Anarchist archaeology?

Neither do I, Baboon. Thanks for putting some archaeological 'meat' on the bare bones of my methodological criticism of Jaocheu's theoretical position.

But as I'm not qualified to decide whether your 'meat' is tender and tasty, or rotten and rancid, I await Jaocheu's reply with interest.

Mmmm... but it smells so good!

This is of course a straw man as nothing of the such was said. Quite the opposite in fact.

Nope the argument emerged from your trousers.

The fact is you're a gullible fool with no capacity to theorise. You simply don't understand what it is. Do you believe everything you're told. Do you have no capacity to work out absolutely everthing isn't absolutely true. Do you live in a world of black and white children's tv simplicity. Is a simple statement that when some theorises it is simply that and we should keep this in mind at all times so beyond you. When a scientist says the universe was created from gravity, do run around screaming it was absolutely, definately, 1,000,000 percent created as he says, with no doubt, and religious fanaticism. then two weeks later when another scientist says it was not, run around shouting and screaming is definately is not true and condemning any who doubts this claim. I can see you do..............

Jaocheu, first of all forgive my rudeness in one or two points related to you above. I'm sorry - they were unecessary.

I'm not an archaeologist but a semi-retired glorified labourer - and also a communist. I think that if one has anything to say about the future then one should also attempt to understand the past. An understanding of the development of civilisation and the state is important, necessary even, but so is the whole period of our history right back to our animal origins, some of the instincts of which, both negative and positive, we still carry.

In 1988 (I've only read it in French) Lewis-Williams and Dawson underlined certain religious beliefs and practices from their analyses of Upper Palaeolithic cave art. Their ideas, that they clearly put forward as ideas, were met with sarcasm and virulence from the archaeological establishment. The level of abuse was incomprehensible and their explanations were caricatured wildly by archaeologists that I'd previously respected. Their positions were never meant to be a monolithic explanation for everything but a particular slant that certainly makes sense to me. More recent discoveries, particularly the stunning art of the Chauvet cave, tends to underline and reinforce the analyses they developed.

Jaocheu, I'm very disappointed by your reply to baboon.

It's probably clear from my earlier posts that I'm in broad methodological agreement (I think) with baboon, but I was hoping that you would be able to illustrate your method with some examples from archaeology, which challenge baboon's position. My knowledge of archaeology is pretty non-existent, but, as a Communist, I find it a very interesting subject, and of obvious concern to any historian.

Also, baboon has apologised to you (although I'm not sure what for), so it would be better to keep this potentially interesting thread on track if you could revert to discussion about both your method and its application in archaeology.

One point has just occurred to me: are you a Communist? Again, it seems to me what links most people on this site, both Anarchists and Marxists, is their commitment to some form of Libertarian Communism. We might have disagreements about what this means and how to achieve it, but if you're not a Communist (of some sort) it might make things a bit clearer to me.

I suppose I can sum up my confusion by asking:

Are you an archaeologist or a Communist archaeologist?

[By the way, to be clear, I see myself as a Communist historian (I don't think that the study of history can be separated from its ideological underpinnings) and a Marxist]

Greetings!

J appears to have ducked out for now but just another example of archaeological evidence of morality from around 530,000 years ago: At Sima de los Huesos in Spain, a Homo heidelbergensis child was found who suffered from a terminal congenital skull deformation, a lambdoid single suture craniosynostosis. The child would have had a strange appearance and reduced mental capacity. But this child had been looked after for five, possibly eight years before its death.

On the animals carved on the Gobleki Tepe pillars: these, including the gazelles, are not just representations of animals but something deeper. In the Epic, at his funeral, Gilgamesh has his “body stretched out like a gazelle caught in a noose”. At a similar burial at Kfar HaHresh a plastered human skull is placed on the body of a headless gazelle carcass. Gilgamesh himself, part man, part god, expresses the human/animal opposition and its mediation to the nether world.

I’ll return on the question of the attitude of archaeology generally to attempts to interpret evidence, particularly around cave art and particularly around the very important discovery of Chauvet cave because it’s seminal. But for now, any radical study of prehistory, anarcho-marxist if you like, would do well to include the works of Anton Pannekoek in this respect. Pannekoek’s work “Marxism and Darwinism”, which can be found on the ICC’s website, presents a defence of the fundamentally revolutionary nature of Darwins’ “Descent....” against the bourgeois perversion of “social Darwinism”.

