Theoretical Interpretations of the 12th century B.C.
Cypriot Archaeological Record
By V. E. Cook
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There are two antithetical general interpretations of the Late Cypriot Bronze Age archaeological evidence marking the transition to the Iron Age that are deduced from realms other than the evidence itself. The oldest, that accompanied the rise of Cypriot archaeology during the 19th century, is the idea of a Mycenaean colonization of Cyprus. It is based on Classical Greek legends claiming the foundation of archaic Cypriot kingdoms by Greek heroes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The other “New Archaeological” interpretation arose in the United States along with technological developments after World War II. In this case, it is maintained that abrupt changes in the sequence of archaeological data in Bronze Age Cyprus need not be attributed to migrations, invasions or colonizations. It is postulated that they indicate a revolution within a cultural “system” or data based “model” that is supposed to reflect the emerging properties of algorithms such as those that pertain to the development of biological entities and have been successfully transferred to the human engineering of the environment. However, this paper argues that empirical induction does not support these theories. On the contrary, simple observation and classification of the evidence leads to a hypothesis of a cultural movement from the Levantine coast towards Cyprus heretofore ignored.
Before discussing these approaches, it may be helpful to set them into their contexts, as well as to briefly review what is meant by theory and theory building.
Derivation of a theory
The ambiguities of theorizing appear at the outset in trying to determine what is meant by the word “theory” itself. A theory can be defined as “a formal statement of the rules on which a subject of study is based or of ideas which are suggested to explain a fact or event or, more generally, an opinion or explanation.” (The cambridge International Dictionary of English, 1995). It can also be defined as “a supposition or system of ideas explaining something, especially one based on general principles independent of the particular things to be explained.” (The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, 1998). A theory can be more or less precise, more or less general. There is no mention of substantiation within the term itself, yet researchers insist upon the necessity of bolstering the term with direct observation.
There are two methods of arriving at a theory: empirico-inductive and hypothetico-deductive. Prior to the 17th century the hypothetico-deductive method prevailed because metaphysical convictions as a starting point for deductions were accepted as truths: those based on Biblical interpretation [1] and those based on Pythagorean geometry or Aristotelian reasoning which reappeared during the Renaissance. [2]
The empirico-inductive method was virtually unknown until the late 16th century when Francis Bacon philosophically formulated it, advocating knowledge as an intention to control nature, rather than proceeding from an unquestioning identification with it. [3] During the 17th century, the weaknesses of hypothetical deductions became increasingly evident. After attempting an axiomatic presentation of his heavily experimental Optics, Newton finally concluded that “although arguing from Experiments and Observation by Induction be no Demonstration of general conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of.” [4] More than a century later the Marquis de Laplace agreed with him concerning induction that “the principal means for ascertaining truth – induction and analogy – are based on probabilities.” [5]
Taking a less positivist stance Wolfgang Pauli wrote in 1954 “I regard it as idle to speculate on what came first, the idea or the experiment. I hope that no one still maintains that theories are deduced by strict logical conclusions from laboratory-books, a view which was still quite fashionable in my student days. Theories come into being through an understanding inspired by empirical material, an understanding which we may best regard, following Plato, as coming into congruence (zur Deckkung kommen) of internal images with external objects and their behaviour” [6] (italics in the original). Although, indeed, the origin of a theory may be an intuition or idea, its value depends upon empirical evidence.
Much more goes on than simply perceiving an object if it is to have a meaning. As C. Renfrew pointed out in his review of Paul Courbin’s Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie? objects are not facts. [7] One inevitably gives a meaning, applies a concept, to what one observes, which is theoretical activity. At present it is fashionable to emphasize Einstein’s attitude that “it is quite wrong to try grounding a theory on observable quantities alone. In reality the opposite happens. It is the theory that determines what we can observe.” [8] Perhaps the Kantian maxim is the truest: “experience without theory is blind but theory without experience a mere intellectual play.” [9]
Unfortunately, modern studies in the humanities have tended to breach the empirical aspect of these principles. Empiricism has been neglected because hypotheses are derived from unquestioned premises stamped with approval by social consensus. Far preferable would be to hypothesize from pure intuition, because intuition would be questioned and more carefully substantiated.
From Homeric legend to cybernetics
To understand the antithesis of the two hypothetico-deductive theories, which at present prevail, concerning the close of the Cypriot Bronze Age, it is helpful to begin with the even deeper theoretical roots, common to both, that accompanied the arise of the formal discipline of archaeology itself in the 19th century.
Efforts to demonstrate Greek mathematical concepts caused empiricism to become increasingly appreciated as its results accrued: leading to the rise of mechanics, industrial production, the power of a new non-agricultural segment of the population, and increasing contradictions to Biblical (hence royal) authority. Finally, the empirical results of Charles Darwin’s observations concerning the evolution of species via natural selection, reinforced by discoveries in the new empirical disciplines of geology and archaeology, replaced ancient Greek philosophy and the Bible as an unquestioned source of deduction. Spiritual traditions became increasingly eclipsed by materialist convictions.
Nevertheless, the straightforward, and often lacunaire, conclusions to be induced from empiricism are not sufficient to nourish mankind’s necessary social structures, so hypotheses come into play from which deductions are drawn. In the early stages of Darwinism, spirituality was not completely done away with; it developed into idealism. There was an increased emphasis on the Hellenism without whose humanist and mathematical traditions the industrial revolution could not have developed. Furthermore, the Greek language and myths were Indo-European, emphasizing a European, as opposed to Semitic, past. Here was a source of distinction for the rising industrial class. The Greek myths of struggling gods and heroes fitted very well with the theory of survival of the fittest adaptation processes and at the same put into question the Christian authority of the landholding aristocrats. Furthermore, scientific mastery of nature suggested European evolutionary superiority. The imperialistic implications, then as now, are obvious; the British and Germanic movements east, in face of the declining Ottoman Empire, could be argued as the inevitable result of Darwinian fitness. In order to discredit the Semitic foundations of aristocratic authority, represented by European Christianity, as well as Ottoman Islam, the authority of the Bible had to be discredited. Darwinism and the Greek heroic traditions provided the necessary arguments. Nietzsche was the most symptomatic thinker of his times when his Genealogy of Morals asserted Aryan (Indo-European), values, while disparaging Christianity. Symptomatic, too, was Schliemann’s successful search for the vestiges of Troy and Mycenae which further vindicated Hellenism. However, it should be noted that both Schliemann and Palma di Cesnola admitted a more significant present of the Phoenicians in both Greece and Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age than was to be the case in subsequent interpretations.
This was the intellectual background of the appearance of Cypriot archaeology at the time of Luigi Palma di Cesnola’s archaeological forays [10] until the arrival of the New Archaeology in Cypriot studies. Until quite recently the New Archaeology has been less dominant than in Cyprus elsewhere; the Cypriot political situation lending weight to the earlier Aryan tradition in the minds of Greek Cypriot archaeologists. There is still a school of thought in Cypriot archaeology which attributes the post destruction levels of the early 12th century B.C. sites to a colonization of Cyprus by the legendary Trojan “nostoi”, or at least to Aegeans as a detachment of the Sea Peoples.
Meanwhile the last decade has seen increasing British-American participation in Bronze Age Cypriot archaeology, so most of the post 1960’s “new” generation of Cypriot Bronze Age archaeologists are applying New Archaeological methods and interpretation. This aspect of social theory developed from Marxism, as opposed to the Hellenism of the 19th century. It is an even closer fit to the theory of human evolution from micro-organisms, via the very un-aristocratic apes, determined by natural selection. It is a fundamentally materialistic, biological, approach to being which favors the common man. Egalitarian social justification is sought in natural, inevitable, at times revolutionary (saltational) processes, indifferently pertaining to all life and all that proceeds from the human mind. These processes, which seem to be reflected in the rise of the 19th century machine age, pertain to a correspondingly mechanical theory of economic upheavals as the basis of social evolution. Since World War II, industrial machines, have been giving way to computing machines, with remarkable results in theory building.
