ABSTRACT
However, two developments led to a questioning of this complacent view. The first was the recognition of a dilemma in the philosophy of archaeology. This issue was discussed in the paper reprinted here as Chapter 7, but it has been more widely and fully discussed by Wylie (1989). The dilemma existed before any attempt to interpret past symbolism, but it was thrown into focus by that attempt. In essence the problem is that archaeologists had espoused first empiricist and then positivist perspectives according to which they could only test hypotheses which concerned the observable world. And yet archaeologists want to go beyond their data to make statements about the dynamics of past societies. They want to make statements about behaviour, economic and social structures and so on which go beyond the data and are not themselves observable. Archaeologists felt that they could ignore this dilemma so long as they could argue for deterministic links from the material to the non-material. But the attempt to get at past symbolism undermines any such argument. The very definition of a symbol normally includes some reference to its arbitrary nature. Few people would argue that the symbolic meaning of an artifact, even if it is historically non-arbitrary (see Chapter 2), can be determined cross-culturally. How could a positivist approach possibly deal with the arbitrary nature of the sign?
