Archaeology of Art: Theoretical Frameworks

Abstract

rejection of cross-cultural unilinealism and his and his immediate archaeologist students' writings against all forms of speculative, compar-ative laws of evolution, race, or progress. The field swings toward Enlightenment ideas with those optimisms of the new archaeology's first flush that archaeology become a science would transform the discipline into a true anthropology of the past. More recently, we have witnessed the Post-Processual recoil against renouncing all attempts to make archaeology into an anthropol-ogy aping the natural sciences. In these theoreti-cal swings and debates and even in the language in which those debates, we see revealed the Enlightenment's deep legacy. From mid-twentieth-century European and North American skepticism that the motivations of the long dead could ever be known and W.W. Taylor's argument that the archaeologist can never be a part of the past, so it is impossible for him or her to reconstruct a civilization, to Lewis Binford's late career repudiation of an earlier position on the question of whether ancient beliefs and intentions could ever be reconstructed, and then the post-Processualists' astonishing reinvention of an empathetic source of real knowledge of the past (Hegel and Herder would have been proud), the Enlightenment belief that the mind (intentions and motivations) of past peoples might be comprehended by the living is alive and well (and hotly debated). At the end of the day, one of the enduring legacies of the Enlightenment (and of debates post-Enlightenment) is the general acceptance that archaeology is the study of the remains of past people's actions upon a world as socially constructed and perceived. Few archaeologists would go so far as to say that the process of social construction is mystical and, hence, utterly unknowable empirically. Behavior does not depend upon an inner logic (manual of transla-tion) that is forever hidden from outsiders to the community. There is an emerging optimism that past motivations can be at least partially revealed through the investigation of how symbols and objects function as devices or insignia communi-cating peoples' view of themselves. That would be a novel way of putting the issue, one that would make the philosophes scratch their chins