Because we observe the economic effects of such a biological-mechanical model today, is modern society’s biological paradigm the discovery of an absolute at the root of all societies?
In 1982, I defended a relatively straightforward empirical inductive thesis on the subject of “The Relationship of Cyprus with the Outside World during the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age.” [11] The chronological reference point of the transition of the Bronze Age to the Iron age, 1180 B.C., is the wall inscription at Medinet Habu celebrating the victory of Ramses III over the “Sea Peoples”. This coincides with the abrupt decline of the Mycenaean palatial empire, Egyptian civilization and the abandonment of Ugarit and Hattutsa. In Cyprus, a series of destruction levels throughout the island has been dated to the same period as these events. Yet, following these destructions, there were not only innovations, but signs of enrichment, in the Cypriot archaeological record, particularly the temple complex at Kition. As exhaustive a catalogue as possible of the published Cypriot finds dating from the 12th century B.C was compiled in order to seek analogous material from regions surrounding Cyprus to account for the innovations. An immigration to Cyprus from Ugarit seemed plausible because a majority of parallels could be observed in immediately earlier Syrian or Hittite contexts. This inference coincided well with written documents of the period referring to upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean as well as to a severe depopulation, or abandonment, of Ugarit. The presence of innovations in the Cypriot material record was echoed in the Aegean and Attica, without evidence proving chronological anteriority in any of the eastern Mediterranean regions. The evidence suggested neither an emigration to Cyprus from the Aegean area, nor a fundamentally internal social upheaval. On the contrary, it seems that there may have been a movement of refugees from Ugarit and the Syria-Anatolian region to Cyprus with further emigrations west into the Aegean. [12]
Colonization. Revolution or Refuge?
After years of continued research I cannot but object to understanding the Cypriot Bronze Age in terms of colonization or revolution. Both colonization and revolution are suspect because they were particularly true of post 17th century Europe and are part of the modern scholar’s immediate world view. On the other hand, refugee movements provoked by invasions or climatic changes are far more ubiquitous. However, the basic objection is that cataloguing and the inclusion of all types of archaeological finds have not been sufficiently referred to. Admittedly, in the case of the hypothesis of a Mycenaean colonization, the hypothesis was founded at least somewhat empirically on the existence of Homeric legend. Furthermore, the cataloguing of Late Bronze Age finds in Cyprus has been remarkably realized. Unfortunately, corresponding material in areas foreign to Cyprus has largely been ignored when it pertains elsewhere than to Greek speaking regions. The more recent, New Archaeological, theory of local revolutionary upheavals with the importation of foreign artefacts to enhance local prestige is based on modern social theory, to the exclusion of adequate attention to the actual archaeological finds.
The Aryan Model
It has often been demonstrated that the unjustifiable supposition of Aryan (Indo European) superiority has slanted the historical interpretations underlying geopolitics ever since the Renaissance. Martin Bernal, in his controversial book Black Athena, has explicitly applied this observation to studies of the East Mediterranean Bronze Age and he presents a thorough historical background of the phenomena. Unfortunately, his alternative Semitic model is as biased as the one he attacks. Furthermore, his analysis of the Bronze Age is based on the inevitably controversial nature of etymological evidence. Nevertheless, his Aryan model is pertinent to the historical interpretations of Late Cypriot Bronze Age archaeological discoveries. He makes an intriguing reference to Victor Berard’s observation that Arcadian cults may have had Semitic origins. [13] Since the form of the Greek language supposedly introduced into Cyprus during the period Linear B was in use was Arcadian, there may have been a Levantine involvement in the conditions of its introduction. Bernal also points out the obvious fact that the presence of Mycenaean pottery in Cyprus does not necessarily indicate its transportation by Mycenaeans, nor does a pottery fashion necessarily indicate the military or political presence of its originators. [14]
Further ambiguities in the evidence for such a Mycenaean colonization, especially chronological discrepancies in the legendary evidence [15], whose earliest written record dates to the time of the much later Greco-Persian wars, were extensively set forth by Einar Gjerstad in his seminal article “The Colonization of Cyprus in Greek Legend.” [16] Although Gjerstad admits many of the legends were political mythology and even that Teucros, the legendary founder of Cypriot Salamis, must have been of Anatolian, not Mycenaean, ancestry, he paradoxically concludes that the legends are corroborated by the “archaeological material” which indicates that there were two Hellenic colonizations of Cyprus during the 12th century B.C.[17] Here he refers to his study of Cypriot Proto White Painted pottery, an evolved form of Mycenaean style pottery, which the scholars of the 1940’s attributed to Mycenaeans themselves. It was assumed that in 12th century B.C. contexts where modifications appeared in the previously well established Levanto-Helladic style of Mycenaean pottery common to Cyprus, the Dodecanese, and the Levant, the Greeks would have unquestionably been the initiators, although none of the modified pottery itself was known to have been imported from the Greek mainland. This remarkably unexamined assumption probably arose because the style being transformed was itself Mycenaean. However, I have elsewhere demonstrated that, in fact, most of the modifications in this pottery have immediately earlier Cypriot or Levantine parallels. [18]
This type of basic assumption is referred to as a “factoid” by F.G. Maier, in his lucid paper Kinyras and Agapenor. [19] He writes that “factoids are mere hypotheses or speculations which have not been proved (and often cannot be proved), but which by constant repetition attained the apparent rank of established fact.” Here he deals with the above mentioned colonization of Cyprus by the Achaeans around 1200 B.C. On a very explicit table he traces this supposition to Einar Gjerstad in 1926, reinforced by Gjerstad himself, Erik Sjöqvist and Arne Furumark during the 1940’s. (In fact, Gjerstad’s hypothesis was no doubt influenced by the 19th century assumptions already set forth by Luigi Palma da Cesnola, mentioned above). Maier points out that the hypothesis of an Achaean arrival in Cyprus was based on two unquestioned, yet methodologically insecure premises: the assumption of these researchers that ethnic identity and migrations could be established primarily from pottery style, and that the destruction levels on Cypriot Late Bronze Age sites were contemporaneous, hence due to the same cause. Whereas, in fact, the Mycenaean III C 1 pottery style that seems to relate these levels chronologically must have spanned at least 50 years. He leaves the insecurity of the theory of Achaen colonization at that; but I would add Gjerstad’s relating archaeological finds to the uncertainties of Homeric legend.
The tenacity of this theory is remarkable, in spite of the inconsistencies and blatant contradictions it gives rise to when faced with the material finds. However the conviction of the reality of a heroic Achaean tradition in Cyprus has its roots in the beginning of Cypriot archaeology and has been so often repeated by figures of authority that virtually no archaeologist working on the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean area put the notion into question until the 1980s. [20] If V. Karageorghis’ interpretations have been chosen, below, as an example of this theory, it is because he has been one of the most remarkably coherent and productive archaeologists on this subject. The origin of his interpretations was undoubtedly that they were already well promoted by the consensus. Although on the one hand his interpretations have a dubious historical basis, on the other hand, it must be said he has made an invaluable contribution to archaeology with his dramatic discoveries, his excellent excavations and the rapid, high quality publications of the finds. Theoretical possibilities depend on the quality and quantity of material discoveries to draw from, which he has amply supplied.
