Figurative language in archaeology

As a remedy for leaving the contextualizing approach behind, I suggest here a return to literary deconstruction. When using the term ‘literary deconstruction’, I refer here exclusively to its definition and use within what has become known as the Yale approach to, or Yale school of, narrative analysis (Herman and Vervaeck Reference Herman, Vervaeck, Herman, Jahn and Ryan2005). The Yale approach was initially developed by literary scholars such as Paul de Man (Reference de Man1979), Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and Joseph H. Miller (for the latter, see Bloom et al. Reference Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller1979), as well as Roland Barthes (Reference Barthes1977). Thus, the term itself should not be confused with the style of deconstruction more commonly known as poststructuralism, which is based on a critique of ideology, and which is often, but not entirely correctly, ascribed to the late works by Jacques Derrida (Clifford Reference Clifford, Clifford and Marcus1986; de Man Reference de Man1979, x; Moran and Mooney Reference Moran and Mooney2002, 543–545).

In archaeology, deconstruction has also (mistakenly) been taken as a prescription of a critique of archaeological theory in general (as pointed out by Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen2017). However, true deconstructive critique is as much constructive as it is destructive, and a better term for it would be simply ‘close reading’ (pointed out by Miller Reference Miller, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller1979). Furthermore, the Yale approach in particular should not be identified with what Wiedemann (Reference Wiedemann, Eberhardt and Link2015) recently termed a ‘narratological approach’ to archaeological historiography, which was an attempt at transforming Hayden White’s concept of metahistory into a method for historical analysis.

Deconstruction in accordance with the Yale approach, however, encourages more than merely close reading. What this approach to narrative analysis offers archaeological historiography is a technique of reading that stresses the discovery and articulation of allegorical narratives in texts. In this precise sense, the opposition to such deconstruction would be to close the meaning of a given text and not to explore it as such, but rather to stick with what the text tells us of the external world. Allegory, however, is the very opposite of external connotation. As Barthes (Reference Barthes1977, 142) suggested, a reading of literature in accordance with the method of deconstruction should pay particular attention to those sections, sentences and moments in the texts where the narration loses its object – or loses what it claims to be its object – and starts to act intransitively. This exact point, or this place within the text, is what Miller (Reference Miller, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller1979, 204) has termed the ‘linguistic moment’ in a text. This is the place where the text puts its own medium or intention into question.

For instance, an archaeological text might start out with a specific research question, such as ‘What did people eat in the Early Mesolithic?’ However, at some point the text might start to question this very approach, and to ask questions such as ‘Did the concept of “food”, and thus consumption of commodities, exist in the Early Mesolithic?’ What Barthes claims is that, when a text does this – when it derails from its primary concern – we should start to expect it to produce allegorical narratives. For the analysis of the text, this is where our ‘interrogation’ of the text should start (Miller Reference Miller, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller1979, 204–205). It means also that not all texts are suitable for this type of deconstructive reading, simply because not all texts produce such linguistic moments.

Allegorical narratives are interesting because they present diachronic descriptions that explain something other than their own (supposedly bare) content. This is admittedly an awkward definition of allegory, and as Clifford (Reference Clifford, Clifford and Marcus1986) has pointed out, different accounts of the same historical phenomena can exhibit allegorical features or qualities with different meaning and expressed in various degrees. What is crucial about allegory in this context is that it is a story about something else – not a representation or a symbolization of something.

One of the ‘hard arguments’ within the Yale approach, one that was initially proposed by de Man (Reference de Man1979), is that allegory cannot be ascribed to the intentionality of the author, or any other agent for that matter, except for the text itself. For if we always presuppose that the meaning of a text can in every case be traced back to the intention of the author, we could effectively encourage a turn back to contextualization and ask, ‘why did she suggest this allegory rather than that one?’ The consequence is, on the contrary, to let the text speak entirely for itself, and to set intentionality aside for good. This methodological move denotes what Derrida (Reference Derrida1973) described as ‘questioning the self-assured certitude of consciousness’, as the method of seeking intention often lies closest to our reading, and it is what Barthes (Reference Barthes1977) poetically termed the death of the author.

