ABSTRACT
At the present archaeology is pervaded by two conflicting attitudes: a radical scepticism opposes a crude scientism seeking objectivity and reducing the archaeological record to the effect of mechanical adaptive process. The sceptical and empirically minded 'dirt' archaeologist digs and 'rescues' the past, describes and lodges the finds in a museum or archive. These sceptics, at heart, believe that all statements about the past (with possible exceptions when dealing in the realms of economy and technology) are little more than subjective whim enlivened by empathy. Those advocating scientism believe it possible to read off the past from its traces in the present without too much trouble providing a suitable technical apparatus can be developed. We replace scepticism with an optimism based on an intervention which denies the polarization of objectivity and subjectivity. For the subjective idealism of scientistic archaeology we substitute a view of the discipline as an hermeneutically informed dialectical science of past and present unremittingly embracing and attempting to understand the polyvalent qualities of the socially constructed world of the past and the world in which we live. We sustain throughout a rejection of the past as presented in archaeological texts as objective, or alternatively, as subjective. There is no question of choosing one or the other. Archaeological theory and practice as labour in the present completely transcend this artificial division, labour which draws past and present into a fresh perspective, a perspective which serves to rearticulate their interrelationship. The study presented in Chapter 7 does not pretend to be an account of what the past was really like, nor does Chapter 8 claim to be a pure and unsullied account of present social processes. Neither are the analytical narratives or 'stories' presented a pure figment of our imagination. They tie together past and present through a political interpretation of the materials, an interpretation which ultimately aims to write our lived present into a past. Archaeology is a particular and active relation between past and present.
