Ian Hodder

Symbolic and structural archaeology

List of contributors Preface Part I. The Development of Theory: 1. Theoretical archaeology: a reactionary view Ian Hodder 2. Artefacts as products of human categorisation processes D. Miller 3. Social formation, social structures and social change Christopher Tilley 4. Epistemological issues raised by a structuralist archaeology M. Alison Wylie Part II. The Search for Models: 5. Matters material and ideal Susan Kus 6. House power: Swahili space and symbolic markers Linda Wiley Donley 7. The interpretation of spatial patterning in settlement residues H. L. Moore 8. Decoration as ritual symbol: a theoretical proposal and an ethnographic study in southern Sudan Mary Braithwaite 9. Structures and strategies: an aspect of the relationship between social hierarchy and cultural change D. Miller 10. Mortuary practices, society and ideology: an ethnoarchaeological study Michael Parker Pearson Part III. Application: The Analysis of Archaeological Materials: 11. Boundedness in art and society Margaret W. Conkey 12. Ideology, symbolic power and ritual communication: a reinterpretation of Neolithic mortuary practices Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley 13. Ideology, change and the European Early Bronze Age Stephen Shennan 14. Sequences of structural change in the Dutch Neolithic Ian Hodder Part IV. Commentary: Childes offspring Mark Leone Index.

Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding

The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eighth millennium bc. Although there would have been considerable economic and nutritional gains from using these animals for their milk and other products from living animals—that is, traction and wool—the first clear evidence for these appears much later, from the late fifth and fourth millennia bc. Hence, the timing and region in which milking was first practised remain unknown. Organic residues preserved in archaeological pottery have provided direct evidence for the use of milk in the fourth millennium in Britain, and in the sixth millennium in eastern Europe, based on the δ13C values of the major fatty acids of milk fat. Here we apply this approach to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia bc. We show that milk was in use by the seventh millennium; this is the earliest direct evidence to date. Milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, pointing to regional differences linked with conditions more favourable to cattle compared to other regions, where sheep and goats were relatively common and milk use less important. The latter is supported by correlations between the fat type and animal bone evidence.

Daily practice and social memory at Çatalhöyük

This article is concerned with the social processes involved in the formation of large agglomerated villages in the Neolithic of the Near East and Anatolia, with particular reference to Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The article aims to show that practice theories (dealing with how social rules are learned in daily practice within the house) can be used to interpret the patterning of recurrent construction and use activities within domestic space at Çatalhöyük. The regulation of social practices in the house created village-wide social rules, but it is argued that the habituated behavior was also commemorative and involved in the construction of social memory. Sitewide and house-based specific memories are documented at Çatalhöyük. The evidence for habituated practice and social memory at other sites is briefly discussed, and is argued to be relevant for the formation of settled agricultural societies.

Interpretive Archaeology and Its Role

This paper seeks further to define the processes of the interpretation of meaning in archaeology and to explore the public role such interpretation might play. In contrast to postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, a hermeneutic debate is described that takes account of a critical perspective. An interpretive postprocessual archaeology needs to incorporate three components: a guarded objectivity of the data, hermeneutic procedures for inferring internal meanings, and reflexivity. The call for an interpretive position is related closely to new, more active roles that the archaeological past is filling in a multicultural world.

Pattern of the past : studies in honour of David Clarke

Preface Introduction: towards a mature archaeology Ian Hodder Part I. Ethnographic models: pre-depositional theory: 1. Anthropological models in archaeological perspective George Dalton 2. Kalinga pottery: an ethnoarchaeological study William Longacre 3. Society, economy and culture: an ethnographic case study amongst the Lozi Ian Hodder 4. People and space: a case study on material behaviour Roland Flectcher Part II. Settlement Pattern: despositional, post-depositional and analytical theory: 5. Stone Age visiting cards: approaches to the study of early land use patterns Glynn Isaac 6. Off-site archaeology: an alternative approach for the short-sited Robert Foley 7. Black holes in British prehistory: the analysis of settlement distributions Les Groube 8. The colonisation of Europe: the analysis of settlement processes Fred Hamond Part III. Subsistence Pattern: analytical and interpretive theory: 9. Population, resources and explanation in prehistory Paul Wilkinson 10. Plough and pastoralism: aspects of the secondary products revolution Andrew Sherratt 11. Counting sheep in Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece Paul Halstead 12. The effects of environmental change on the scheduling of visits to the Elands Bay Cave, Cape Province S.A John Parkington Part IV. Social Pattern: analytical and interpretive theory: 13. Conceptual frameworks for the explanation of sociocultural change Christopher Tilley 14. Archaeological theory and communal burial in prehistoric Europe Robert Chapman 15. Towards a socioeconomic model for the Middle Bronze Age in southern England Ann Ellison Index.

‘Always momentary, fluid and flexible’: towards a reflexive excavation methodology

Catalhoyuk, on the Konya Plain in south central Anatolia, in the 1960s became the most celebrated Neolithic site of western Asia: huge (21 hectares), with early dates, tightpacked rooms with roof access, exuberant mural paintings, cattle heads fixed to walls, dead buried beneath floors in collective graves. This site, as difficult to excavcate as it is strange, is the object of a pioneering application of the ‘post-processual’ approach, hitherto largely a matter of re-working and criticism outside the trench. The Catalhoyuk project director explains his approach, in which the conclusions as well as the work in early progress will be ‘always momentary, fluid and flexible’.

Emotion in Archaeology

Despite the establishment of significant traditions of emotion research in many disciplines, there has been little discussion of the state and potential of the archaeological study of emotion. This paper aims to review archaeological approaches to emotion-to assess the significance of existing studies and outline the potential for the incorporation of emotion into archaeological research. It argues that the study of emotion in the past is both necessary and possible ; it considers which understandings of emotion we might find most useful, how the archaeology of emotion might be carried out, and what are the most promising avenues to explore. In archaeology, both the sociobiological approach and one based on empathy have serious problems. After reviewing and rejecting the dichotomy between emotions as entirely biological, universal, and hard-wired, on one hand, and entirely social and constructed, on the other, a view of emotions as historically specific and experientially embedied is advanced. Finally it is argued that it is vitally important for us to incorporate a consideration of emotional values and understandings into our archaeologies but that emotion cannot be separated from other aspects of social and cultural meaning and experience.

Writing archaeology: site reports in context

As it is written in site reports today, the modern language of archaeology is not a handsome tongue, efficient though it may be at conveying neutral data (another horrid word). Are there lessons to be found in the beguiling style of site reports from a couple of centuries ago? And is there more to their charm than antiquarian romance?

This is not an article about material culture as text

Abstract Archaeological attempts to see material culture as meaningfully consituted have often used an analogy with language as a structured system of signs separate from practical and expedient activity. This separation of meaning from the context of action has generated the split between normative and processual archaeology. Rather than being compared with language, material culture can be considered as a text. A text is a specific and concrete product, written to have effects in the world. It makes use of linguistic codes, aspects of which may universal, but a text can only be adequately interpreted in relation to the historical meanings which it manipulates and in relation to the nonarbitrary social and practical context in which it is “written”. Material culture is recognized as a particularly material form of text, and some examples are given of the archaeological implications of the view that meaning and practice are closely tied in material culture.

Archaeology in 1984

‘ . . . the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.’ (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four , Penguin, p. 31).