This specific understanding of deconstruction is, in my opinion, the very opposite of the version of deconstruction proposed by those scholars who have focused precisely on the active engagement of the author in textual meaning production (see examples in Olsen Reference Olsen1997; Ramstad Reference Ramstad2000, 67). No wonder, then, that today deconstruction so often is met with scepticism in academic contexts. Barthes (Reference Barthes1977), however, argued that the death of the author takes place precisely when ‘a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly in reality but intransitively’. This is why we should not trust textual intentionality, as it is superficial at best, but focus precisely on the loss of objects.

So, what good does this loss of objects in a text do for us really, one might ask? At the level of figurative language, deconstruction involves a change of focus from literal denominations (metaphor) to associative translations (metonymy). Where metaphor points to meaning in an instrumental manner, metonymy brings forth the absence of such objects, and to what remains in a text despite the intentions of the author (see in particular Runia Reference Runia2006). Barthes (Reference Barthes1977, 141) writes also that metonymic logic, in contrast to metaphorical denomination, belongs to the unconsciousness, and he suggests that the distinction between such tropes, in addition to their syntactical specificities, involves a fundamental difference in intentionality. As with the argument in favour of the death of the author, the deconstructivist approach to intentionality is also based on a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity (Barthes Reference Barthes1977, 111–112; see also Lacan Reference Lacan2004). While metaphor is explanatory and involves identity and truth, metonymy is referential and syntagmatic (de Man Reference de Man1979, 5–16). The loss of the object thus forces us to trace the figurative language in whatever path the text is directing us.

The constructive nature of the Yale approach, when applied to the field of archaeological historiography, is therefore its potential to truly discover and explore the richness of meaning embedded in certain publications, field reports, or even notes from the archives. Deconstruction is, in this approach, not simply a critical reading but a reading that pays attention to derailments and even the loss of meaning. There is thus also the potential predicament that deconstruction in this sense cannot guarantee an analysis that serves as constructive or even relevant to the field of archaeology as a discipline.

The motivation behind the Yale approach, or simply its drive within literary studies, was partly based on the belief that the method itself was a consequence of a specific understanding of language, text and meaning. The aim here is not to perform all-encompassing and conclusive analysis in line with this theory but rather to attempt to explore what kind of insight we can reach when it is applied to a field such as archaeology.

A tale of two cultures

To make this reading of Norwegian research meaningful, I will briefly outline the main actants that appear in the analysed texts that discuss the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in Norway. To be short, early-20th-century Stone Age research in Norway focused mainly on two cultures and their interplay. As we have already seen above, the Megalithic culture was important, but only owing to its arguable lack of presence, and therefore, I do not consider it a main character. The first of the two main cultures is referred to in the literature as either the ‘settlement culture’, the ‘tool culture’, or the ‘old forager culture’, depending on the authors (Gjessing Reference Gjessing1920, 165; Bjørn Reference Bjørn1921, 44; Reference Bjørn1924, 23; Shetelig Reference Shetelig1922, 355; Brøgger Reference Brøgger1925). For simplicity, I will refer to it here as the ‘settlement culture’ (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. In 1878, Asbjørn Knutsen presented a series of plates to be used for history education in Norwegian primary schools. The black and white plates, which were originally coloured and made by renowned artists, were part of a series called Billeder til Norgehistorien for skolen og hjemmet, which translates to ‘Pictures for Norwegian history for schools and homes’. The plate presented here is entitled Fra stenalderen (Det indre av Kristianiafjorden), which translates to ‘From the Stone Age (the inner Kristiania fjord)’. Christiania, and later Kristiania, was the official name for the city of Oslo in the period 1624–1924. The plate shows foragers settled on the eastern side of the Oslo fjord during the ‘Megalithic period’, when foragers were living under influence from farmers, as shown through the presence of pottery and four sectioned flint axes. It was not among the first 35 plates in the series, and its exact production year is uncertain. Photographed by the author.

Figure 2. Two scholars digging at the Ruskenesset site in western Norway. The site was excavated by Haakon Shetelig in 1915–16, and perhaps this was where he first could ‘vividly feel the lifeways of primitive people’, which he depicted in more detail in his later work. Photographer: Bergen Museum (inventory number Bf_A_000667). Licenced under: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA).

Figure 3. A scholar visiting the rock shelter site Skipshelleren in Straume in western Norway in 1949. The site was investigated by Johs. Bøe in the early 1930s, an experience that evoked envy towards the ‘carefree affluence’ of the site’s original inhabitants, which were stone age foragers. Photographer: Wencke Slomann, Bergen Museum (inventory number L_014429). Licenced under: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA).

