Postprocessual archaeology: origins

Michael Shanks
Stanford University
This is part of a review feature that appeared in Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2007 17: 199228) accompanying the reissue of Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, a collection of essays
edited by Ian Hodder and first published in 1982 by Cambridge University Press. The book is seen
as one of the first manifestations of Postprocessual archaeology.

As an author, with Chris Tilley, of one of the more cited papers in the book, I was asked to reflect on
what has happened in archaeology in the intervening 25 years under a general title of Revolution
Fulfilled? Symbolic and Structural Archaeology a generation on. Rather than outline the success or
failure of concepts and methods, I chose to outline my experiences of how the book came together,
how the archaeological academic community worked back in Cambridge in the 1980s, how joint
projects were formed. In this my comments are about what was actually entailed in the origins of
postprocessual archaeology.

This kind of perspective is the same as that adopted in the book Archaeology in the Making that I
edited with Bill Rathje and Chris Witmore (Routledge 2013).

It is not difficult to see how Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (SSA) anticipated many of the
agenda topics of Anglo-American archaeology over the last twenty five years, how it was part of the
emergence of what has come to be called post-processual and interpretive archaeology. Ian
Hodder and others in this review feature have already detailed such a genealogy involving
concepts of structure and agency, meaning and power, representation and ideology, embodiment
and gender.
So was the publication of SSA a special moment? How might such a special moment reflect on the
discipline today? This journal feature invites us to use the publication of SSA twenty five years ago
as a way of thinking about recent and future directions in archaeological theory. I am going to try to
ground such a challenge in an account of how I now see the context surrounding the publication of
SSA - from 2007 and a tenured faculty position back to 1980 as an undergraduate. I will suggest
this hindsight is a way of considering the conditions under which archaeology today is practiced in
the academy.

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It is tempting to view this recent history of archaeological theory as a story precisely of new ideas,
theoretical frameworks, of different approaches to the past. A story also of the people who first
published them. Conventional histories of disciplines almost always follow this narrative form
focused upon the history of publication. It is a narrative that ascribes agency to the creativity of
individual researchers and to powerful ideas that gain credence by virtue of being strong ideas.
This is distinctively the line taken in SSA in the introduction by Ian Hodder and the conclusion by
Mark Leone when they connect the agenda claimed by and for SSA to a history of humanistic
trends in archaeological publication in the UK - the great figures of Childe and Piggott, great
philosophers of history such as Collingwood. It is conspicuous in the cartoon that acts as a
frontispiece for the book - a caricature of archaeological characters and their ideas operating upon
each other, references to the vigor of ideas, to "Hodderism", to seminal thinkers like Binford putting
them to the test. This (meta)narrative regularly involves armed camps, marshaled by alpha males
and females, in the sciences, social sciences and the humanities, debates won and lost in the
seminar rooms of the academy, in the pages of learned journals, gains made by one over the other.
Of course this is, to a certain extent, what changing research agendas are about. Academic
appointment and power, represented simply, for example, by success in gaining research funding,
usually hinges upon perception (peer review) of publication. Nevertheless I want to challenge this
kind of understanding of disciplinary change. I suggest that much more was and is going on that
governs the changes in archaeology then and since. SSA is, in my view, actually not a story of new
(and old) ideas and their success (or not) in archaeology.
We are also now familiar with the sociology of knowledge after Thomas Kuhn (1972) and the
importance ceded to communities of researchers in concepts of normal science and paradigm shift.
The way such epistemic communities work has come to be much clearer with the development of
science studies over the same last twenty five years (ref). A key term is that of discourse. This is
familiarly associated with Foucault (for example 1972 and distinctively 1986), though it has much
wider application. Basically I treat discourse as the concept that covers the structures and
conditions under which production occurs of what counts as a candidate for knowledge. Discourse
includes the institutional structures, the forms of argument, the libraries and buildings, the
genealogy of disciplinary practices, the systems of qualification, recruitment, gate-keeping and
career paths, the modes of manifestation of knowledge in lectures and publication.
This is the conceptual terrain of my point about SSA - that we should try to understand it in such a
context. But rather than pursue this argument through an elaboration of the features of
archaeological discourse pertinent to 1982, but let me take a more anecdotal approach, one that I

