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"Trigger, Bruce G"
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Monumental architecture: A thermodynamic explanation of symbolic behaviour
While human beings cope with the production and distribution of goods by trying to achieve maximum efficiencies in energy expenditures, the basic way they symbolize power is through the conspicuous consumption of energy, control of which is the fundamental measure of power. Conspicuous consumption occurs in the form of monumental construction, supporting large numbers of energy consumers, production of high energy-consuming luxury goods, and an emphasis on non-useful movement (processions, needlessly large rooms, etc.). By expanding the concept of energy-use to cover conspicuous consumption as well as efficiency of production, it can be seen as a basic factor in shaping the political as well as the economic behaviour of human beings and can explain why, as systems of inequality evolve, monumental architecture becomes an increasingly prominent feature of the archaeological record. This enlarged concept would also broaden a materialist perspective on human behaviour to take account of many significant aspects of the ideational components of such behaviour that appear in the archaeological record.
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All People Are Not Good
Richard Lee's analysis of the role played by gossip and ridicule in maintaining political and economic equality in small-scale societies is reviewed from an evolutionary perspective. Comparative research on early civilizations suggests that, whenever the scale of society increases, these mechanisms eventually fail to be effective and force is used to protect political and economic privileges. While high-level decision making is required to manage complex political systems, this does not explain why managerial elites invariably appropriate disproportionate surpluses for their own use. Such behaviour questions the view that human beings are inherently altruistic, although sometimes corrupted by reactionary or unjust societies. While social engineering was able to curb inegalitarian behaviour in small-scale societies, industrial societies have yet to discover how to produce an analogous result. /// L'analyse faite par Richard Lee du rôle joué par les commérages et le ridicule pour maintenir l'égalité politique et économique des société à échelle réduite est envisagée dans une perspective évolutionniste. La recherche comparative sur les premières civilisations suggère l'hypothèse que chaque fois que la dimension de la société augmente, ces mécanismes finissent par ne plus être efficaces et on utilise la force pour protéger les privilèges politiques et économiques. Même si on doit prendre des décisions à un niveau global pour diriger des systèmes politiques complexes, cela n'explique pas pourquoi les élites dirigeantes s'approprient toujours des surplus disproportionnés. Un tel comportement met en question l'idée que les être humains sont fondamentalement altruistes, malgré qu'ils soient parfois corrompus par des sociétés réactionnaires ou injustes. Alors que l'intervention sociale a pu prévenir le comportement inégal dans les sociétés à échelle réduite, les sociétés industrielles n'ont pas encore découvert comment produire de tels résultats.
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Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist
This article examines similarities and differencies in the questions that prehistoric archaeologists ask and the answers that they are predisposed to accept as reasonable in different parts of the world and under changing social conditions. Archaeology is strongly influenced by the position that the countries and regions in which it is practised occupy within the modern world-system. Three basic types of archaeology are defined and examined: Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist. The significance of these types for problems of objectivity in archaeology is examined briefly.
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Archaeology and Epistemology: Dialoguing across the Darwinian Chasm
Archaeological theorists employ rival epistemologies (theories of knowledge) borrowed from philosophy to justify and help implement alternative programs for interpreting archaeological data. Epistemological idealism has been used to validate cognitive studies of the past, positivism to privilege behaviorist and processual approaches, and realism to promote a combination of both while at the same time noting the constraints exerted by external reality. It is argued that, viewed from the perspective of biological evolution, these three approaches are complementary rather than competing. All human adaptation to the social and natural environments is cognitively and culturally mediated, while, contrary to the claims of extreme idealists, discrepancies between expectations and observed happenings facilitate more effective adaptive behavior. Any rounded interpretation of archaeological data must take account of mental concepts, sensory perceptions, and conditions external to the individual. Positivist methods and humanistic forms of analysis that focus on subjectivity, agency, and the historical transmission of knowledge are complementary to one another. To understand better what has happened in the past, archaeologists must produce scenarios that are radically different from what has previously been conceived. But these speculations in turn must be subjected to rigorous appraisal if genuine progress is to be achieved. Because of its greater inclusiveness and specific postulates, a realist epistemology, combined with a materialist view of reality, offers the most satisfactory general framework for integrating the best features of all three epistemologies and interpreting archaeological data.
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‘The loss of innocence’ in historical perspective
The dual tasks of this paper are to examine David Clarke’s ideas about the development of archaeology as they relate both to the era when ‘the loss of innocence’ was written and to what has happened since. In his treatment of the history of archaeology offered in that essay, Clarke subscribed to at least two of the key tenets of the behaviourist and utilitarian approaches that dominated the social sciences in the 1960s: neoevolutionism and ecological determinism. Clarke viewed the development of archaeology as following a unilinear sequence of stages from consciousness through self-consciousness to critical self-consciousness. The first stage began with archaeology defining its subject matter and what archaeologists do. As its database and the procedures required for studying it became more elaborate, self-conscious archaeology emerged as a ‘series of divergent and selfreferencing regional schools … with regionally esteemed bodies of archaeological theory and locally preferred forms of description, interpretation and explanation’ (Clarke 1973: 7). At the stage of critical self-consciousness, regionalism was replaced by a conviction that ‘archaeologists hold most of their problems in common and share large areas of general theory within a single discipline’ (1973: 7). Archaeology was now defined by ‘the characteristic forms of its reasoning, the intrinsic nature of its knowledge and information, and its competing theories of concepts and their relationships’ (1973: 7). Clarke looked forward to a fourth (and ultimate?) phase of self-critical self-consciousncss, when the new archaeology would monitor and control its own development.
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Expanding middle-range theory
The obscure and ugly language of theoretical archaeology conceals as well as reveals fundamentals that no real practice of archaeology can actually escape. In this paper, revised from a plenary address at the TAG conference at Bradford last year, one of the cannier of the old hands puts some of those fundamentals into proper place.
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Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Constraint and Freedom - A New Synthesis for Archeological Explanation
This article was presented as the second annual Distinguished Lecture in Archeology at the 89th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 30, 1990, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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