ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we argued that as a consequence of its intimate relationship with the modern nation-state, archaeology has tended to construct an image of the past that is dominated by bounded and internally homogeneous social entities. This tendency was most pronounced in the culture-historic and processual archaeologies of the early and mid-twentieth century. In more recent years, in reaction against this totalisation, an emphasis on the ‘archaeology of the individual’ has begun to emerge. While there are many positive aspects to this development, I will argue in this chapter that stressing the individual and subjectivity as against the social and objectivity merely reinforces the modernist dichotomies that these terms imply. More importantly, I will suggest that ‘the individual’ refers to a very particular understanding of what it is to be a human being, which is specific to Western modernity and is both anachronistic and ethnocentric when applied to the distant past. In other words, the assumption is that there is only one legitimate way to be human, and it is ours. This viewpoint originates in a philosophical humanism, which posits a fixed and universal human nature as the basis for the dignity and natural rights of all human beings. However, as I will hope to show, the attempt to base a moral perspective on supposed human universals is doomed to failure, while the notion of the free and autonomous human agent actually sustains the divisive politics of the New Right.