Indeed, Mycenaeans can be attested in Cyprus. However, they have been postulated where the evidence is contradictory. The hypothesis of their 12th century B.C. post-destruction level colonization no doubt stems from the fact that they are so well attested in the great amount of imported pottery from Mycenaean centers which began in the 14th century B.C. During the 13th century the Mycenaean pottery found in Cyprus and the Levant has distinctive characteristics, which have led it to be called “Levanto-Helladic.” P. Aström has observed that the duration and nature of this contact seems to have been consistently underestimated. [21]
During the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. even the palaces and open air sanctuaries in Cyprus suggest Aegean customs. Furthermore, the 13th century would be a more fitting date for foundations by Trojan heroes, if Classical texts are considered sufficient evidence for this hypothesis. [22] This, in turn may have involved the introduction of the Greek language, which J. Chadwick would place in the 13th century B.C. because of its Arcadian elements. [23]
On the other hand, during the 12th century B.C. there is a change in the archaeological evidence which is not of a traditionally Aegean nature, although it also appears in the Aegean at this time. For instance, ashlar building blocks were used in Cyprus as well as the Levant during the 13th century B.C. but do not seem to have immediate antecedents in the Aegean. [24] So it is startling to read arguments for the Mycenaean colonization of 12th century B.C. Cyprus such as the following: “The sacred architecture of Kition with its monumental ashlar blocks, has already been compared to the temples of Enkomi of the same period. One may ask, however, how this architectural style could have been introduced by the Achaeans, since no examples have so far been found in the Aegean, whereas the nearest parallels are in the Near East, as for example the temple of Baal at Ugarit. The Achaean colonists may have used local talent in building monumental architecture just as their predecessors, the Mycenaeans, profited from contacts with Near Eastern art.” [25] This interpretation might come directly from a text of Aristotle quoted by Bernal [26] where Aristotle maintains that courage and passion are characteristic of Europe and cold regions, brains and skill are characteristic of Asia, but only “the Hellenic race, occupying a mid-position geographically, has measure of both.” (Politics VII, 7).
Most recently the same author, V. Karageorghis, has stated: “it has been clear that the flourishing of metalworking in Cyprus during the 12th century B.C. may have owed much to the technological skills of the new Mycenaean immigrants, as well as to Levantine influence. At the same time Cyprus was a center of innovation in ironworking, which again may be partly attributable to the metallurgical skills of the new immigrants” [27], or “Although the ground plans of sanctuaries erected just after ca. 1200 B.C. are based on Levantine architectural tradition, as seen at Kition, at the same time there were some interesting innovations in the use of religious symbols.”, that is, Aegean “horns of consecration.” [28] Unfortunately there is little evidence to support these assertions. Karageorghis neglects discussing the probability that ironworking was introduced from an earlier Hittite tradition, the only well attested one during the Bronze Age. [29] In a more recent article he fails to provide a chronological justification for his suggestion that it was introduced from Italy. [30] In the case of the horns of consecration, which are indeed characteristic of Minoan and Mycenaean cult practices, they have also been found in earlier contexts in Anatolia and the Near East where they may well have originated. [31]
Furthermore, the Levantine aspect of something as fundamental as religious architecture is reinforced by the presence of bronze votive livers and foundation deposits. These practices are unknown in the Aegean and earlier Cyprus, but have a strong tradition in the Near East, notably at Ugarit which was abandoned at the time the temple complex at Kition was expanded. Not much later, on the abandonment level of Enkomi at the end of the 12th century B.C., bronze statues of male deities had been protectively buried. C.F.A Schaeffer, the excavator of Enkomi, commented on the fact that bronze male deities are so far unknown in Cypriot and Aegean contexts prior to the 12th century B.C., whereas close parallels to these statuettes have been found in earlier contexts at Bogazköy and Ugarit. [32] As for the supposedly Mycenaean “megaron” in the Enkomi building where one of the statues was found, only C. Baurain has published a plan of the Cypriot example alongside a Mycenaean example. [33] The weakness of the comparison speaks for itself. Karageorghis himself admits that such hearth-rooms existed in Late Bronze Age Anatolian contexts (which would be Hittite), including nearby Tarsus. [34] P. Begg has commented that the supposition that “the Mycenaean world acted as a sort of dispensary of cultural and technological advancements seems a very limited and Greco-centric view to take.” [35] Whereas Karageorghis would attribute numerous clay figurines of a type also found in the Aegean to the arrival of Aegean newcomers after 1200 B.C. Begg, arguing from context, considers this attribution to invaders unjustifiable. He observes that the figurines first occur in early Late Cypriot II, ca. 1300 B.C. and, furthermore, they were not used in the same way: in Cyprus they appear in high status official cult places, whereas in Greece they appear in popular level cult places.
The continuation of locally produced Mycenaean pottery styles known in earlier 13th century Cypriot contexts, with what are apparently indigenous Cypriot modifications, demonstrated for the Mycenaean IIIC:1b pottery,[36] is nevertheless believed by Karageorghis and many others, to have been developed by what here are referred to as “Aegean” newcomers. Karageorghis reasons that “The newcomers did not eradicate the existing Cypriote material culture, which had reached a high level of development during LCIIC-LCIIIA and was deeply rooted in the island.”[37]
As for the often cited legendary foundation of salamis by the Homeric hero Teukros returning from the Trojan war, or even Gjerstad’s Teucrians: Achaeans mixed with Anatolian coastal tribes,[38] serious scholars would have to account for the chronological discrepancy. Unless new chronological evidence is produced, this can only suggest that the legend was a later affirmation of Hellenic legitimacy at the time of Evagoras and the Persian wars.
Although there are strong parallels in the Aegean and Cypriot finds of the 12th century, especially the pottery, “the inherent chronological imprecision for Bronze Age Crete and the Cyclades involves uncertainties ranging from 50-200 years,” [39] so the anteriority of the appearance of innovations in the Aegean does not rest on firm chronological criteria. Given the abandonment of Ugarit, 100 kilometers to the East, the escape to a nearby island seems more probable than a movement from the West to Cyprus, whereas of the Aegean islands, Rhodes lies closest to Cyprus at 500 kilometers away. The remarkably small amount of truly Aegean innovations in the Cypriot material at this time (such as the calathos vase form) simply reflects the inevitable interchange of ideas resulting from direct contacts; which is apparent in the common transformations in both the Aegean and Cypriot 12th century B.C. archaeological record.
The Mycenaean (Achaean, Aegean) colonization as an explanation for the archaeological evidence of Cyprus, which was implicitly accepted by all archaeologists prior to the 1980’s (Maier 1986: 311), is the perfect example of a “factoid” theory throwing its shadow over the material record. This is the first case of what testing hypotheses deduced from an “a priori” theory has done to the record of the Cypriot Bronze Age. Now we shall see what the following generation of Anglophone archaeologists have done to the recorded finds in applying the theories of the New Archaeology and its offshoots. To begin with it will be necessary to define this research movement.
The New Archaeology
During the 1970’s, the Anglo-American “New Archaeology”, emphasizing natural adaptation processes, heretofore mainly focused on European prehistory and American anthropology, finally appeared in Cypriot studies. One of the New Archaeology’s many proponents, A. Voorrips, described humanity thus: “When we think of living systems (like human beings) the essence of being alive is trying to adapt and to survive (which is equivalent to maintaining organization) as groups, as individuals, or perhaps even as genes. All actions of a human being … find their basic justification in whether they do or do not increase the possibilities of survival, of maintaining organization.” [40] The romantic Achaean wanderers who waged a war for beautiful Helen, and the friendship of Achilles and Patrocle, immortalized in Homeric metaphor for hundreds of generations, have been slain.
Myth has been eclipsed by a scientific idea. And yet, according to the New Archaeology developed in the United States and England during the 1960’s, a hypothesis may be borrowed from any realm; what matters is testing it according to logical criteria. Here the hypothesis is that intervariability of human production in the past will reveal socio-politico-economic processes (of which culture and religion are merely exploitive appendices) belonging to interdisciplinary laws, deduced from computerized biological processes. Carl Hempel’s oft quoted statement that “theories are not derived from observable facts, but invented in order to account for them” has become a new archaeological truism (Hempel; 15, Courbin, 69; Vierra, 167). One of the basic hallmarks of the New Archaeology that differs from traditional archaeology, according to Lewis Binford, is the avoidance of induction (1972, 90). He cites the movement’s guru C. Hempel that “what determines the soundness of a hypothesis is not the way it is arrived at (it may have been suggested by a dream or a hallucination) but the way it stands up when tested.”
The New Archaeology insists upon model building so research can take place within a “framework”. Such frameworks seem to have in common an attempt to detect the human evolutionary relationship to environment. They are general frameworks drawn from the concepts of modern industrialism, rather than from the specific evidence of the archaeological record itself, which would apply to traditional theoretical models.