The ‘settlement culture’ had its origins in the Mesolithic period and postglacial pioneer population. Yet, finds of polished flint flakes on some of these settlement sites attested to a certain degree of contact with Neolithic groups, which were then identified as the Megalithic culture in southern Scandinavia. The northern equivalent to the ‘settlement culture’ was the ‘arctic group’ in Finnmark, which will not be discussed further in this text (but see Rygh Reference Rygh1872, Brøgger Reference Brøgger1909 and Opedal Reference Opedal1996). In the 1920s, the identity of the various settlement cultures in Scandinavia and Finland bore certain resemblance to the ‘secondary Neolithic cultures’ in Britain, which by then denoted forager groups contemporary with early farmers (Childe Reference Childe1923, 331).

The other main character in Stone Age research was the ‘Dagger culture’, which was identified as a foreign and intruding group of farmers and pastoralists. The archaeological record indicated that the Dagger culture in southern Norway succeeded the ‘settlement culture’ chronologically, and several scholars believed that members of the ‘Dagger culture’ had migrated from Sweden and Denmark to Norway at the transition to the Late Neolithic (hellekistetid, the stone-cist grave period). Scholars portrayed the Dagger culture as a hierarchical society, and some believed that the ‘settlement culture’ had actually witnessed the process of Neolithization through the invasion of the Dagger culture, which was often described as an event (Gjessing Reference Gjessing1920; Shetelig Reference Shetelig1922, 291–293; Hinsch Reference Hinsch1955). Yet, to fully understand the interplay between these two cultures – the ‘settlement culture’ and the Dagger culture – it is necessary to understand how scholars distinguished between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic periods and how this distinction related to the concept of ‘savages’ and ‘wild people’.

The idea of a wild Stone Age

The archaeological distinction between foragers and farmers took its first shape with the identification of an older (Mesolithic) and a younger (Neolithic) Stone Age in Scandinavia. Though this distinction was first proposed by J. J. A. Worsaae (Reference Worsaae1860), it was John Lubbock (Reference Lubbock1865) who disseminated it to an international audience. Lubbock defined the Neolithic as a time of cultivation and polished stone tools, and he established a link between such tools and ‘… the rude implements and weapons still (…) used by savage races in other parts of the world’ (Lubbock Reference Lubbock1865, 336). A total of 3 years later, Sven Nilsson elaborated on the cultural consequences of the Neolithization process in Sweden and noted that a prehistoric agriculturalist in comparison to a forager:

As in the writing of Lubbock, we find in the above-cited work by Nilsson an interdependence between economic strategies and material culture. For instance, foragers lived in moveable tents, while farmers lived in fixed dwellings located in cultivated lands. Cultivation was understood by Nilsson as intensification of food supply and ownership of land (see also Trigger Reference Trigger2006, 11–12). The implied negation of this logic was, of course, that less cultivation means less food, and even fewer rights to own land. Evidently, in both Lubbock and Nilsson we discover a concept of ‘savagery’ integrated in a narrative about the Stone Age that reflected a more general notion of wildness, one that can probably be traced back to Western European medieval literature (Helms Reference Helms1988, 50). There, the Wild Man was a mythical creature; he (sic) lived geographically outside civilized society, in non-domesticated areas such as mountains, caves or forests. He was, by definition, uncontrolled by law.

The medieval Wild Man was ugly, libidinous and solitary but also strong, cunning, devious and magical. As Hayden White (Reference White1978, 151) has argued, this notion of the Wild Man was part of a self-authenticating tradition in Western European thought and literature, a tradition which served to confirm domestic values, such as civilization, sanity and orthodoxy. Modernist philosophers also mentioned ‘savages’ in published reflections on their own cultural backgrounds. Descartes (Reference Descartes1998) for instance, argued that ‘savages’ made use of their faculties of reason just as any citizen did, while Montesquieu (Reference de Montesquieu2001, 246) explained behavioural variation as effects of geography, for instance, that people were made timorous by warm climates and wild, vigorous and brave in colder climates. Even Kant (Reference Kant2012) identified ‘savages’ as fully rational subjects formed into a particular shape by their history and geography.