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hope will resonate if not echo the experiences of others who went through Cambridge in the late
70s and early 80s.
Back in the late 1970s I was an undergraduate on the fringe of the research community at
Cambridge. Under encouragement from Ian Hodder, junior faculty at the time, I adapted a
multivariate statistical analysis in the programming language Fortran IV, added a graphics plotter
and applied it to an archaeology of the ideological body in early farming society in southern
England. This was for my undergraduate dissertation. I had met Chris Tilley among the many other
research students then at Cambridge, and we worked together closely to expand this study to
include southern Sweden. It was a project in archaeological social science. The aim was to enhance
a quantitatively grounded understanding of early farming society in northern Europe, albeit tied
now to Marxian social theory of ideology and corporeality.
My faculty advisor Ian Hodder was a key in enabling me to pursue this project because he
suggested and encouraged the approach. More important were the circumstances surrounding the
supervision of undergraduate and graduate students at Cambridge in the 1970s. There were no
tight requirements for either the BA or PhD, only the submission of satisfactory exam papers (in the
case of the BA), and a satisfactory dissertation (in the case of the PhD). A doctoral student had no
coursework or graded assignments to complete and it was common to embark upon a PhD without
a taught Masters degree. This conferred an extraordinary freedom on students to follow what might
be seen as dangerously idiosyncratic courses of study; this threat was held in check by the
student's personal relationship with their supervisor.
This is what enabled me to write my dissertation. Quite simply, I skipped lectures for the company
of graduates who seemed to be changing things on the basis of fascinating new research and
ideas. There undoubtedly was a buzz, a sense that orthodoxy could be challenged, and, most
importantly, a critical mass of researchers doing just this. Cambridge was still receiving major
research support in the way of graduate fellowships from the British Academy for a project to
investigate the origins of agriculture. More generally, many talented graduates were attracted to
Cambridge from other universities in Britain and further afield because it was, arguably, perceived
as a focus for one of the most forward-looking research agendas in archaeology, because it offered
ample research infrastructures in both the university and colleges, and because of the kudos of
Oxbridge. So the buzz, for me, was not about "postprocessualism", whatever that might have been.
It was about the prospect of disciplinary agency, on whatever theoretical grounds.
There were newly available tools and resources - new discursive infrastructures. Through the 1970s
tertiary education in Europe and the US had expanded considerably. New disciplinary initiatives
involved social and cultural agendas in the humanities and social sciences. Publishers had taken

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the opportunity to service a need in the academy for books and journals to manifest such interests.
There was a new wealth of reading produced by a cadre of young academics seeking to make a
mark. In the humanities and social sciences translations were available of key continental works
that explored radical new vistas of cross-disciplinary and politically-grounded understanding. They
spurred an interest in exploring the French or German originals and a whole tradition of thinking
marginalized by analytic Anglo-American traditions in philosophy. These were new media
infrastructures.
Theory mattered because it allowed just this kind of exploration. Theory provided bridging
concepts and arguments that could connect literary studies with political economy. And theory
could make Lukacs's cultural critique of class consciousness or Walter Benjamin's utopian
historical materialism relevant to a chambered monument in Wessex. Why? Because some of us
thought that thinking broadly and deeply about what constituted not just an archaeological
account of social change, but any kind of account, could make a better archaeology. At Cambridge,
and particularly, of course, in the US, archaeology was institutionally cognate with anthropology.
Continental traditions of anthropology are often in stark contrast to the ethnographic model found
in British social anthropology, because they explore fundamental features of human being and
cultural experience - Claude Levi-Strauss versus E.E.Evans-Pritchard. Notable here also was an
interest in critical social and political science in the long tradition of western Marxism - because it
foregrounded the theoretical apparatuses that allowed this kind of bridging effort, of aspiration to
do better.
Theory as bridging device. For some of us this was embodied in the library of Cambridge University
- unlike other major research collections based upon closed stacks and reader requests, Cambridge
offered miles of shelves that could be freely browsed. You could stumble upon a new connection.
Theory was a way of finding an approach that could serve the need of the researcher to make a
mark upon the discipline. There was a perceptible pay-off for investing in abstraction. Not just in
cynical terms of marking out a promising resum; it was often tied to an idealistic sense of purpose.
New Archaeology had set a trajectory of questioning traditional archaeological orthodoxy on the
grounds of its lack of rigor. In SSA we see this turned against New Archaeology itself. The
contributors to SSA repeatedly call for a better social archaeology than that offered by processual
archaeology.
Ian Hodder has already commented that the papers in SSA do not focus much at all on theoretical
critique of New Archaeology. They get on with empirical research tied to building a more
sophisticated body of theory. Yes, there is plenty abstraction, but this "theoretical archaeology" is
very grounded, without exception, in substantive research projects. I see it as representing what I