Processual Archaeology
The earliest expression of the New Archaeology was basically processual archaeology. After World War II processual thinking largely developed in France with Neo Marxist undertones alongside the Annales school and structuralism. The Annales school, [41] referring to the review “Annales d’Histoire sociale et économique” founded in 1929, which became “Annales: Economies, sociétes, civilisations,” finds its roots precisely in the 19th century social struggle to justify the emerging industrial class. Lucien Lefebvre and Marc Bloch, the inaugurators of this approach, follow the path opened by Jules Michelet, who intended to take in the total scope of history, a broad range of sources and a concern with “ordinary people” (Knapp, 1992 , 5). In an effort to understand the collective behavior of humanity it was hypothesized that all human behavior, in spite of chance factors, stems from an underlying adaptation to the environment and production processes. Humans have become increasingly socialized creatures: moving from cave to tribe to state to imperialistic spread (following through to the present global capitalism instrumented by the internet). These “events” are assumed to be the result of a relentless biological pattern moving towards increasing complexity and economic productivity.
The New Archaeology also borrows notions from theoretical “structuralism” according to which a system can be discerned underlying human mentality (in a way analogous to an archaeologist uncovering layers of human vestiges). Structuralism is a theory developed in France by the ethnographer Claude Levi Strauss in 1958 and others during the 1960’s. It is maintained that the individual is the unconscious expression of the collective knowledge of a given society. This collective knowledge can be observed as a structural “system”, particularly in the choice and use of words (Eribon 1991 :189). But here the systems are locked within themselves according to various cultures, whereas, until the advent of post modernism, proning subjectivity, the new archaeologists prefer an evolutionary process that takes place within a universal system.
There is a stress on natural selection and the natural environment in the New Archaeology which distances it from both the French approaches. The New Archaeology is a “shift of the focus of archaeology from the study of man and his cultures to man and his environments. In relation to the environment, cultures are often seen as a factor in evolutionary situations” (Wilson, 281). The relationship of systems theory to evolutionary theory is discussed by Binford who describes evolution as “the dynamic process of interaction between a living system and its field”. (Binford 1972: 106, 105-113). The example he gives is Leslie White’s formulation of a “science” of culture. It is not surprising that such a theory arose in the mid twentieth century United States, because, like for Marxist communism, for global capitalism to take hold, cultural pasts, necessarily carrying local values and hereditary rights rivalling those of an international economy, have to be invalidated. The contradictory term of a “science” of culture is one way to do this. It implies negating the irrational aspects which are inherent in the term culture; perhaps eventually erasing even the memory of them, in favor of the scientific control and obsession with the technological comforts of modern Western consumer societies.
More leniently, one must take into account that the shift to a formal theory announcing a break from traditional archaeology was first announced in the 1960’s by Lewis Binford at the University of Michigan and Stuart Struever at Northwestern University (Chicago). Hence it was partially due to the anthropological aspect of North American archaeology. In the American Middle West Indian vestiges are as sparse and of the same nature as those of prehistoric Europe. Hunter gatherer societies don’t accumulate materially complex cultural contexts to reflect their nonetheless irrational psychological dimension of experience. The relatively scarce and repetitive physical survival material particularly lends itself to computer analysis. The computer can accumulate data bases large enough for statistical patterning, and immediately present graphic patterns facilitating the search for interrelationships in the mundane, repetitive, data. Multivariate factor analysis is used for grouping type attributes, dimensional analysis of variance and nearest neighbor statistics intend to indicate if objects on a site are scattered at random or part of systemic production. Along with principal components analysis and cluster analysis these computer techniques reveal patterns of recurrence which are expected to reflect human social relationships on the grounds that “repetitive social behavior will leave repetitive patterns of objects” (Wilson 1974, 218-221). Such patterns may indeed be significant if the sampling is correctly carried out, but they tend to reveal the self evident rather than the dynamics spurred by the exceptional factors, also inherent in statistics. In nomad and hunter gatherer societies exceptional and irrational factors of human experience are expressed in perishable materials lost forever to the archaeologist. In applying the analytical procedures of this type of society to more complex sedentary cultures, less rationally manipulable data has become increasingly ignored.
This anglo-american version of process, with a heavier emphasis on natural science than the Annales school, may have found its earliest inspiration in the form of a general systems theory, which was formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and A.C. Burton in 1939-1940 as the “theory of the organism as open system” (von Bertalanffy, 1968, p. vii). The original statement of the concept was in Burton’s 1939 article: “The Properties of the Steady State Compared to those of Equilibrium as shown in Characteristic Biological Behaviour,” and in Bertalanffy’s 1940 article: “The Organism Considered as Physical System.” After World War II the theory was further developed and popularized by Norbert Wiener (1954) using the term cybernetics. Cybernetics is the very fruitful theory from which computer models were conceived. The models register the back and forth flow between things and their environment (feedback in the case of mechanics, adaptation in the case of living organisms) in such a way as to produce predictable forms of action (Rifkin, p. 181). This is a system: “a system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelationship.” (Bertalanffy, 55). The basic tenet is that open systems tend to establish order (negative entropy), whereas closed sytems tend to disorder (entropy). A universal process is supposed to explain the negative entropic behaviour of open systems. Such systems (including living organisms) maintain themselves in homeostasis via feedback in a lawful predicable way (von Bertalanffy, p. 78, 14).
However feedback can also provoke changes within the system. A feedback loop can connect the parts of a complex system in such ways that one part affects the next, which in turns affects all the others, and so on (Cole, p.78). “feedback loops are powered by the process of exponential amplification – where each small change quickly multiplies into a major consequence.” (Cole, p. 79). In this way emerging properties move towards complexity (the whole is more than the sum of its parts).
In General Systems Theory, p. 56, Von Bertalanffy presents a mathematical formula for this principle of kinetics: “Denoting some measure of elements pi (i=1,2… n) by Qi, these for a finite number of elements, and in the simplest case, will be in the form:
Change of any measure Qi therefore is a function of all Q’s, from Q1 to Qn, conversely, change of any Qi entails change of all other measures and of the system as a whole.” This equation is the first in a largely developed series to be found in the article-chapter first published in 1939. A different, topological, equation to explain the change in emerging patterns in less continuous terms is presented below.
General “systems science” intends to reorient science into all intellectual disciplines (Von Bertalanffy, 31, Rifkin, 184). To cite von Bertalanffy: “systems science, centered in computer technology, cybernetics, automation and systems engineering, appears to make the systems idea another – and, indeed the ultimate, – technique to shape man and society ever more into the “mega machine” which Mumford (1967) has so impressively described in its advance through history.” (von Bertalanffy, 1968, vii-viii). He readily acknowledges the destructive potential of scientific control in physics, biology and the behavioral sciences. Also taken to account is the risk of oversimplification and sacrificing aspects of knowledge in order to make a conceptual model controllable (Bertalanffy, 200). Nevertheless, he insists that the establishment of scientific laws in human society, isomorphically related to laws in different levels of reality (Bertalanffy, p. 87), would throw the uniquely human into relief (Bertalanffy, p. 53). “Such knowledge can teach us not only what human behavior and society have in common with other organizations, but also what is their uniqueness.” Isomorphically relating the organization at all levels into a grand unifying principle might possibly result in the realization that all is mind or spirit (Bertalanffy, p. 49). Although few, if any, of the new archaeologists would share this idealism, it does indicate that systems theory is not necessarily reducible to materialism.
