Thinking about archaeological excavation in reflexive terms

Abstract

For archaeologists, stratification is an important character of archaeological deposits. Through it, layering is discerned and cultural and evolutionary interpretations are proposed. Archaeologists possess much implicit knowledge about the social practices that produce stratigraphic sequence and the specific, contextualized manner in which layers were built upon or cut into previous deposits. The aim of this paper is to gather together and formalize this knowledge so as to codify conceptual 'tools to think by' when recording and interpreting stratigraphy. Relevant literature is widely dispersed and here can only be sampled; authors consider stratigraphy in terms of (1) techniques of terraforming, (2) processes enacted and (3) meaning and interpretation. Techniques and processes are discussed within larger social interpretations such as memory, history-building, forgetting, renewing, cleansing and destroying. Examples are drawn from the Turkish Neolithic site of Ç atalhöyük and the ancestral Maya site of K'axob in Belize, Central America, to illustrate the applicability of an approach that here is called 'social stratigraphy'. A practice-based history of stratigraphy -the recording and interpretation of strata -within archaeology is problematized in reference to codependence with geology, the deployment of labour and centralized authority within the emergent 19th-to early 20th-century field of archaeology. The contributions of and conflicts between British and American stratigraphic schools are considered in light of a potential rapprochement. Contested issues of cultural heritage -such as preservation of selected strata -suggest that thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise.During the past few decades, the study of human interaction with the material world has witnessed rapid development of method and theory on macro-and micro-scales. Archaeology has both benefited from and contributed to this emergence. For instance, landscape archaeology (through synergism with geography) has expanded the frame of archaeological inquiry beyond a settlement focus, allowed the inclusion of nonresidential places -such as sacred caves -and encouraged a more daring, phenomenological perspective among others). At the other end of the scale, approaches to artefacts (through synergism with social theory) have taken a decidedly social turn and now frequently entertain interpretive dimensions other than chronology and cultural affiliation. Attention often is focused on the manner in which artefacts encode social memory and biographies, evoke an understanding of human agency, resonate with social and ritual practice and play an active role in social networks and figured worlds (Appadurai 1986;Dobres and Robb 2000;Holland et al. 1998;Kopytoff 1986;Latour 2005; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). But there is a middle ground -the place where landscape and artefacts meet -that remains undertheorized. The interpretation of stratigraphic sequences of depositional and subtractive processes forms a primary c...