Elsewhere, Pannokoek’s 1953 work “Anthropogenesis” is well worth a read. In this pamphlet he stresses the development of tools and the importance of touch for the development of the brain. He insists that this development could only take place within the framework of a community (“Each individual postulates his existence in the continuity of the group”).
I particularly like his characterisation of the “detour” in the development of human thought and consciousness. I find it similar to ideas of sub atomic physics in that spontaneity becomes restrained and this “indirectness” produces surprising, stronger results that seem to appear out of nowhere. Pannekoek talks about the potentially unlimited nature of human imagination.
There is a weakness in his analyses in that he expresses a somewhat mechanical view of the development of technology and this, from a revolutionary who was very clear on the development of consciousness and the necessity for self-organisation in the proletariat. This also affects his view on the revolution which he comes to see as a technological process above all. But in this pamphlet Pannekoek does stress the importance of the social instincts, of solidarity, courage and confidence within the group. And this leads on to the importance of belief systems as a way to explain the mysteries of the unconscious.

For me on the question of human consciousness, the overwhelming archaeological and ethnological evidence for the independent (in time and space) development of just about everything simply underlines the potential for the development of a universal proletarian consciousness at a higher level.

I am now going to explore the tiered consciousness through various stages of intoxication.

You're mad Baboon, everyone knows this.
But I think you are right about Pannekoek's strengths and his limitations.
Merry christmas

Hmmm... 'anarchist archaeology'. It's a contradiction when looked at from the perspective of institutional, academic archaeology, which is a professional discipline with its own caste of specialists, raising questions about 'who controls the past'? The academic discipline of archaeology exists in a contested spatiotemporal terrain of knowledge, a terrain which ultimately has to be liberated from any 'ology' and the disciplinary boundaries they erect.

Jaocheu states the case very well against the kind of utopian imaginings and interpretations advanced by gerbil, baboon and others; that is, a case founded on an ultra-orthodox (almost 1950s) positivist empiricism that favours methodological rigour and the objective reality of physical evidence (the self-evident reality of jaocheu's 'stone axe') as a counter to 'too much interpretation'. Most academic archaeologists realise that they do not approach material culture - stone axes, say - without the assumptions of the society that recognises them as physical objects. What archaeologists do - methodologically and interpretatively - is not value-free.

Who controls the past? This question has exercised some academic archaeologists. As one archaeologist has put it: the separation in time between the prehistorian and prehistoric people means that ‘we enjoy the perspective of seeing their lives encapsulated in a past that is somehow finished’, a perspective which ‘disengages people in prehistory from participation in changing presents, their own pasts and also futures’. This separation of observer and object coincides with the ‘objective time’ of chronology, in which a detached, static view of the past fixes the actions of people in prehistory in ‘a sequence of events which ignores that they came about amidst any number of other possible outcomes’ (Goodman, M. 1999. ‘Temporalities of Prehistoric Life: household development and community continuity’, in Brück, J. and Goodman, M. (eds.) Making Places in the Prehistoric World. London: UCL Press, 145-159, 147).

This opens up a whole can of worms, but I'll throw in a few other things to the mix... The 'anarchist' (or 'Marxist' or 'communist') prefix adopted by other posters to qualify their approach to the past (because it matters in the present) points to this utopian dimension, a dimension articulated by Ernst Bloch when he ponders past activities ‘too all-encompassing to have coincided with the locality of their times’, which may need re-activation in the present. This is beyond the bounds of academic archaeology which still has to justify its commitment to a 'value-free' ideology, expressed in its most fundamental form by jaocheu. The question of history and objective chronology (two wholly different things) comes into play here, and Bloch's friend, Walter Benjamin, had something to say about this. His spatialised conception of an 'open', dialectical history in which past events form a 'constellation' with the present, subverts the 'triumphal procession' of a chronological order 'in which the present rulers are stepping over those who are lying prostrate'. Archaeologists have power and control over the past because they have a chronology, 'underwritten by excavation and the laws of stratigraphy’ (T. A. Dowson:317). Benjamin cites Henri Focillon on the dangers of archaeology’s unmodulated concept of evolution: ‘its deceptive orderliness, its single-minded directness, its use…of the expedient of “transitions,” its inability to make room for the revolutionary energy of inventors’ (Benjamin 1999: 488). To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Benjamin 247), Rather, the materialist historian grasps ‘the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one’, as a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past (255).

Sorry about the chaotic referencing towards the end - I really can't be arsed at the moment...

