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What's the news? Thinking about McAnany and Hodder's ‘Thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2009

Barbara Helwing
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Extract

New thoughts about the use of archaeological stratigraphies! Is this so? The discussion article by Patricia A. McAnany and Ian Hodder aims at the construction of a theoretical framework to expound and discuss the problems of archaeological stratigraphy. Such a theoretical framework is urgently needed, they feel, and has been largely neglected until now. Reading and interpreting an archaeological stratigraphic record, if carried out according to the guidelines they try to establish, may reveal much more information about past social processes that led to the formation of the specific stratigraphy. In the authors' own words, ‘thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise’ (quoted from abstract). As the record left behind by ancient communities, archaeological stratigraphies, in their view, take a middle place on a scale from micro-records endowed with meaning (artefacts) to macro-records of contextual meaning preserved in archaeological landscapes. The in-between, the immediate residues of meaningful past human behaviour encapsulated in archaeological sites, remain, in their view, undertheorized.

Type
Discussion
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , June 2009 , pp. 25 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

Notes

1 That archaeological fieldwork, not only interpretation of archaeological stratigraphy, is indeed never neutral and that interpretation begins at the trowel's edge is an aspect much stressed within the Çatalhöyük project. Compare various contributions in Hodder (2000).

2 Sociological research uses the term ‘social stratification’ to describe levels of complexity within societies, a term explicitly borrowed from geological terminology. The introduction of the new label ‘social stratigraphy’ therefore bears an immanent danger of confusion. The established term ‘archaeological stratigraphy’ includes the view that archaeological contexts are created and constructed intentionally by humans and thus record meaningful past operations.

3 Further comments on fieldwork will be kept restricted to examples from ancient western Asia, since I am personally not familiar with affairs in Central America.

4 For example, see Bartu Candan, Sert and Bağdatlı (2007) on the constraints imposed on the educational programme at Çatalhöyük through the ideology of the right-wing MHP party currently governing the magistracy in the provincial town.