A mathematical formula was developed during the 1960s in order to explain the process of change within a system. Although the following theory has since been successfully discredited in recent years, since the limits of science have become increasingly observed, particularly in prediction (chaos theory) (Horgan 1995, p. 79), it is interesting to present Colin Renfrew’s adherence to René Thom’s topological ‘catastrophe theory’ because it concerns events involving the Hittite and Mycenaean disagregations at the end of the Bronze Age, and is still implicitly applied to some interpretations of the Cypriot Bronze Age. These interpretations assume that internal social transformations are “pressured” by external economic factors rather than by outright population displacements.The Theory appears in Colin Renfrew’s seminal article that appeared in Antiquity, 1978: “Trajectory Discontinuity and Morphogenesis.” In it, he applies the topology of René Thom’s catastrophe theory to discontinuities in human behavior, demonstrating how a negatively entropic system can collapse into entropy. It demonstrates how “a gradual change in control can cause a sudden catastrophic change in behavior” (Renfrew, p. 203). The theory is an engineering note that is supposed to apply to human behaviour as we as to boilers and bridges. In Thom’s own words: “this type of description may be applied to all morphological processes – whether animate or inanimate – where discontinuities prohibit the use of classical quantitative models.” [42]
Thom’s “topology” involves plotting a manifold space representing functions determined by the relationship of a behavioral space to a space of not more than four variables. In order to mathematically formulate the catastrophe principle, the following symbols are given:
X = behaviour ; state
C = control variables ; parameter (a,b,c,d variables)
c = a particular set of values of the variables
M = manifold (a topological structure) [43]
f = a real value of a control variable ‘c’ or a potential value of the behaviour variable x
It is supposed that “the evolution (the dynamics) of the system is governed by a family of functions fc , , from the state space X to the real numbers fc : X > R” (Renfrew, p. 205).
It is helpful to understand that the establishment of the points of the “manifold” diagram in order to study the way the maxima, minima, etc. of ‘f’ changes can be formulated:
Graphically this gives rise to a catastrophe map charting “folds” and “cusps” (Renfrew, 1978, 206, fig 2, 210) which is supposed to enable the prediction of a system collapse.
What concerns us here is Renfrew’s suggestion that this would somehow prove that the collapses of the Mycenean and Hittite civilizations were due to the internal failure of elite-class culture. Renfrew postulates that in archaeological situations, the state (or behavioral) variable (of a system in equilibrium) C, is the Degree of Centrality. The control variables are I, Investment in Charismatic Authority, and M, Net Rural Marginality. I implies “direct and implied coercive force; dispensation of material goods; and dispensation of symbolic benefits (“various devices used to produce loyalty, solidarity and adherence to the center – by conspicuous display, by ritual, by involving the supernatural”). M relates to the economic balance for the rural population indicating the degree of adversity, i.e. “the capacity to resist adversity” (Renfrew, p. 214). These control variables can be charted into cusps and folds reflecting Ø, the allegiance response, in order to determine the modifications in variables necessary to provoke a sudden catastrophe (Renfrew, p. 212-214). (Ø = utility function; perceived benefit)
Probably the most obvious flaw in this whole procedure is that it depends upon the assumption that human behavior, X, acts invariably in an optimal way in relationship to variables C. Observation of human behavior consistently proves that such invariable rationality simply doesn’t exist. Another, scientific, flaw is that in catastrophe theory “measure” is not necessarily truly quantitative, because it applies to events. How does one measure “energy assigned to cultural devices”, “dispensation of symbolic benefits”. How securely can “the flow of information” or “the hierarchy of central places” be established from archaeological evidence? The difficulties of determining the necessary events for the topological model are compounded by semantic difficulties. Yet these types of observation are “measures of degree of centralization.” (Renfrew, p. 213). All depends upon the archaeologist’s subjective determination of what he calls “measures.” Who can objectively determine that display is “conspicious” or that evidence of ritual or supernatural belief involves “investment” in centralized charismatic authority? What is meant by the word “adherence” as involves authority? The pitfalls of semantics are rife. (a good example of the imprecision of human behavior). Furthermore, Renfrew himself admits “that all relevant controlling factors are to be expressible in terms of I and M. In any real case the position may not be quite so simple” (Renfrew 1978: 214; see Horgan 1995)).
This type of theorizing is so unsubstantial that it has been suggested that Renfrew’s antidiffusionist interpretations are a reaction against colonialism (Bernal, “vol. I, 1987, 407 and vol. II, 1991, 14). One can also notice notions of popular revolution and the 19th century undermining of aristocratic authority coloring the interpretation of the archaeological record, in a way that is remarkably heedless of the material evidence itself (catastrophe theory requires less than five control variables (Renfrew 1978: 296)), and which gives an entirely different interpretation to that formerly proposed. Instead of a Mycenaean colonization, we have a series of internal power collapses in various Eastern Mediterranean polities due to economic factors, gradually affecting eachother but not to the point of migration or colonization.
However, even more than the above two approaches, the mathematical procedure most favored by new archaeologists is “factor analysis”. This procedure intends to infer sociocultural regularities from statistical regularities between sets of artefact types (Clarke 1978: 578). A factor is the common variance of a set of variables (the square of the standard deviation of the variables) (Ibid 563). It permits separating the key, essential (change as part of the changing system) and inessential (not relevant to the study or constant throughout) variables in a system. The factor loadings (degree of correlation between variables) of specific artefact types might be expected to distribute between different kinds of activity factors, plotted against one another two at a time (Ibid 578). Such an analysis does help to understand causes by directing one to information beyond the mathematics of correlation. However S. J. Gould warns against reification (Gould 1981: 250-269), i.e. to confuse an abstract concept with a physical entity. The determined factor does not necessarily reflect a causal relationship underlying positive correlations. This can only be determined by additional knowledge of the physical nature of the measures themselves (Ibid 250). As P. Courbin has observed, in archaeological situations this necessary additional knowledge of the type of evidence that can be correlated is usually self evident. Factor analysis tends to merely confirm what is obvious (Courbin 1988: 27, 147). Worse, establishing a factor may suggest a non existant cause. Gould gives an example of a person’s increasing age with an increase in oil prices where there is a strong correlation with no cause. Or the strong correlation between the distance a person can throw and bat a ball: there are various explanations that the correlated factor cannot indicate.
The superiority of the above mathematical procedures to more straight forward examination of archaeological evidence, respecting its limited, aleatory nature, is simply that this sort of equation fits into the contemporary Western value context (i.e. science as an absolute); its quasi incomprehensibility creates precisely the sort of mystique that Renfrew himself would find a measure of power. The above examples of processual theory reflect what Jacquetta Hawkes meant when she pointed out that the scientific approach risks recreating the past in the image of the present (Wilson 1976: 276), in this case, the European revolutions following the 18th century enlightenment are connected to earlier periods as a manifestation of inevitable (hence consecrated) “process”.
The effort to englobe various disciplines within a holistic, rational, science based model breaks the one of the most fundamental rules of science. Science is only useful at certain levels of reality (Pauli, p. 36). And even these levels have specific limits which cannot be englobed by a single scientific process. Science is not a religion, it cannot explain all, and it does not apply to the immeasurability of human behavior. This does not belie the scientific method which is a fruitful way of obtaining knowledge from any type of observation. It is the questions and responses the method is used for to that are not interchangeable. The increasingly prevalent tendency to disregard the limits of rationality has given rise to two recent publications: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures (1997, 177-78) Il7) and Michel de Pracontal’s L’imposture scientifique en dix leçons, (2001). These authors make it clear that the application of physical science models to the humanities merely serves to deviate understanding. As Sokal and Bricmont expressed it “human societies are complicated systems involving a vast number of variables, for which one is unable (at least at present) to write down any sensible equation” (p.136).
Post-processual archaeology
Inevitably, scholars began to react to the totalitarian mechanical reduction of the unpredictable human behavioral record. The reaction was partly due to unsatisfactory results, such as the failure of prediction in human affairs. No doubt, at least unconsciously, chaos theory, which was first observed and developed during the 1970’s by Edward Lorenz had its role to play in the “post” humanistic theories. This theory demonstrates that “for certain deterministic systems, a small discrepancy between one set of initial values and another might magnify very quickly over time into major differences in resulting behavior.” (Halpern 2000: 133). Unfortunately, even the mathematical models of chaos, are not applicable to the humanities (Sokal and Bricmont 1999: 135).