Wellclose Square, your post is very interesting and I think I agree with much of it, but I'm a bit confused about parts, so could I say what I think you are saying, and then you can correct me if I'm interpreting you wrongly?

I agree that the 'professional' archaeologists have to appear to be 'academically neutral' to maintain their own position of power, and that 'inter-disciplinary' enquiry is the way forward for Communists. There is no 'neutral' position in any scientific enquiry, and we Communists disdain to pretend otherwise: in fact, openly revealing one's own biases is the only way of moving towards any notion of 'objective' science, together with integrating all phenomena (ideal and material), philosophy, politics, economics, sociology, archaeology, etc., into a true 'human' science.

So far, I think, so good.

But your characterisation of the various positions has me a bit confused. Perhaps just writing this will clarify things for me.

I think you point out these positions:

1. Jaocheu's 'positivist empiricism'

2. Gerbil and Baboon's 'utopian imaginings and interpretations' (opposes 1)

3. Modern academics' 'value' -awareness (opposes 1, but perhaps not 2)

but this is (confusingly) contradicted by:

4. My position (ie. 'Communist archeology'; opposes 1, 2 and 3?)

I would characterise this position as the better one, because

a) it totally rejects discredited empiricism and positivism in science (as does Einstein in physics);

b) it rejects what you call 'utopian imaginings', but not 'interpretations' - interpretations must have some base in reality, so we can't have the (real) stone axe being used to build (utopian) helicopters;

c) it goes far beyond 'value awareness', as it maintains that 'values' are inseperable from interpretations, unlike the academics' belief that a ritual genuflection towards 'value awareness' innoculates a 'professional' from the curse of the 'utopian' or the 'biased'.

I would imagine that you'd agree with a-c above, but your statement:

seems to suggest that you see a 'prefix' as moving to utopianism.

Wouldn't you 'prefix' your position, or are you merely saying that 'interdisciplinarity' has no prefix? I'd agree with the latter, in a Communist society, but, for now, I think we should emphasise that the 'interdisciplinary' position is the Communist position.

I hope you take my points in the spirit they are intended - not for dismissing you, but for discussion.

LBird, you've studied my post more methodically than I put it together and noticed some inconsistencies. I'll try and address your points - modulated by Boxing Day excess, as I am.

* The 'confusing contradiction' between the value-awareness of (much of) modern archaeology and its commitment to the ideology of value-freedom. I do think that both contradictory tendencies run concurrently in the discipline - each tendency being emphasised at different times. One archaeologist I know of does recognise the value-laden nature of archaeological enquiry, drawing on Marx and Heidegger (ugh!), but he also attacks 'utopian' interpretations which are presumably based on what he has elsewhere called 'presentist deformations'. There's also the matter of so-called institutional impartiality, whether of the university or individual departments, that underpins such statements as "We're above politics", a statement of value freedom if ever there was one, however contradictory.

* I used the term 'utopian imaginings' in a dual sense (confusingly) - both in the pejorative sense I'd imagine some archaeologists using it against people, but also in a positive sense, in that I'm happy to identify myself as a utopian, in contradistinction to a 'social realist' sensibility (not restricted to its Stalinist sense, but including it) that characterises much of the critique of capital. We want another world.

* Interdisciplinarity. I'm not totally happy with that term (much as I agree with the spirit in which you're using it). To me, it implies the multiplication of disciplinary boundaries, a tacit recognition of the integrity of each academic territory, even as we try to overcome their boundaries. I'd see the critique of interdisciplinarity as, perhaps, analogous to the critique of internationalism articulated elsewhere (recognising the territorial integrity of nations, etc.). I'd go further and say that the erection of disciplinary boundaries is analogous to the process of enclosure and the enshrinement of absolute property rights - scientific empiricism and absolute property (empirically proved by legal documents) being aspects of the same regime. I haven't got that much to back this hunch up, but if anyone wants to elaborate... Suffice to say, I think Marx was on to something when he said: ‘the overcoming of private property means…the complete emancipation of all human senses and aptitudes’. I think that points to a 'new science' not bound by disciplinary limits. In pointing beyond those limits, I'd say that's utopian, in a good way.

LBird, I hope that answers some of what you've brought up, though I'm aware that I haven't covered it all, but I really need to go now...

Wellcose Square, thanks for your helpful reply. One point: I'm glad you turned out to be 'inconsistent', rather than I turned out to be thick. Although, on second thoughts, they're not mutually exclusive, are they?

On your points:

I don't think that 'value-awareness' and 'value-freedom' are necessarily 'contradictory', in the eyes of the 'professional academics'.

