Determinism, core and periphery

This short 2019 book chapter underpins the whole recent acrimonious debate about interpretative inflation in archaeology.  In it, Gordon Barclay traces the roots of the "Wessex bias" in prehistoric archaeology back to Mackinder, Sir Cyril Fox, Semple, Huntington, Childe and others who were motivated by a sort of geographical determinism;  academic geographers have been arguing about this for a century or more!  The debate about crude determinism, possibilism and probableism was pretty well over and done with by the 1970's in geographical circles, but maybe it has hung on in the field of archaeology until much more recently?  If one is looking for patterns and seeking explanations of distributions, it's quite appealing to simplify complexity into something like this:  ancient rocks are in the north and west, which is where the highlands are, which is where the acid soils are, which is where the climate is inhospitable, which is where farming is difficult, which is why the communities there are more primitive than the cultured communities of the dry and sunny lowlands.........  From there, it is not a very great leap over to ideas of core and periphery, accessibility and remoteness, backwardness and progress, intelligence and stupidity, masters and servants.

Anyway, this is worth reading:

"Four Nations Prehistory": cores and archetypes in the writing of prehistory.   Gordon Barclay,
September 2019
In book: History, nationhood and the question of Britain (ed) Brocklehurst, Helen & Phillips, Robert
Publisher: Palgrave
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335928118_'Four_Nations_Prehistory'_cores_and_archetypes_in_the_writing_of_prehistory

Conclusions

The writing of much twentieth-century British prehistory can be related to arange of wider cultural issues. First, the wholly unconscious functioning of England's peculiar national consciousness, which is perceived in England as not even being 'nationalism' of the kind found in other cultures (cf Craig, 1996, p. 103), for 'it represents a history whose nationality is not in question, Determinism, core and periphery and to which national issues are therefore' irrelevant'. This can manifest itselfthrough the dismissal of alternative narratives from the periphery as 'nation-alistic' (Thomas, 1998).  Second, the consequent tendency to erect English patterns as a norm against which other patterns can be seen to be abnormal (cf Craig, 1996, pp. 102-3); this can be seen in supposedly 'British' prehistorieswhere non-core material is included inconsistently and' with limited local interpretative context (Longworth and Cherry, 1986; Dyer, 1990; Parker Pearson,1993). Third, the particular place of 'landscape' in the English tradition and the almost mystical role of a regionally restricted conception of an archetypal landscape in the English national consciousness (cf. Pittock, 1999), the effectsof which are read through directly to the practice of archaeology and the writing of prehistory. Fourth, the operation of English culture in all aspects as one of a few, or perhaps the only 'organic' culture with an unbroken tradition (as argued by Craig, 1996). In archaeology this appears as an apparent incapacity to deal with the possibility of incomplete sequences of development in 'core' areas such as Wessex or its 'satellite cores', or the absence of types of material in the core that occur or are better preserved on the 'periphery'. This powerful core can, when convenient, redefine 'peripheral' material as 'core', like the settlement evidence from Orkney.  

I have attempted in this chapter to discuss broad trends in the writing of prehistory, prompted by the apparent lack of self-awareness of how political (albeit unconsciously) much of the practice of archaeology in the UK is, and the apparent difficulty of writing worthwhile prehistories of these islands from the 'core' in Britain, whether the modern metropolitan core or a core based on the archetypal English landscape and its archaeology.