Some of the by now “old timers” of the New Archaeology, such as V. K. Flannery are still trying to defend the processual approach. In “Process and Agency in Early State Formation” (Flannery 1999), Flannery attempts to reconcile processual archaeology with the post processual demand for more than mathematical equations, i.e. the role of human agency beyond the role of automata. However, he opens with M. Gazzaniga’s statement (Flannery 1999: 3) that “no scientist seriously questions whether we are the product of natural selection …Learning circuits are laid down by the genome; social, analytical and interpretive skills are an evolutionary phenotype.” (Flannery 1999, p. 3; here natural selection means “process”, note 2, p. 19). The problem with this is it is only partially true. It applies to human bodies, including brain chemistry and development. On the other hand, social, analytical and interpretive skills (in other words, intelligence) are immaterial variables that cannot be measured, so how can they be attributed to physical interaction? Even as enthusiastic and evolutionist as a Stephen Jay Gould observes that “intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension” (Gould 1992: 319 and 1981: 325, 331; De Pracontal, p. 52, 211-212)? Gould does not take issue with the fact that the large human brain, which permits intelligence, is the product of natural selection. Nor does he deny that genes play a role in potential, though not inevitable, human behaviors. But he maintains that the resulting intelligence has, as an epiphenomenon, a cultural evolutionary dynamics of its own that is not comparable to the slow process of natural genetic adaptation. In other words, the brain developed in a way that cannot be modeled after natural selection (Gould 1981: 324-327). One should also take into account the generally accepted role of chance, that does not pertain to selection, in evolution (De Pracontal, p. 80, 81 ; Gould 1991, 30). Even the appearance of the phenotype is far more problematic than Gazzaniga’s statement takes into account. If natural selection means a computational algorithm of genetic components such as that which has been discovered to permit transgenetic engineering, and the possibility of creating life from lifeless matter in a laboratory, then we do seem to be a product . But in this case, the producer is the human mind sidestepping the timespan of natural selection. If evolution is not necessary for the production of life, might the algorithms possess an inherent energy, in the ancient Greek sense, which produced evolution itself as an unveiling of an independently existing principle (reminiscent of Bertalanffy’s “all is mind”)? Or did natural selection chance on the algorithm that continuously developed from a single accidental gene to the epiphenomenon of human intelligence via trial and error in the midst of chaos? Neither is provable ; hence neither is valid as a premise for a theoretical framework. Life’s fundamental relationship to the natural environment, which provides the premise of processual archaeology, is far from as clear as Gazzaniga’s statement pretends.
Nevertheless, Flannery can’t resist reducing human behavior to right and left hemisphere brain mechanisms geared to environmental adaptation. The left brain may indeed treat spatial perception necessary for hunting and acquiring land, but he also places a mechanism called the “interpreter” (apparently the product of a gene protein) [44] in the left brain hemisphere that creates the illusion that the self makes conscious decisions. This interpreter is what he calls post-processual human agency (hence, in fact, he remains in the mechanical realm of processualists). He seems to convincingly demonstrate his conclusions using five random societies moving from tribal to state formation, under the impetus of fit and brutal leaders. However it must be noticed that the imaginative, superstitious, or religious aspects of these events are presented as unconsciously adaptive and reasonable manipulations on the part of the leaders. This very significant, and perhaps erroneous, assumption remains undemonstrated.
Already in 1985 Ian Hodder observed that “The desire to shrive archaeology of any taint of the subjective and non-material can only be understood as part of the quest for scientific control.” (1985, 8). Hodder maintains that processualist archaeologists like Binford, Renfrew (and Flannery) are caught in the trap of an idealist/materialist dichotomy where materialism is fundamental and decisive. However, in fact, the ideational and/or subjectives cannot be excluded from understanding, which gives rise to “post-processual” analysis. According to Hodder “it is impossible to consider process without culture, social systems without individuals, adaptive change without history, science without the subjective.” In post-processual archaeology, the mechanically derived social structures: the reduction of human behaviour to adaptive processes within eco-environmental systems of processual archaeology are linked to human agency: Historical as well as social ideological and cognitive factors are taken into account (Knapp 1996: 141).
The major flaw in the new archaeological effort to scientifically confirm Marxist economic “revolutions” with biological evolutionary behavior is that too much modern social justification was read into evolution. The palaeontologist, Stephen J. Gould, has warned against this tendency to use natural selection as a political alibi: “evolution means only that all organisms are united by ties of genealogical descent. This definition says nothing about the mechanism of evolutionary change” (Gould 1992: 426 ; see also Rifkin 1998: 210).
Postmodernism
Postmodernism goes a step further than postprocessualism. The latter accepts the presence of facts, juxtaposed to irrational, or at least inexplicable, factors. Postmodernism does away with facts. Since the entrance of humanity into outer space, then cyber-space the restrictions of what has been experienced on the land are no longer relevant. Boundaries are blurred; forms are amorphous. All is essentially virtual, belonging to the principles of computer simulation. Evolution is less a competitive struggle of fitness (a notion in accordance with capitalism) than a genetic computational information relationship with the environment (Rifkin 1998: 216 ff). Although scientific positivism is rejected, post-modernism resembles processualism and, even more so structuralism [45] in that it minimizes the value of cognition and human agency, tending to eliminate history, and claiming any non-systemic knowledge of the past to be so subjective as to be meaningless (Knapp 1996: 140). Because post-modernism “deconstructs” these systems, believing them to be inappropriately mechanical, meaninglessness replaces them. In archaeology this means a trivialization, if not negation, of the past other than for subjective manipulation. This is a useful conviction in the carrying out of a western powered globalization which can thus deny the intrinsic value of grounded traditions.
B. Knapp observes that it is easier to define what post modernism is not than what it is. Which is basically a disenchantment with the far from rational and enlightening “modernity” of the late twentieth century (Ibid: 132). Knapp defines critical and moderate orientations (Ibid: 130-131). The critical orientation tends towards despair, conviction of meaninglessness; all is simulacra, because all origins are lost, … or never existed in the first place. Moderates are more ethically oriented: politically involved or mystically inclined. Both object to a global world view based on a rigid objectivism with claims to the “truth”. On the contrary, post modernists put into question the possibility of knowledge at all; they maintain that only subjective relativism exists beyond knowledge used as a tool of domination and oppression. This gives rise to the notion that we cannot know the past, other than what is relevant to an activist political present. “Since, therefore, it is impossible to say anything with confidence, everything is worthy of attention and a pluralism of more or less equal viewpoints exists … Good or bad criteria do not exist, and all interpretations therefore become equally good.” (Knapp 1996 : 135).
Both B. Knapp and W. Dever refer to postmodernism as nihilistic. In referring to “revisionism” as a form of post modernism, Dever, too, characterizes it as a reactionary movement more easily defined by its opposition to scientific positivism than anything else. (Dever 1998: 40). In the tendency to deny intrinsic meaning in anything, and the undercutting of traditional approaches to understanding, all that remains is ideology (Dever 1998: ).
Interpretive Archaeology
B. Knapp seems to combine the premises of the “moderate” post modernists, along with the human agency of the post processualists, when he refers to “interpretive” archaeology. Earlier, the processualists of the Annales school had already maintained that the past, created as the result of modern or recent historical social transformation, cannot be viewed in isolation from contemporary human action or contemporary social concerns (Knapp 1992: 1-2). The interpretives go so far as to contend that “there is no ultimate explanation, but, rather, an array of interpretive approaches that can provide a better understanding of past environments, social processes, cognition, and human agency.” (Knapp 1996: 151). He apparently relates this to the subjective polyvocality of a women, people of color and aborigines making their own history (Ibid: 137). It is hoped that giving equal value to alternate ways of examining the past, may overcome their contradictions. In recognizing different views of the past the present can be understood as a specific product of history (Ibid: 151). This is supposed to lead to a better understanding of the past. Nevertheless, paradoxically, for the interpretives “There is no single truth, no one correct interpretation, no ultimate explanation. We not only develop alternative ways of understanding the past, in fact we develop alternative pasts.” (Ibid: 151). Claiming the impossibility of objectivity and referring to empiricism as “mindless” (Ibid: 150) devalorizes what the past can teach us.
