Larry's parable is both interesting and entertaining.
As one who was involved in extensive discussion of reflexive archaeology 10 or 15 years ago, The present discussion is most amusing. My recollection of reflexivity was as an activity that took place before going into the field, when research questions were framed, and after getting out of the field, when analyzing and reporting the results. The Ap is still the Ap, no matter what broadly methodological approach one is using. It is still 10YR 5/3, brown fine sandy loam (or whatever), containing 3 quartz debitage fragments, 4 undecorated pearlware sherds and 2 annular pearlware sherds (or whatever).
In interpreting it all, the archaeologist may feel a responsibility to examine how her or his experience, (or for that matter the past scholarship in the discipline), relates to the material and the lives of the people who threw it out. That's how I conceived reflexivity entering the process, and still do. At the time some of us felt that not considering the archaeologist as a participant in the creation of particular pasts made us neither more scientific, nor brought us closer to a "true" past. Some of us were accused of "just telling stories" by people who simply didn't like the stories that we were telling, or the people who we were telling them about, and accused of being "unscientific" by people who still felt that hypothetico-deductive reasoning expressed through statistical analysis of test hypotheses was the sole determinant of "truth."
Lauren J. Cook, RPA
Senior Archaeologist
Richard Grubb & Associates, Inc.
30 North Main Street
Cranbury, NJ 08512
Ph: 609 655-0692 ext 312
Fx: 609 655-3050
email: [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Larry
Moore
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 9:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reflexive archaeology and field work
Hi folks,
Let me offer some additional thoughts on reflexive behavior while in the
field as folks have had questions about it.
The best I can do to explain reflexive fieldwork is to give you some fiction.
You’re at this excavation, a phase III mitigation project on a tight
schedule. The team is two crews and a field director. One of the crew chiefs is
sitting in a unit preparing to do a profile. The profile has seven layers to it. The
top four are man made deposits and the lower three are an Ap, E, R sequence.
The crew chief stares at this profile and falls into a reflexive thought
process. He thinks to himself:
1. These layers are cultural over natural
2. Wait, the Ap is a plowed soil, so it is both cultural and natural
3. Wait, all the soils here are cultural because humans view all life through
a cultural lens. We dug this hole in a square shape, so it all must be
cultural.
4. No, change that. Humans are animals with culture. Therefore, everything I
see and do is natural. Thus, the whole profile is natural.
At this point he has been staring at the profile for 20 minutes. His crew has
noticed that he is just staring. Two of them go over to the field director
and say: “Hey boss, John’s doing his Buddha thing again.” The field director
gets angry and walks over to John.
At this point John is hitting new highs. He exalts to himself:
“I am one with nature. I am one with culture. Hallelujah.”
He jumps to his feet. His thought processes have visualized the parallel
worlds of solipsism and the universality of humanity. “Unity, entropy, chaos are
all mine. Self actualization”
Thump!!! The field director swatted him across the rear end with her clip
board. “John, I want that profile done in twenty minutes. Otherwise, you work
through lunch. And stop daydreaming. We don’t pay you to study your navel.”
John goes back to work with a little smirk on his face. “Yah, you don’t pay
me enough anyway. At least I leaned something about myself today.”
Cheers
Larry Moore
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