Indiana Jones and the Post-Processual Archaeologists

Feb 15, 2008 Alun Politics, The Past 3 Comments Archaeology, Indiana Jones, John Bintliff, Philosophy, Theory

Every­one else is link­ing to the trailer, so I’ll link to a paper from The Nor­we­gian Archae­olo­gical Review, ‘Why Indi­ana Jones is Smarter Than the Post-Processualists’ by John Bint­liff.

The most remark­able fea­ture of this latest con­fer­ence was the way in which speaker after speaker, Brit­ish and Con­tin­ental, dis­played a total dis­reg­ard for affil­i­ation to ‘Pro­ces­su­al­ist’ or ‘Post-Processualist’ fac­tions, and deployed an eclectic atti­tude to the vari­ous object­iv­ist and sub­ject­iv­ist approaches debated over in the last 20 years. Yet equally con­sist­ently, this mer­ger of formerly oppos­i­tional tra­di­tions within a new prag­mat­ics of prac­tice, saw the speaker ground­ing his or her feet on evid­ence, an archae­olo­gical record, test­abil­ity.

It dates from 1993, but has stood up well. The per­sist­ence of pro­ces­sual and post-processual camps in archae­ology and earn­est dis­cus­sion of them says much more about the social rela­tion­ships between archae­olo­gists than it does about the past.

I need to read more Wittgenstein.