annotated bibliography on gender archaeology

Ceyhun ÇOKAL

In his article Trigger’s main idea is that the positivist methods of archaeology and humanistic methods that emerged in the last three decades are not rival to each other, but should build an archaeological methodology by complementing each other.
His first area of research is the philosophical concerns in today’s archaeology. In the dominantly post-modernist world, archaeology has to deal with issues like subjectivism, conventionalism, relativism, constructivism, de-constructivism etc. However, only very few archaeologists are able to understand and evaluate this broad range of ideas let alone implementing them in their work. Chippendale states that archaeologists are using these terms as if these were new items in the intellectual supermarket. So certain items are becoming popular without anyone understanding their real value for archaeology and soon after they are out of fashion and get discarded. Also, it is a danger that archaeologists play too much with useless issues and lose time and effort. Since the archaeologists do not have time and necessary training in order to become philosophers, they can misuse certain philosophical methods into intellectual nihilism.
Trigger points at an important element of philosophy which is epistemology. The main competing parties on epistemology are rationalism which emphasizes reason, and empiricism which emphasizes sense experience. Throughout the history of archaeology, the archaeologists have been using the philosophical trend that was popular and the ancient understandings were soon buried down as a new trend emerged. The main problem is the lack of background in the archaeologists which led them to misunderstand the philosophical theories. It is very hard to create an interdisciplinary work between philosophy and archaeology, according to Trigger, because the two disciplines do not share a common ground. He thinks that a simplified framework should be created for the use of archaeologists. For this, he supposes the sociocultural evolution to be the fittest “common ground” for both archaeologists and philosophers. Today, most of the philosophers are no longer interested in social evolution, however most of the archaeologists, especially the prehistorians are keen on seeing all human action from an evolutionary point of view. There are two epistemological extremes facing the archaeologist. These are positivism and idealism. The third and most recent is realism. Unfortunately none of these epistemologies are able (by themselves) to work with archaeological data. Archaeology studies the human behavior and action over a very long period of time and this is an issue too complex to be handled with ease. Instead Trigger proposes an evolutionary approach. Evolutionary approach means that by natural selection only the ones that adapt better to the environment will reproduce succesfully. He claims that human behavior is also the result of such a natural selection over a long lineage. As cultural change occurs very quickly the human beings should also be quick in adapting to the new social environment. However the more complex the society becomes there is more risks of misconceptions and wrongdoings. According to Trigger this is why different approaches should be applied to archaeology in order to understand the human behavior.
I think that Trigger’s approach to the problem (why the archaeologists cannot understand philosophy) is a good-willed one, but there are a lot of other fields where the archaeologists do not have enough knowledge and no more time to remedy their deficiencies. It can be sociology, philosophy, statistics, economy and the list can be made even bigger. Normally the archaeologists are trained to recognize a certain material culture and to date them, however too much is expected from the archaeologists later. perhaps they are expecting too much from themselves too. I do not think that a clear understanding of past human behaviour can be drawn by “dating” and “classifying” objects that we find in excavations. There is need for a wider scope. However, this is very difficult to obtain for one person – one discipline-. Most of the issues that the archaeologists are challenging are no less complex than what today’s social scientists are studying, however there are many disciplines under the umbrella of social sciences – from political sciences to economy, till social psychology- while archaeology remains as archaeology. The natural result of this lack of subdisciplines is that the archaeologists only acquire a very superficial knowledge about other disciplines if they are ever willing to do and apply what they learn rather clumsily. We cannot expect the archaeologists to learn everything since it would take ages of study before the archaeologist can start to work, but a specialization of labour (as interdisciplinary study or specialization within the archaeology departments) is necessary. So far, the specialization in the archaeology departments – at least in Turkey and Europe- was mainly between different periods, however I think that different aspects of a past society should be handled by differently specialized researchers. However, a basic study of philosophy is quite necessary for the archaeologist because a scientific work should be based on a theory and should have a methodology, so a preliminary study of current philoophical approaches would be helpful to the archaeology student to build his or her own epistemology and ontology in the future.