In Lubbock and Nilsson then, the Neolithic period became a story of wildness versus civilization. Yet, it is easy to ignore the ambiguity of the wild – ugly yet strong, solitary yet magical and libidinous yet cunning – when mundane objects such as ‘stone tools’ were often described as ‘rude implements’, e.g., in Lubbock. Rather, we should keep the significance of the ‘savage’ fully open (Barthes Reference Barthes1977, 141). With these clearly opposite notions of wildness, we are left with an ambiguous and awkward understanding of cultural identity.

The Stone Age never ended

In the late 19th century, Scandinavian scholars perceived the Stone Age as a relatively swift phenomenon. It is hard to believe today, in my view, that, at the turn of the century, Sophus Müller argued that the Stone Age in Scandinavia had started 5000 years ago and that the Neolithic transition occurred ca 500 years later (Müller Reference Müller1897, 41–42). In Norway, this framework was used by archaeologists actively until the late 1960s (i.e. the Neolithic in Norway dated to 2600/2500–1500 Cal. B.C. in Odner Reference Odner1965, 213), when radiocarbon dating was developed. A total of 3 years after Müller’s influential publication, the Second Kitchen Midden Commission ended the chronological debate concerning the Neolithic transition in Denmark, as they identified that the coastal kitchen middens (Danish: køkkenmødding) pre-dated the megaliths (Madsen et al. Reference Madsen, Müller, Neergaard, Petersen, Rostrup, Steenstrup and Winge1900).

According to one study by Kristiansen (Reference Kristiansen, Fischer and Kristiansen2002, 18), several decades went by before new Neolithic research emerged in Denmark (for a different view, see Troels-Smith Reference Troels-Smith1966). In Norway, the situation was quite the opposite than that in Denmark. Shortly after the Second Kitchen Midden Commission published their report, Brøgger (Reference Brøgger1906, Reference Brøgger1909) produced what has later become known as his early and empirical work (Glørstad Reference Glørstad2006, 175–176). In contrast to his Danish colleagues, Brøgger (Reference Brøgger1909) proclaimed that the (Mesolithic) ‘old forager culture’ in southern Norway, which emerged after the last glacial period around 5000 years ago, had not been eradicated by subsequent megalithic or Dagger people. On the contrary, he argued, fragments of this older culture had persisted at least until the Iron Age, and certain elements had even survived until very recent times.

Controversial as it might still sound today, this theory was not considered curious by Brøgger’s contemporaries (for an early example of its reception, see Hansen Reference Hansen1910), and Brøgger (Reference Brøgger1925, Reference Brøgger and Lionæs1939) formulated it more clearly in subsequent and more popularized publications. Research based on the cave investigations by Anders Nummedal on the northwest coast of Norway also showed that the theory found its scholarly audience. In his synthesis on ‘Bjørneremsfundet’, Nummedal (Reference Nummedal1913, 40) was convinced that the slate and flint artefacts discovered in the cave dated to the Migration period (A.D. 400–550), and the idea that slate arrowheads continued to be produced through the Bronze Age and Iron Age on the northwest coast of Norway was proposed as late as the 1970s (comment by K. Møllenhus in Nydal, Løvseth and Syrstad Reference Nydal, Løvseth and Syrstad1970). It is well-established fact today that slate arrowheads were mainly produced during the Neolithic period, and there is little or no evidence supporting a theory of continued use through the early Iron Age (Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Solheim and Persson2019).

As several historians of archaeology have pointed out, what we discover in Brøgger’s late work is less empirically focused but more theoretically informed (Gjessing Reference Gjessing1951; Helliksen Reference Helliksen1993; Amundsen Reference Amundsen2000). As he proclaimed in a final paragraph of his 1925 popular publication, ‘I have not talked about races, tribes or people, but only about how people have tried to live their lives in prehistory’ (Brøgger Reference Brøgger1925, 176; translated by the author but compare, for instance, with Veblen Reference Veblen1914). Brøgger claimed that the archaeological record could not support the idea that cultures had evolved through stages, as some scholars had claimed. True causes in prehistory, he argued, remained completely unknown to archaeologists (Brøgger Reference Brøgger and Lionæs1939, 12). Thus, Brøgger effectively undermined the very notion of the Neolithic transition as a significant and particularly meaningful event in prehistory, at least regarding the peripheral regions of Europe, where the natural conditions for farming were not optimal.

