Simon Denison talks to Mike Shanks
For many people who enjoy archaeology, theory has a bad name. Many bad names, in fact, and here are some of them - obscure, pretentious, laden with jargon, and irrelevant to what most archaeologists actually do.
Post-processualism in particular seems to bring people out in a cold sweat. In contrast to the supposedly scientific or processual archaeology that came before, post-processualism (PP) is said to believe, amongst other things, that all interpretations are equally valid, regardless of the evidence, and that no hypothesis can be judged right or wrong. PP is also associated with radical politics and stresses the political content of all interpretations.
So far removed is all this from the way that most archaeologists operate, that it seemed high time to put some questions to one of PP's high priests, Mike Shanks. Now 37, and head of the archaeology department at Lampeter, he was the author 10 years ago (with Chris Tilley) of ReConstructing Archaeology and Social Theory and Archaeology, two of PP's seminal works.
We meet at his home in a remote village in West Wales. Sitting either side of a crackling log fire, Mike Shanks immedi ately demolishes all my preconceptions about PP. Hypotheses can be tested, he says; all theories are not equally legitimate; certain generalisations can be made about human nature and society. `Post-processualism,' he says in a strong Geordie accent, `doesn't mean you cannot judge between theories. Every interpretation you make is open to a multitude of different kinds of critique, for example on the grounds of empirical inadequacy.'
Fine, I say, so how does PP differ from conventional, processual archaeology? He stresses PP's attitude of suspicion towards the evidence and creativity.' [In PP] you use the evidence, but you also make enormous interpretive leaps, with juxtapositions of ideas which have no grounds other than that you have made the juxtaposition . . . The net of your interpretation is hooked onto the data at various points but not at every point. Not all of it is testable but some of it is, and the whole picture, or network, creates an interpretation that is more or less feasible.'
That, I say, is surely no different from the way any wise archaeologist proceeds - whatever his or her theoretical affiliation. Like party politics, I suggest, the debate between the two schools is fired by black-and-white polemic whereas in truth the aims and methods of the wisest practitioners are similar. Mike Shanks grins as though about to say something he might regret: `Yeah,' he says. `I think we do have common ways of dealing with the evidence. There aren't these cut-and-dried systems of thought. We do share a lot.'
If PP, then, is not quite what you might have thought, nor is Shanks himself. Far from the furious Marxist of repute, his politics are Blairite. He drives a silver Volvo estate (that most reactionary of cars) and keeps three labradors. The interior of his home is part country-cottage, part urban chic. It is designed with panache; and style is important to the man - he is a photographer, his wife is a potter, and he likes the company of artists. A natty dresser and spectacular lecturer, he is perhaps one of archaeology's few genuine charismatics, although somewhat given to ranting (`missionary zeal', he calls it). He speaks very fast, and during our talk he leans forward, juts his chin out, waves his arms about, and gets so fired up he constantly needs to be interrupted.
Born in a pit village in the North East, he read archaeology at Cambridge (the first in his family to go to university), where he met his future co-author Chris Tilley - then a research student - and became deeply interested in theory, much against the inclinations of his tutors. He went on to teach classics in a Tyneside comprehensive for six years, before returning to Cambridge aged 30 to start a PhD. It is startling to realise that his first two books were written and published while he was still a teacher in his 20s.
This brings us to the issue of the hideous language of archaeological theory. Revolutionary those two books might have been, but there can be few people, I suspect, who enjoyed reading them. Why all the ghastly jargon? `I'm not trying to obscure,' he says. `I'm saying, here are a set of good words that make us think with a different angle on something. I cherish the notion of the difficult text that challenges. What a world it would be if we refused to read something because we couldn't understand it at first reading! Do you want that?'
Put that way, no - in theory. But in practice, the question whether the main effect of theoretical jargon is to put off readers and reduce the circulation of ideas, is one that theoreticians, including some former teachers, might like to consider a little further.
Return to the British Archaeology homepage
© Council for British Archaeology, 1997