ABSTRACT
What I found particularly interesting in the way processual archaeologists reacted to my writing was that they did not respond to what I said, but to what they wanted me to say. In other words, they had already begun their interpretation of my work before they read it. They were following classically hermeneutic procedures, but it was none the less annoying. Archaeologists had absorbed stereotypical oppositions between objective and subjective, materialism and idealism, the general and the particular, science and relativism. Even though I wrote that I wanted to break down these divides, processual archaeologists claimed that I was being idealist, that I rejected generalisations, that I took a relativist position. As is clear from Chapter 3, I tried not to take such a one-sided view. Yet my work was read in terms of the old expectations. I was set up as a ‘straw man’ so that I could be knocked down.