Affluent foragers

Brøgger’s theory of cultural continuity was not uncontested within the scientific community. On the one hand, his idea that the Stone Age had lasted longer in some regions compared with others was generally accepted (Bjørn Reference Bjørn1924, 51), but some could not accept that the Megalithic culture had not affected the ‘settlement culture’. In Sweden, Knut Stjerna (Reference Stjerna1911) argued that the Megalithic culture had migrated to southern Sweden, where it shortly after had collapsed and turned to foraging as its primary economic strategy. He also suggested that, through this process of ‘de-Neolithization’, the Megalithic culture had merged with the local ‘settlement culture’ (which Stjerna referred to as ‘epipalaeolithic’). Contrary to this, Stjerna considered the Pitted Ware Culture in eastern middle Sweden not as locally developed but the result of a second migration of foragers from the Eastern Baltic. According to Stjerna (Reference Stjerna1911), farming was introduced twice in Southern Sweden – first by the Megalithic culture and then by the Dagger culture.

In Norway, Helge Gjessing (Reference Gjessing1920) was one of the few who elaborated on Stjerna’s theory but suggested, in line with Brøgger, that the Megalithic culture never reached as far north as southern Norway, where megaliths were then still unknown. It is in this connection interesting to note that, in contrast to Stjerna, Gjessing consistently portrayed ‘primitive man’ by reference to its most ambiguous meaning: These ‘savages’ were degenerate and poor, but also creative and productive. An excerpt from his account of the Dagger culture invasion is telling:

The ‘new time’ that Gjessing mentioned was the advent of the Dagger culture. What we discover in the work of Gjessing, when he departs from his primary aim (which was typological), is a framing of the ‘settlement culture’ as free, creative and affluent. Foragers were presented as free to choose their culture, while the culture itself determined and controlled the lives of the farmers. This distinction between choice and pre-determination elucidates a truly liberal notion of freedom, where savagery is defined not as a lack of culture but, on the contrary, as ‘one’s direct identification of a particular culture, which renders one intolerant towards other cultures’ (Zizek Reference Zizek2008, 141). According to this particular notion of freedom, barbarism is the very product of culture, not the other way around.

A similar perception of the ‘settlement culture’ can be discovered in the work of Anathon Bjørn (Reference Bjørn1921, 46), one of Gjessing’s contemporaries, who claimed that they had probably practiced farming even before the Neolithic period. Bjørn (Reference Bjørn1924, 24) argued that the Megalithic culture had migrated to eastern Norway, and that there was a period of ‘cultural dualism’ there until the onset of the Dagger culture, when again everything changed in the archaeology. Thus, both Gjessing and Bjørn presented narratives of the Neolithic focused on cultural contact and migration, while economic practices were less important.

Approaching foragers with care

The notion of a ‘liberal forager society’ continued to be discussed in subsequent research, for instance, by Haakon Shetelig (Reference Shetelig1922) and Johs. Bøe (Reference Bøe, Bugge and Steen1938). Shetelig stressed that ‘primitive civilization’ clearly was the most common form of human organization throughout history, and that one of the main tasks of archaeology was to stress this commonality in research and to furnish a sense of care and empathy towards such ‘primitive’ societies:

Evidently, Shetelig succeeded in attaching both charm and awe to the ‘settlement culture’ (Fig. 2). His ambition is in this sense thus reminiscent of the anthropological aims of Claude Levi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1963, 338) regarding the readers of his research ‘… to rediscover, in his own experience (…) institutions that would otherwise remain unintelligible to him’. Levi-Strauss suggested that scholars should use everyday cultural references as the context for scientific dissemination. This strategy (i.e. ‘to help the reader… rediscover’) also appears in the work of Bøe (Reference Bøe, Bugge and Steen1938, 29) when he claimed that the Stone Age ‘sneaks its way’ into modern lives through commodities such as smoked or dried meat and fish.

As Shetelig had done before him, Bøe also stressed the context of archaeological excavations as a place of origin for an understanding of prehistoric ‘savages’:

This critique of ideology and modern societies occurs inside the description of a stratigraphic sequence.