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think is the best of archaeological theory: it is simply thoughtful archaeology. And this is a vital
correction to the idea that theory is necessarily abstract and disconnected from substantive
research. I think this perception is more to do with specialized and focused academic research
eschewing bridging practices that can challenge the sovereignty of academic departments. The
theory wars between positivism and poststructuralism are, I find, mostly about such mundane
research practices and systems of reward (for example, local/global articulation versus grounded
incremental advance of knowledge) as they are about grand ideological positions. Hire an
interdisciplinary theorist and your department might be giving away a faculty billet.
What I find now looking back at the papers in SSA is not so much their roots in anthropological
fieldwork, though that is very evident. There is, for me, in all of the papers, a profound sense of
actuality. That the empirical research underway mattered now. This is something that can offer
enormous motivation, a sense of relevance. Theory facilitating a bigger picture. And especially
when you are part of a group. Incidentally, I think that this is one of the most profound aspects of
recent developments in heritage studies and what has come to be called the archaeology of the
contemporary past - the concept of actuality (Shanks 1992, Buchli and Lucas 1997).
Here in SSA is an example of such agency afforded to a group of young researchers taking an
extraordinary risk of publishing work at an early state of maturity. Significantly Ian Hodder is named
as the editor of SSA for the Cambridge Seminar on Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. A seminar
- a traditional structure of the European University. Personally I still remember this distinctive sense
of being part of something bigger. Not a collective exactly - there was far too much individualism
and the competition that goes with academic advancement. But the tensions were reduced in such
bridging projects that went with theory, For if you were working on a community in contemporary
south Asia and your colleague on prehistoric Europe, you were not going to be in direct
competition for the same job.
The political economy of archaeology that produced SSA at Cambridge in 1982 thus contained
profoundly liberal elements that empowered individuals in a freedom to choose an intellectual
regime that attended to a disciplinary demand for new and improved epistemology. It could reward
such entrepreneurial effort with a sense of agency and actuality. There were certainly ways of
manifesting this agency (in publication and conferences like TAG). But it could not be sustained.
This was not collective action; it was not grounded in any project of institutional construction (of,
for example, an Institute of Social and Symbolic Archaeology); career paths were not readily
available then as reward for such effort. Many of the contributors preferred to move to cognate
disciplines such as anthropology to explore the epistemological project. Or they chose safer
intellectual agendas.

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This kind of disciplinary political economy has existed elsewhere and since. After all, the
components of the particular conjuncture that gave rise to SSA are to be found in many
institutional settings. I am putting forward what are, of course, my personal and anecdotal
experiences because the issues they point to are, according to a growing body of research
mentioned above, at the heart of disciplinary change.
So we might justifiably plot the success of some of the ideas in SSA, and express disappointment at
the lack of success of others. More importantly, I think we should consider what kinds of
institutional ecology in the academy favor transdiciplinary theory building, that is the crossfertilization of thoughtful and diverse research practices that bridge different fields and that many
of us would like to see as the mark of of SSA, even if only developed in a rudimentary way. We have
hardly begun to consider the implications of new media infrastructures for interdisciplinary
collaborative research facilitated by grounded theory. They are now digital, in contrast to the world
of conventional academic print in the 1970s, but represent similar challenges to academic agency.
The actuality of archaeological research is now a most pressing concern as pure academic research
competes with agendas set by heritage and CRM agencies. The institutional location of
archaeology in academic departments is not necessarily fruitful of bridging research when career
paths are locked into systems of value that reward only orthodox specialized and accredited lowrisk investment of time and theoretical scope. Are there not possible some new kinds of scientific
agency for archaeology? Lab-based, interstitial, bridging fields? I think these matters of discourse,
as I have defined it, are the context within which we should consider those changes in
archaeological theory we are more used to seeing treated in academic papers and books as the
debate of ideas.

Shanks - origins of postprocessual archaeology