” aimed at offering a more balanced view, one that recognized the value of culture history and stressed the difference from archaeology taken on its own terms. The distinction is based on the nature of the sources.
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Clarke
The precise citation for David Clarke’s famous phrase is: “Archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.”
Clarke, David L. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen, p. 13.
It occurs in the introductory discussion where Clarke argues for archaeology as an autonomous discipline, with its own concepts, methods, and theoretical structure, rather than merely as an adjunct to history or anthropology.
There is also an important second edition, revised by Bob Chapman: Clarke, D. L. 1978. Analytical Archaeology. 2nd ed., revised by Bob Chapman. London: Methuen.
A closely related—and exceptionally important—statement of Clarke’s conception of disciplinary development is Clarke 1973, “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” Antiquity 47: 6–18, where he describes archaeology’s transition from “noble innocence” toward disciplinary self-consciousness.
In the 1968 first edition of David L. Clarke, Analytical Archaeology, the statement occurs on p. 13, in Chapter 1, “Introduction and Polemic.” A searchable reproduction of the book confirms the location, and a published retrospective on Clarke likewise cites it as AA:13. (PagePlace) The key passage reads:
“The view taken in this work is that archaeology is archaeology is archaeology (with apologies to Gertrude Stein). Archaeology is a discipline in its own right, concerned with archaeological data which it clusters in archaeological entities displaying certain archaeological processes and studied in terms of archaeological aims, concepts and procedures.”
Clarke immediately adds that archaeological entities and processes were once historical and social entities, but argues that the character of the archaeological record prevents any simple equation between archaeological observations and the vanished historical events that produced them.
The preceding sentence is particularly important for understanding the famous formula: “Archaeological data are not historical data and consequently archaeology is not history.”
So Clarke’s argument is stronger than simply asserting disciplinary independence. His sequence of reasoning is: material remains ? historical events ? archaeological data ? historical data ? archaeology ? history ? “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.”
This also explains the contrast with the American New Archaeology slogan of Willey, Phillips, and later Binford that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” A modern assessment of Analytical Archaeology explicitly emphasizes this contrast.
There is an interesting connection here with archaeological stratigraphy: Clarke’s insistence that archaeological percepta cannot simply be equated with past events anticipates, in a different theoretical vocabulary, the later problem addressed by Harris and Schiffer—how one moves from the material archaeological record to the sequence of events and processes that generated it.
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Analytical Archaeology
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Critique
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