As Gjessing had written before him, Bøe (Reference Bøe, Bugge and Steen1938, 58) argued that the stone age lifeway had been one of affluence and freedom. Thus, what we discover in the work of scholars such as Gjessing (Reference Gjessing1920), Bjørn (Reference Bjørn1921), Shetelig (Reference Shetelig1922, Reference Shetelig1945) and Bøe (Reference Bøe, Bugge and Steen1938) is not a static and typologically inferred view of the past. On the contrary, there was deep engagement with – even a sense of care towards – the Stone Age, and particularly towards the pre-Dagger period. Conversely, we should not be tempted to close off the signification of the prehistoric ‘savages’ too hastily. Even Shetelig could present the Stone Age as primitive and contemptible:

We can of course criticize Shetelig for his choice of context (‘our own country’), just as there is a basic irony in some of Brøgger’s work, particularly considering the title of his book (Det Norske Folk i Oldtiden/The Norwegian People in Prehistory) (Helliksen Reference Helliksen1993; Opedal Reference Opedal1996; Scott Reference Scott1996). More recently, Foldøy (Reference Foldøy2023, 177–178) argued that Brøgger’s late writings have served to inspire present-day right-wing extremism. However, this critique confuses, at least to some extent, the form with the content. I would stress that, when Brøgger (Reference Brøgger1925) wrote about the Norwegian people in prehistory, he referred to the general mass of humans who throughout history had dwelled in the landscape now identified as Norway. In fact, his main argument against migration-based theories was not that theories of local adaptation were more adequate, but rather that the vast evidence of historical migrations to Norway made archaeological identification of prehistoric migrations seem an impossible task. Thus, Brøgger claimed that archaeologists did not have accurate enough data to identify the multitude of past migrations which he thought had realistically occurred in prehistory.

There was no Neolithization

The texts analysed above represent a certain proportion of the productive and creative Stone Age research in Norway that dates to the first decades of the 20th century. The books and research articles from these years laid the foundation for several generations of scholars to come, as many of the theories developed in this period were discussed for decades. However, it should be noted that not all these publications invite readings in line with the deconstructive approach applied here.

It is also interesting to observe that, even after the onset of radiocarbon dating, Brøgger’s theory of cultural continuity continued to influence the Stone Age research in Norway (see discussion of the Gauthelleren site in Nydal, Løvseth and Syrstad Reference Nydal, Løvseth and Syrstad1970, 233–234). On a different note, Stjerna’s (Reference Stjerna1911) theory of a ‘de-Neolithization’ within the farming pioneers in Scandinavia is arguably still influential, as is the radical cultural change associated with the Dagger period (Prescott Reference Prescott1996; Iversen Reference Iversen, Larsson and Debert2013; Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Solheim and Persson2019).

The exoticism of foragers is also visible in some of the published research on the Pitted Ware Culture, in statements such as ‘… the Pitted Ware People around the Baltic were, in all aspects, wild at heart’ (Fornander, Eriksson and Lidén Reference Fornander, Eriksson and Lidén2008, 295). Even a proposed definition of the Pitted Ware Culture such as ‘… the people that for some time abstained from farming but who in the long run could not prevent the change from happening’ (Edenmo Reference Edenmo, Bratt and Grönwall2011, 60) reflects this tradition. The discourse on culture and foraging in the Neolithic clearly evokes Marshall Sahlins and his idea of an ‘original affluent society’, even though this discussion predates it by decades. We already saw, for instance, aspects of the same attitude in works by H. Gjessing, who described the time of the ‘settlement culture’ as one where ‘Material wants were few and the need to trade was little’ (Gjessing Reference Gjessing1923, 2).

Returning to the initial theoretical outlook of this paper, we need to ask: What have we gained by exchanging a contextualizing approach to past archaeological claims with one that explores the intrinsic meaning in them? I would argue that we have gained a better understanding of the meaning of the concept of ‘foragers’ in the Stone Age, at least within the discursive limits of Norwegian archaeology. However, there can be no doubt that these findings can share relevance with other regions of Europe. From its onset, two contesting views on the process of Neolithization in Norway defined the discourse. On one side was Brøgger’s radical view on cultural continuation coupled with a dismissal of a normative concept of culture. On the other side, there were H. Gjessing, Bjørn, Shetelig and Bøe, who accepted a normative concept of culture and who maintained that the ‘settlement culture’ and the ‘Dagger culture’ defined the crux in their narrative of the Stone Age. We see this for instance in their usage of binary oppositions:

