Any good archaeologist is reflexive in the sense you always think about
what and why you are doing certain things and continue learning
throughout your career. I was taught theory was a load of rubbish but I
can now quote Bordieau and LeFebvre with the best of them and I am even
thought of a theoretical guru in some parts of the world.. I found for
instance studying the historiography pf post-med/historical archaeology
brought many relevations about the entirely accidental way we currently
do the subject. The Hodder approach is applied on site and as I
understand it basically endlessly defers taking decisions about what is
a layer or context, for example, or how you describe it by relying on
video/paintings/encounter groups etc. I am not a processualist but I
think some decisions have to made on site with the primary evidence not
on secondary records afterwards- to use a historian's distinction.
Defining and describing contexts- the basis of Wheeler-Kenyon-
Biddle-Harris school stratigraphic archaeology is one of them. If you
are not capable of doing it on site you should not be digging.
paul.
Lauren Cook wrote:
>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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