Chang K.C. Rethinking Archaeology

New York: Random House, 1967. — xiv, 172 p. — (Random House Studies in Anthropology).From time to time, as the primitive Old World archaeologist squats on the shore of the primordial Atlantic, a passing current will wash up at his feet the ideograms of a distant civilization-the baneful signs of distant archaeologists. With curiosity and persistence the aboriginal may laboriously run his finger along familiar signs in unfamiliar and difficult constructions. At such times an American book on archaeological theory presents the English-reading native with all the problems of relating Linear A to Linear 3. When the author of such a work is a native of China and an American scholar the difficulties are multiplied. It is hardly surprising to find, therefore, that at times Dr Chang Kwang-chih’s Rethinking Archaeology combines a ‘zareba’ of American polysyllabics with a recondite approach reminiscent of the ‘eight-legged’ essays required for entry into the former Chinese Civil Service.
The title of the work acknowledges the stimulating opening of Rethinking Anthropology (1961 : I) in which Edmund Leach declaims that ‘to understand what is happening in social anthropology I believe we need to go right back to the beginning and rethink basic issuesreally elementary matters such as what we mean by marriage or descent or the unity of siblings, and that is difficult-for basic concepts are basic; the ideas one has about them are deeply entrenched and firmly held’. This borrowed trumpet-blast leads us to prepare for a lucid analysis and definition of old and new terms in a skilful modification and integration of tried archaeological procedure with the fresh potential introduced by: the study of systems, game theory, set and group theory, topology, the postulates of information and communication theory, the impact of numerical taxonomy, cultural ecology, locational analysis, and the implications of modern analytical and inductive statistics using computers-the array of peripheral studies whose implications are diffusing piecemeal into the archaeology of the 1960s. Alas, Dr Chang does not go back to the basic issues and entities and rethink them only returns to the entrenched and firmly held opinions of various authors-not so much rethinking archaeology as regurgitating it.
Rethinking Archaeology starts with a semantic discussion on Time and Space; establishes the settlement as a useful and basic unit of archaeological study; then, after commenting on typology and the comparative method, the work moves into a disappointingly superficial appraisal of cultural ecology. Perhaps the best sections in the book are those in which the author is more directly expressing his own views on ‘rival archaeologies’ and ‘archaeology and the world of man’. Unfortunately, the text is not helped along by prolonged interpolations --examples which seem either irrelevant or too superficial to help in the task set by the title.
Archaeology is an undisciplined discipline: an empirical discipline lacking an ordered and structured study based upon declared and defined models and rules of procedure-lacking a body of central theory synthesizing the regularities of the increasing midden of multifaceted data. At the moment archaeologists do not agree upon central theory although regardless of place, period, and culture archaeologists furtively employ similar tacit models, and procedures based upon similar entitiesattributes, artifacts, types, assemblages, cultures and culture groups. Lacking an explicit theory defining these entities, processes, and their relationships in a viable form, archaeology has remained an intuitive skill-that is to say a skill whose basic procedures and concepts remain unanalysed, -constructed subconsciously by observation and learned by rote. Rethinking archaeology should involve making the tacit explicit, purging the immediately visible inadequacies and then offering alternative and additional postulates.
Dr Chang himself states: ‘theory provides us with a basic framework for operating our methodology and for determining the actual methods and techniques of gathering, ordering, and interpreting data that we come to use. A theory is worth little if it will not dictate, guide, and be modified by the practical work of dealing with the empirical data’ (p. 128). On this basis it can only be said that Rethinking Archaeology fails to provide just this-whilst yet remaining an interesting essay in the most difficult of all archaeological fields, that of theory. The sad and continuing cost of this archaeological deficit is the unsatisfactory teaching procedure by example and mistake, in the-absence of explicit primary theory, and as Dr Chang points out, a consequent ‘continuation of the naive and distorted public image of archaeology that is supplied to the public by the presumably college-educated writers and editors of influential mass media’ (Chang, p. 149, quoting R. B. Woodbury).(Review by David L. Clarke in Antiquity. — 1967. — Volume 41, Issue 163. — pp. 237-238).