ABSTRACT
In recent decades, archaeologists have rarely shown more than passing interest in history and the theoretical issues of historical interpretation. This is somewhat odd given the ‘historical’ (in the sense of temporally concerned) nature of our discipline. Instead, archaeology’s principal influences have come from anthropology and from the sciences: particularly evolutionary biology, which sees change as an externally driven, adaptive process rather than one of historical contingency; and philosophy of science, especially the Hempelian logico-positivism underlying the New Archaeology. Postprocessual archaeology has recently rediscovered the social sciences, and the anti-histories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose reified mental structures allow no room for historical change, and Michel Foucault, whose ‘history’ has been extensively criticised on empirical grounds (Vilar 1985) – although this does not invalidate his theoretical project. For their part, historians have generally been concerned more with methodology and the problems of interpreting texts than with the wider issues of understanding the past. Hence the archaeology of historic periods has had little theoretical input from documentary history and is frequently characterised as an atheoretical ‘handmaid of history’ (at least in Britain; for America, by way of contrast, see the historically situated structuralism of Glassie 1975, Deetz 1977). Historians have generally distrusted grand theorists – who now reads Toynbee? – and Foucault has contrasted the Hegelian view of history common among philosophers with the real-life practices of the historian (Chartier 1988).