What is clearly missing from this narrative, however, is a concept of the Neolithic, or of Neolithic societies. ‘Stock-breeding and the cultivation of cereals were revolutionary steps in man’s emancipation from dependence on the external environment’, V. G. Childe (Reference Childe1923, 15) proclaimed in The Dawn of European Civilization, and thus summarized decades of scholarly opinions. In the work of Norwegian scholars such as Gjessing, Shetelig and Bøe, we find the opposite view: Cultivation, emancipation and civilization represented obstacles to a free and creative society, which they saw a reflection of in the ‘settlement culture’ (Fig. 3). The Dagger culture, on the hand, showed only evidence of people who copied technology, and who were controlled by their own ideologies.

What was the cultural-historical paradigm in Norway?

I believe that, throughout this paper, we have gained insights that could shed some new light on our understanding of the cultural-historical research paradigm. Archaeological literature, or research, in this period (1906–38) often contained a criticism of contemporary modern, industrial societies. The contrasting discussions of the relation between the ‘settlement culture’ and the Dagger culture towards the end of the Stone Age exemplified this; the former in fact drew on tropes from the idea of the Wild Man: interesting, adaptive, creative and free but also primitive, cunning and degenerate. These aspects of the cultural-historical research paradigm have largely been overlooked by historiographical studies, both recent and earlier. The fact that Nils Åberg (Reference Åberg1948) failed to mention any Neolithic research from Norway when he summarized what he termed the ‘Nordic tradition’ in 1948 reveals an elitist approach that was later criticized by a new generation of scholars. This new generation forged the intellectual story of the cultural-historical research paradigm taught to students today.

Several historians have portrayed Scandinavian archaeology in the period 1900–60 as representing its first paradigmatic structure (Klindt-Jensen Reference Klindt-Jensen1975; Helliksen Reference Helliksen1993; Baudou Reference Baudou2004; Trigger Reference Trigger2006). This research tradition is usually referred to as traditional, normative, culture-historical, or simply cultural archaeology (Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen and Daniel1981, 30; Olsen Reference Olsen1997, 31–34). According to the standard story then, the cultural-historical paradigm shifted in the 1960s towards a processual or New Archaeology, which had a particular focus on scientific and quantitative methods, before it shifted again towards a post-processual or interpretative archaeology in the 1980s (Hodder and Hutson Reference Hodder and Hutson2003, 1; Olsen Reference Olsen2012). Most students of archaeology know this standard story very well, as it appears in several introductory books in archaeology and archaeological theory (Dark Reference Dark1995; Olsen Reference Olsen1997, Reference Olsen2012; Johnson Reference Johnson1999; Hodder and Hutson Reference Hodder and Hutson2003; Thomas Reference Thomas2004). However, the standard story has also received criticism, particularly for its focus on prominent personalities as well as a progressivist view of science and intellectual ideas (Brattli and Svestad Reference Brattli and Svestad1991; Svestad Reference Svestad1995; Svedin Reference Svedin and Goldhahn2005; Goldhahn Reference Goldhahn2012).

Deconstruction represents a direction out of this theoretical and methodological deadlock. By proposing this, I have not claimed to present a deeper truth about archaeological claims and theories; I merely present a new story about them, which is precisely what ‘an allegory of reading’ is, namely a metaphor of a metaphor (de Man Reference de Man1979, 205). Describing the cultural-historical research paradigm today as archaeology’s ‘long sleep’, as Johnson (Reference Johnson1999) did, does not pay any worthy tribute to what was actually written at that time. As Glørstad (Reference Glørstad2006, 24) has pointed out, the cultural-historical research paradigm in Scandinavian archaeology has been defined by its successors primarily in terms of what it was not. It was not consistent, scientific, critical or theoretically reflexive. In this perspective, the cultural-historical paradigm is by its definition precisely the negative surplus of stuff that remains after we have described the ‘triumphs’ of processual and post-processual archaeology. Clearly, such a treatment of our scientific history is doomed to be unfair from the beginning. These developments are, I presume, probably not unique to Norwegian and Scandinavian archaeology, which makes the relevance of critical reading, and the Yale approach to deconstruction, all the more relevant for a wider field of research. As I have argued above, instead of pointing out the shortcomings of earlier research, we should call into question precisely the ‘naturalness’ of the standard history of archaeology, and rather focus on what was actually written, as well as how it was written.