I think they often regard 'values' (especially political ones) as being like dogshit. The reason for recognising the existence of dogshit is so that one can avoid it! So, for them, they can be 'aware' and 'free'. The path to academic excellence is thus no longer like going for a walk down a straight and clean avenue, as imagined by the Positivists, but more like a meandering, dark (and shit-filled) alleyway, but, at least in principle, one get can to the end of one's walk with still-pristine boots.

Whereas we Communists know what's waiting for us! [draws a welcome veil over the image]

Well, the 'spirit' for me is one of the destruction of disciplinary boundaries, not their 'multiplication', so I should make that clear, and I'm sure you'd agree, as you also include a quote from Marx "'the complete emancipation of all human senses and aptitudes’. I think that points to a 'new science' not bound by disciplinary limits".

My one possible disagreement with you is your statement that,

I'm not sure about this use of the term 'utopian'. I see it to be directed more at people with unrealisable ideas. For example, I don't think it is 'utopian' to think every human on this planet could have clean water, good food, nice housing, full education, political freedom, etc., although we are always told that these 'ideals' are 'utopian' by the powerful. But there are some physical limits to what we can achieve - let's face it, we can't compete with the capitalists with their promises of a sun-kissed island to all who work hard enough. They're lying, of course, but we can't make a reality of this ideal, for six billion, no matter what our efforts are. It is truly 'utopian'.

'Social realist'? - now there's a discussion waiting to be had!

Let's hope your needs were met... whether utopian, spiritual or mundanely physical. Cheers.

Thanks, LBird. No serious issues with what you've just posted - well, not serious enough to go racking my brains on a holiday afternoon!

To go back to Gerbil’s original post about the possibilities around anarchist archaeologists: I don’t think that this is quite the right question in that the wealth of archaeological studies provides plenty of opportunities for a radical interpretation of prehistory. There’s plenty of sound archaeologists around and there’s a wealth of writings and analysis that come from the “mainstream"; particularly when some of this “mainstream” element dares to interpret, against the “shock-horror” of conservative elements, and even predict, from an intuitive basis, the past. A couple of examples here in this respect and another below: Ian Tattersall is a Paleoanthropologist and currently curator of the US Natural History Museum. About ten years ago I read one of his books (I forget which) where he argued against the linear view of prehistory. The linear view of prehistory is one perpetrated by the present ruling class because it validates the existence of capitalism as the apogee of humanity with the bourgeoisie as its representatives. Anyway, a decade or so ago, Tattersall in this work, predicted that around 30,000 years ago it was quite possible, likely even, that there were four or maybe more species of Homo extant on the planet at the same time. It was a bold prediction and absolutely spot on because today we know without any doubt that thirty millennia ago there were at least four species of Homo living on the planet. Similarly with Darwin for whom revolution was an anathema: a hundred and fifty years before it was accepted by the scientific establishment – when it was proved beyond any scientific doubt – he predicted that the birthplace of humanity was Africa. So I don’t think we need, at this stage, particularly anarchist or marxist archaeologists though the contributions of Kropotkin, Marx, Engels, Pannekoek and Kautsky are deeper enquiries into prehistory.

On another point from Gerbil regarding the general period and geography of Neolithic Scotland and the essentially egalitarian nature of that society: I agree that this was generally the case particularly against the interpretation of bourgeois ideology which presents prehistory as a competitive struggle for survival of which warfare would be a central part. Gerbil poses some elements from the period in Scotland which, he says, point to the non-hierarchical nature of society. I broadly agree with this although it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t conflict and conflict doesn’t have to mean warfare or fighting. The conflict could have been “political” or religious in the wider sense of the word and could have been an element in the developments of priesthoods and elites. The state didn’t exist then but civilisation was just around the corner. But this wasn’t the case in the period referred to.

Colin Renfrew (2007) shows that from a study of Maes Howe, the Ring of Brodgas and the Stones of Stennass (all henge monuments built in Neolithic Scotland), as well as the monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, there is no archaeological evidence of chiefs or “Chiefdoms”. The same can be said of the “temples” of prehistoric Malta, the structures of the American south-west (Chaco Canyon) and the constructions of coastal Peru. In all of these, there are no signs of “rich” burials, no signs of status and all the pointers are towards egalitarian society. Of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but what Renfrew points to is the capacity of “group oriented” societies to produce great works. For example on Orkney, Renfrew estimates a hundred thousand man-hours of work which provides a point of reference and communality to the entire island population (Renfrew estimates the monuments of Silbury Hill and Stonehenge to have taken up tens of millions of man-hours – Renfrew was a professor of archaeology at Cambridge and I recommend his short and powerful work “Prehistory – The Making of the Human Mind”. I would put him among the “radical” mainstream not least for his coining of the term “cognitive” archaeology – a shocking blasphemy for the conservative elements like J. above).

