Presentist History as a Means to Overturn Qualified Authority: A (False) Warrant for a New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s

Presentist History as a Means to Overturn Qualified AuthorityA (False) Warrant for a New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s R. Lee Lyman (bio) Studies of the history of archaeology are now fairly common in the literature. These range in length and coverage from books considering the entire world (e.g., Trigger 1989) to brief articles covering a limited topic (e.g., Lyman et al. 1998). These pieces have diverse aims, but they all tend to be studies aimed minimally at revealing aspects of disciplinary history, or historicism (Stocking 1965). With increased scholarly effort and attention devoted to the history of archaeology, it is perhaps not surprising that instances of "presentist" history are identified (e.g., Trigger 1998). Anthropological historian George W. Stocking (1965), inspired by historian Herbert Butterfield, described presentism as analyzing historical events and phenomena in terms of the present, typically for purposes of ratifying the goals of the present and showing more or less continuous disciplinary progress toward attaining those goals. Although not without value (Hull 1979), the standard implication of presentist history is that it is biased toward favoring, even justifying, the present. But presentist history can also be used in a rather different way than arguing for continuity between past and present yet still serve the ends of the present. Presentist history can be used to vilify the past as a service to modern ends. In this paper I describe an example of writing history that well illustrates a kind of disjunctive presentist history written as a warrant for (1) abandoning an old approach to an old set of questions and (2) adopting a new approach to a new set of problems and a new set of analytical goals. The example derives from the North American emergence during the 1960s of what is known variously as the "new" or "processual" archaeology (Willey and Sabloff 1993). The portion of this historical emergence focused on here concerns the notion—now accepted as a myth in many sciences—that scientists are sufficiently objective that they "never permit their judgments to be affected by authority [such that] the reputation [End Page 103] of a scientist making a given claim is irrelevant to the validity of the claim" (Woodward and Goodstein 1996:480). In his now classic book chapter "Archeological Perspectives," Lewis Binford (1968a) argued for a new means of evaluating the correctness of archaeological knowledge that would be better than what he alleged was the old means of evaluation. According to Binford, the latter involved "passing personal judgment on the personal qualifications of the person putting forth the propositions" (1968a:17). Binford characterized this supposedly traditional evaluative criterion as follows: "the degree to which we might have confidence in the professional competence and intellectual honesty of the archeologist advancing interpretations (see Thompson 1956:33)" (1968a:16). There is no page 33 in Raymond Thompson's 1956 paper; that article spans pages 327 through 332. Given what Thompson (1956) says on those pages, I suspect the page to which Binford (1968a) referred is actually page 331, where Thompson (1956) introduced what he termed "the subjective element in archaeological inference," described by him as an archaeologist's "unique combination of interpretive skills [and his/her] professional competence [and] intellectual honesty." Thompson (1958:8) repeated this definition of the subjective element verbatim two years later. Binford (1987:394) cited Thompson's (1956) page 331 in a later publication, where he repeated Thompson's subjective criterion. Thompson's (1956, 1958) characterization of how archaeological knowledge should be evaluated became a warrant for the processual archaeologists of the late 1960s and 1970s, especially their advocation of a deductive approach to hypothesis testing (Binford 1968b) and the use of nomothetic laws of culture processes (e.g., Watson et al. 1971) as the bases of knowledge claims. Use of the new warrant demanded that the old warrant for, or means of evaluating, knowledge claims be shown as significantly flawed. Binford therefore repeated that, following Thompson and evaluating "reconstructions or interpretations by evaluating the competence of the person who is proposing the reconstruction [was] scarcely sound scientific procedure" (1968b:270). In the 1960s the word science was thought to denote an objective, impartial field of...