Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-s9k8s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-19T04:25:35.326Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Processual and systems approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Ian Hodder
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Scott Hutson
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access

Summary

In chapter 1 the question was posed: how do we infer cultural meanings in material remains from the past? In this and the following chapters various approaches to achieving this end will be discussed. The search is for an approach that takes adequate account of agency in an historical and cultural context.

It is necessary first to make a distinction between two broad classes of approach followed by archaeologists, which we shall term materialist and idealist. We shall see later that these terms have numerous senses within different schools of thought; for the moment we wish to give them provisional but precise meanings.

For Kohl (1981, p. 89) materialism ‘accords greater causal weight to a society's behaviour than to its thoughts, reflections, or justifications for its behaviour’. This kind of materialism is considered ‘vulgar’ because thoughts, reflections and justifications – the ‘superstructure’ – are said to be wholly determined by the productive economic behaviour that forms the ‘base’ of society. In the materialist scheme, productive capacity and behaviour is influenced only by technology and environmental limitations (see chapter 4 for other forms of materialism). This definition needs to be extended to include the nature of inference within materialist approaches. In this book we mean by materialist approaches those that infer cultural meanings from the relationships between people and their environment. Within such a framework the ideas in people's minds can be predicted from their economy, technology, social and material production.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Past
Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
, pp. 20 - 44
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×