I think that it’s fairly easy to see that the exchange of stone axes, which was prevalent during the Neolithic, to carry, display or place in tombs, expresses their symbolism both in reciprocal relationships and in relation to the nether world of the tiered cosmos, which is also an explanation for these chambered tombs and passage graves. The whole of prehistory is littered with stone axes that even at face value tell us an enormous amount, let alone the carvings and representations of them in poems and myth.
The similarities between Maes Howe and other structures in the region (about 5000 years ago) and the great tombs on the Bend in the Boyne are striking (also with those on Anglesey and Brittany). The motifs carved on the stones are also similar. I think that the similarities of these structures across North West Europe are beyond any doubt but what about the carvings, the “motifs” on the stones which make them up? What is the role of this imagery on the megalithic tombs that tended to form a spiritual network?

Jeremy Dronfield, when a Cambridge Ph.D student in 1997, published an important investigation into these motifs in the Irish tombs. He found that they were expressions of the inner mind and associated with altered states of consciousness. To quote his conclusion:
“we can say – with approximately 80% confidence – that Irish passage-tomb art is fundamentally similar to (as opposed to merely resembling) arts derived from endogenous subjective vision and fundamentally dissimilar to arts not so derived. Therefore we can confidently say that Irish passage-tomb art was itself derived from endogenous visual phenomena.
Thus, the basic conclusions already reached by Bradley (1989) and Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1993) are vindicated (at least as far as Ireland is concerned), by using a more substantive and reliable analytical process... Irish passage-tomb art was apparently derived from endogenous visions associated with some form of mind-altering practice”.

All these structures can be well placed within their particular, but general view and expression of the tiered cosmos.

Baboon wrote: Colin Renfrew (2007) shows that from a study of Maes Howe, the Ring of Brodgas and the Stones of Stennass (all henge monuments built in Neolithic Scotland), as well as the monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, there is no archaeological evidence of chiefs or “Chiefdoms”.

I am not sure about this. I tend to think that the henge monuments expressed a transition to 'civilisation', ie class society. Lionel Sims has done a lot of work on the symbolism of Stonehenge, arguing that it was part of what he (following Chris Knight and others) refer to as a 'neolithic counter-revolution' following the dissolution of the earlier stage of primitive communism. I don't think counter-revolution is the right term exactly, because the advent of class society was a factor of progress as well as regress, but the scale of such monuments seem to imply a high degree of centralisation which, in most phases of past history, has been imposed from above rather than below.

Gobleki Tepe and other contemporary sites also presuppose a high degree of organisation and, possibly, centralisation eleven thousand six hundred years ago. That doesn't make it a counter-revolutionary or hierarchical society. But I will have to read more on the "link" suggested by Alf above. In the meantime some preliminary thoughts:

I agree with Alf above that the period he mentions is part of a transition to civilisation, the state and class society. At the time of the henge monuments there was certainly conflict (not necessarily warfare or even fighting) which is demonstrated in one major site (from memory) having its megaliths overturned and the previously hidden symbolism of the "old" religion being displayed again. Similarly there seems to be conflict between the Bend in the Boyne structures of Knowth and Newgrange. Around five or so thousand years ago it would, one can suppose, have been a situation of flux with a definite tendency towards civilisation proper.

I don't think that "counter-revolution" in relation to the Neolithic is a valid proposition; where was the revolution? The Upper Palaeolithic saw what could possibly be described as an "explosion" of consciousness but this, in my opinion, was a process that was continued into the Neolithic where the development of the "consciousness of consciousness" was even more acute. The Neolithic wasn't a conscious revolution but I think it right to describe it as a revolutionary period. After all, the chains of primitive communism had become a fetter that, as Marx and Engels said, had to be broken. Unconsciously, the Neolithic paved the way for a massive development of the productive forces.

I think that it's also worth noting that well into civilisation, right up to the decomposition of the Roman Empire and beyond in fact, Barbarian egalitarianism was still a strong force in society. Lewis Henry Morgan demonstrated this in considerable detail in relation to the Barbarian gentes.