Bernal (1991 vol. II: 64), too maintains that “how the object came to be there and what it represents are open only to the archaeologist’s or historian’s subjective interpretation. When looking at buildings or traces of agriculture or industry there is great leeway in their interpretation.” This is highly overstated. Whatever an archaeologist’s preconceptions are, indeed they are inevitable, they do not permeate “where he digs, with what methods, where to stop, what to examine, clean, not and keep.” These matters are basic givens independent of the archaeologist’s will. The archaeologist necessarily works within a temporal-spatial framework. He may decide to search for vestiges of the Trojan war, but that cannot affect the ancient textual descriptions of location or where the bronze age pottery sherds are that determine where to plant the spade; there are collectively tested methods to be used; he usually stops for reasons of time or financing; and what is examined, cleaned and kept can be, and usually is, literally everything of human manufacture that is not found in great quantities; in the latter case, a sample suffices.
When rationality takes leave of empirical evidence, when deductions find no testable analogies, reasoning can indeed become subjectively nihilistic. Is there no other choice?
W. Dever states the case for objectivity quite well when he points out that we all have “ideologies” that we cannot eliminate but that we can unmask in ourselves and others. The problem is to base our ideals on facts rather than illusions. There really is an “objective world out there to be known,” and some secure knowledge to be obtained of it (Dever 1998: 50). However this requires an “empathetic insight into all sources.” If the vestiges of the human past, as well as nature, are observed with humility and respect for their limits, they can deliver information that is independent from the observer and rich in content, far from nihilistic.
Conclusion
Theories direct research and result from it. What is being questioned is not theory itself, but how it is derived and tested. The very theories upon which the New Archaeology has built: natural evolution and cybernetics, resulting in control of the natural environment, are proofs of the reality and value of objective empirical research. But the same objectivity requires recognizing the limits of these theories, which exclude vast fields of specifically human experience. Empiricism leading to scientific mastery developed when thinking was released from traditional consensus hypotheses. At present it seems to be falling into sterilizing convictions as blinding as the religious or classical convictions of the past.
Archaeological theory is particularly fragile. Not only are excavations limited and aleatory, but much of the record has been irrevocably lost through the wear of time. Aside from pottery, there is rarely enough repetitive material to permit significant sampling procedure. So, although the theory must be an effort to explain, it must also remain easily modifiable as new material is discovered (Rainey 2001: 141).
Insofar as facts can be statistically quantified and patterned they are useful. But in the humanities behaviour cannot be quantified [46]. Even if statistics are applied, it is the statistically inevitable improbability that provokes change. The traditional view of history as a description of often unexplainable events driven by remarkable personalities holds true: the wraths of men like Achilles can have unpredictable, long range consequences.
The traditional approach to archaeology has been to catalogue and compare finds with attention to chronology. Basically, as Paul Courbin defined it: archaeology is the discovery and ordering of material entities: correct retrieval of material from the ground, the creation of categories of objects, noting similarities and dissimilarities, associations and disassociations, and from there the hypotheses are inferred relative to the initial frame of reference (Courbin 1988: 112-113, 116). Every human endeavour requires a frame of reference in time and space. In the case of archaeology a land surface where Mycenaean shards are found may suggest the Bronze Age and the presence of Mycenaeans. Or a Homeric text may contain a geographical description from which a Mycenaean site may be inferred. But nothing is deduced until the framework is further confirmed by the material coming out of the ground. Thus, rather than being based on ideology, the contextual framework is empirically established before other hypotheses are deduced. Such hypotheses are clearly modifiable as new material appears. Perhaps the best description of a reliable model is Stuart Piggot’s. The archaeologist proceeds from his own or another researcher’s strictly controlled observations. Underlying connections between them are sought, then he devises a hypothesis or theory to account for them – a mental creation expressing the relationships and arrangements, perhaps a mathematical formula. Ulterior evidence or the development of related models will test its correctness (Piggot 1959: 3).
The most recent, post-modern, tendency to view objectivity in social research as insignificant is both false and dangerous. Absolute knowledge is impossible, errors of perception are inevitable, but at least objectivity can be intended. Although explanatory laws of human behaviour are elusive, if the archaeological record is observed with patience and humility it will continue to provide a wealth of information as the means of unveiling and observing improve. Computers and nuclear analysis to help determine the provenience and chronology of various materials add new dimensions to the image of the past. These material observations are limited to providing a background from which emerges an entirely different order of images belonging to the human mind. The background is significant because it contributes to an understanding of how this image emerges from the past. But science provides only one level of information. The human mentality always adds an imprecise dimension. It is so unpredictable that its imaginative expressions must be passively observed.
It is apparently impossible to factor chance, such as synchronicity, emotional responses, misconception… all of which play a role in human activity. Nevertheless, once an act has been accomplished, or a decision turned into an event, they exist and can be observed. Respect for them is the basis of tolerance and the freedom of the other. They do not need to be subservient to the observer’s personal experience or self-interest. Passive observation loosens the straightjacket of our own convictions and social patterns, putting one’s given social value systems into question, possibly enriching them.
The empirical method I am arguing for, has been largely influenced by P. Courbin. Also J. C. Gardin’s “analyse logiciste” of symbolic constructions has been influential (Gardin 1979). This although Gardin’s artificial intelligence analysis of theory building to which my own research has been subjected (Herman 1987) may, itself, seem like an obscure example of cybernetic reductionism. At least Gardin, like von Bertalanffy, has had the merit to question the ethical implications of a scientific approach to the humanities (Gardin 1979: 297-300). Furthermore, rather than searching for predictable processes, he admits to irrationalities in the archaeological record (Ibid: 299). He distinguishes three types of significant archaeological constructions: scientific, practical lore, and alchemical (Ibid: 287ff.). The scientific construction is an effort to combine the empirical practicalities of practical lore with the logically sound, but unproductive procedures of alchemical constructions. He takes on the ambitious task of analyzing the reasoning process behind the formulation of hypotheses, be they inductive or deductive. What matters is that the reasoning process be solidly based on empiricism, either in the formulation or the testing of the hypothesis.
The hypothetico-deductive method becomes dangerously apt for political ideology when it is based upon, and proceeds to nourish, a consensus opinion as an absolute. On the other hand, the empirico-inductive method leads to probabilities and their exceptions. The exceptions to scientific law that modest, traditional inductive observation leaves room for applies to Gardin’s term “practical lore”. This is aptly translated as “magique” in French, not because, as Gardin intended the term, the logical “alchemical” procedures are not explicit, but because some observations are as irrational as probability itself. It may be that the “practical lore” constructions contain more information that the scientific theoretical archaeologists allow to appear. The rediscovery of the real and observable dimension of the past will hopefully be the challenge of the future.
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[1] S.J. Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, London, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 376; R. Rappaport, When Geologists were Historians, 1665-1750, Ithaca, New York, 1997, p. 137 ff.
[2] A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, London, 1989, first published 1959, p. ; W. Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, Berlin, 1994, p. 142.
[3] Pauli, op. cit.,p. 144.
[4] Rappaport, op. cit., p. 46.
[5] K.C. Cole, The Universe and the Teacup: the Mathematics of Truth and Beauty, New York, 1997, p.147.
[6] Pauli, op. cit., p. 129. Wolfgang Pauli was a nobel prize winning contributor to quantum theory: he discovered the very basic concepts of the neutrino and the exclusion principle.
[7] C. Renfrew, book review of Paul Courbin Qu’est ce que l’archéologie, in Antiquity, vol. LXI, no.218, 1982, p. 228.
[8] M.A. Cremo, R.L. Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, the Hidden History of the Human Race, Los Angeles, 1996, p. 23.
[9] L. von Bertalanfty, General Systems Theory, revised edition, New York, 1968.
[10] The first published archaeological records of Cyprus are the lively, quite channing, narratives of Luigi Palma di Cesnola with ample to references to both Phoenician and Homeric traditions: Cyprus, its Cities, Tombs and Temples, 1877, and Salaminia, 1882, reprinted in 1991 and 1993 respectively by Star Graphics, Nicosia.
[11] Unpublished doctoral dissertation, under the direction of Paul Courbin, Paris, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1982.
[12] In a relatively recent study, largely based on cuneiform documentary evidence, M. Robbins, Collapse of the Bronze Age, the Story of Greece, Troy Israel, Egypt and the Peoples of the Sea, New York, 2001, impressively corroborates this possibility. Unfortunately the documents are rare for the late 12th century which is beyond the scope of his research. He supposes the arrival of the Greeks in Cyprus at this time on the authority of other scholars.
[13] M. Bernal, Black Athena, Rutgers University Press, 1991, vol. I, p. 378.
[14] Ibid. vol. II, p. 464.
[15] There is only one reference to Cyprus in the Iliad, and three in the Odyssey. They suggest an alliance between Cyprus and the Achaeans, but not colonization. See O. Panogyl, “Cyprus and the Cypriots in the Homeric Poems, » in J. Karageorghis, O. Masson eds. The History of the Greek Language Proceedings of an International Symposium Sponsored by the Pierides Fondations, Nicosia, 1988. Gjerstad refers to texts by Pausanias, Strabon, Lykrophon, Apollodoros, Stephanos Byzantinios, Tacitus, Vergil and Diodoros.
[16] E. Gjerstad, “The Colonization of Cyprus in Greek Legend,” Acta Instituti Romani Regni Sueciae, Opuscula Archaeologica, vol. III, Lund, 1944, p. 73-106.
[17] Ibid., p. 123.
[18] V. Cook, “Cyprus and the Outside World During the Transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age,” Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. XVII, 1988, p. 16-21, tables I and II.
[19] F. Maier, « Kinyras and Agapenor » in V. Karageorghis, ed. Acts of the International Archaeological Symposium “Cyprus between the Orient and the Occident” Nicosia 8-14 September, 1985, Nicosia, 1986, p. 312-320.
[20] Although, in some cases, Mycenaeans became “Europeans”. C.F.A. Schaeffer, the French excavator of Enkomi, attributes the remarkable number of parallels between the Ugaritic material (which he also excavated) and the slightly more recent material at Enkomi as the result of a Sea People’s invasion at Enkomi. He believed that the Sea People’s originated in Europe, then descended into Greece and continued on to the Syro Palestinian coast where borrowed a Syrian religious ideology. C.F.A. Schaeffer, “Dernières découvertes à Enkomi-Alasia,” Ugaritica III, Paris, 1956, p.162. For a possible Balkan or Dorian origin of transformations in Mycenaean evidence that was then supposed to have been passed on to Cyprus, see, for example, J. Bouzek, “Local Schools of the Aegean Bronze Age of European Inspiration,” Studies Presented in Memory of Porphyrios Dikaios, Nicosia 1979, p. 49-53; W.A. Heurtely, “A Prehistoric Site in Western Macedonia and the Dorian Invasion,” Annual of the British School at Athens, no. 28, 1926-27, p. 158-194.
[21] P. Aström, “Comments on the Corpus of Mycenaean Pottery in Cyprus,” in V. Karageorghis, ed. Mycenaeans in the Eastern Mediterranean, Nicosia, 1973, p.122, 127.
[22] For the most coherent account of the evidence at Hissarlik for a Trojan war, which would have taken place at level VI (ca. 1250), see M. Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, London British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. Wood does not doubt the historicity of the Trojan War, to the contrary of the opinions of certain academic theorists: The Trojan War, its Historicity and Context, eds. L. Foxhall and J.K. Davies, Bristol, Bristol Classical Press, 1984 ; D. Easton “Has the Trojan War Been Found?” Antiquity, LIX, 1985 rallies to Wood’s viewpoint.
[23] J. Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 12.
[24] G. Hult, Bronze Age Ashlar Masonry in the Eastern Mediterranean, Göteborg (SIMA LXVI), 1983 ; V. Cook, “Bronze Age Ashlar Construction in Cyprus, Theoretical Consequences,” Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, Nicosia, 1991, p. 93-96.
[25] V. Karageorghis, Kition, Mycenaean and Phoenician Discoveries in Cyprus, London, 1976, p.72.
[26] Bernal, op. cit., vol. I, p. 202.
[27] V. Karageorghis, “Cultural Innovations in Cyprus Relating to the “Sea Peoples”, » in E.D. Oren, ed. The Sea Peoples and their World, a Reassessment, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 254.
[28] Ibid., p. 255.
[29] V. Cook, op. cit., 1988, p. 31.
[30] V. Karageorghis, op. cit., 2000, p. 254.
[31] M.E. Mallowan, “Excavations at Brak and Chagar Bazar,” Iraq, vol. IX, 1947, p. 184, pl. XXXIX; see also D. Gray, in Du Plat Taylor, Myrtou Pighades, Oxford, 1957, p. 107 ff. for an Anatolian origin of the Myrtou Pighades horns of consecration; S. Diamant, J. Rutter, “Homed Objects in Anatolia and the Near East and Possible Connections with the Minoan Horns of Consecration,” Anatolian Studies, London, p. 147-149 for such objects at Beysultan and Mersin; O. Borowski, “Hezekiah’s Reforms and the Revolt Against Assyria,” Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 58, no. 3, 1955, p. 148-155 for the homed altar at Beersheba.
[32] C.F.A. Schaeffer, “Dernières découvertes à Enkomi-Alasia,” Ugaritica III, Paris, p. 160.
[33] C. Baurain, Chypre et la Méditerannée orientale au Bronze Récent, Synthèse Historique, Etudes Cypriotes VI, Athènes, Ecole Française d’Athènes, 1984, p. 346-347 and Baurain’s observations, p. 348.
[34] V. Karageorghis, “Hearths and Bathtubs in Cyprus, a “Sea Peoples” Innovation,” in S. Gitin, A. Mazar, E. Stem, eds. Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, Thirteenth to EarlyTenth Centuries BCE., Jerusalem, 1998, p.279.
[35] P. Begg, Late Cypriot Terracotta Figurines: a Study in Context, SIMA, Pocketbook 101, Jonsered, 1991, p.399.
[36] B. Kling, Mycenaean IIIC:1b and Related Pottery in Cyprus, SIMA, vol. LXXXVII, Göteborg, 1989; S. Sherratt, “Immigration and Archaeology, Some Indirect Reflections,” in P. Aström, ed. Acta Cypria, Acts of an International Congress on Cypriot Archaeology Held in Göteborg on 22-24 August, 1991, part 2, Jonsered, 1991, p. 317-348.
[37] V. Karageorghis, op. cit., 2000, p. 251.
[38] Gjerstad, op. cit., p. 119, 123; Karageorghis, op. cit., 2000, p. 251.
[39] B. Knapp, “Bronze Age Mediterranean Cultures and the Ancient Near East,” part 1, Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 55, no.2, June 1992, p.63.
[41] For a thorough overview of the Annales see B. Knapp “Archaeology and Annales”, pp. 1-12 in Archaeology, Annales and Ethnohistory, Knapp ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992.
[42] Renfrew, 1978, p. 204. See Sokal and Bricmont’s (1997, p.17 ff) famous criticism of the application of topology to the humanities, as J. Lacan applied it to psychoanalysis in 1966.
[43] A mechanical manifold is “a pipe or enclosed space which has several openings allowing liquids and gases to enter and leave.” Cambridge International Dictionary of English.
[44] De Pracotal, pp. 227-228, expresses a well defended scientific skepticism to this tendency to reduce human mental attributes to a simple genetic function, in his commentary on E. O. Wilson’s L’Unicité du savoir. De la biologie à l’art une même connaissance, Laffont 2000. In his opinion this is fraudulent science. See also Stephen J. Gould.
[45] In a structural “system” the individual is merely the unconscious expression of collective knowledge at a given point of time. (Eribon 1991 : 189).
[46] A. Sokal, J. Bricmont 1998: 136 ; S. J. Gould goes into detail about this in his essay “George Canning’s Left Buttock and the Origin of Species » (1992, 21-31).