Post Processualism and ArchaeoMythology

One of the themes of my talk the other evening was the manner in which evidence has been devalued in archaeology, at least by those practitioners who have embraced this strange thing called Post Processualism. Those who see themselves as "post processualists" have a license to say that evidence and facts have some value, but not much -- and that creating a coherent and exciting narrative that explains features on the ground is a far more worthy (ie academically respectable) exercise. In order to create the narrative you must understand the people you are dealing with, even if they lived many thousands of years ago. So you use imagination and empathy to get inside their minds and understand their motivations, their beliefs and their behaviour. In passing on your discoveries to others, you then tell the story, and bolt onto it any evidence that might give it extra colour or strength. The story becomes, in effect, the working hypothesis, to be modified as often as you like, with material added from your fieldwork or your archaeological digs, until it ends up as confirmed in your own mind.  On effect, you then have a ruling hypothesis. It's a rather relaxed procedure, fairly familiar to people working in the humanities, where you don't need a huge amount of raw data or academic rigour.   After all, everything is subjective, and your story is not necessarily any more or less accurate or truthful than mine.  Understanding and insight become more important than processes and facts.........

That's all very well for those of you who are communicating with colleagues or students who are just as relaxed as you are. But your problems start when you start communicating with others -- especially those who see themselves as scientists working in fields where research and publication procedures are clearly defined and adhered to. And here's the rub.  You want to publish in a scientific journal because that will make you look more respectable in academic circles, but that's where you come up against the buffers, because your modus operandi is to tell people what they are looking at and then to give them some information in support of your conclusion. Your work is dominated by speculations, assumptions and assertions which your colleagues allow you to get away with. But now you dress your information up to be as "scientific" as possible in tables, graphs, diagrams, technical data sheets and so forth -- but it's all a con, and you know it. You are using technology because it suits you, but you are not a scientist, because you cannot, or will not, conform to the scientific publishing convention of problem statement, evidence presentation, interpretation and deduction, discussion and conclusion.

It's all a bit like Putin arranging elections in Russia which are so strictly controlled that they are farcical -- because he NEEDS to demonstrate to the world what an amazing democrat he is, and what a powerful mandate he has from a grateful electorate.  Democracy is the thing you hate the most, but you have to pretend you embrace it so that you can sell yourself to the rest of the world.  Scary, but also rather pathetic.

This is of course all reprehensible.  Back to archaeology and archaeologists.  You are either for science or against it, and it is disingenuous and dishonest of you if you deny or ignore the relevance of science on the one hand and then on the other hand hijack it as a vehicle for the promotion of your ideas or your career.

Well, you might say that the above is all very simplified, and that the reality is more nuanced.  Or maybe more convoluted:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7316%28199901%2964%3A1%3C33%3ATSNOP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

Wonderful stuff from Van Pool and Van Pool, and three cheers for hyperrelativists,  extreme positivistic scientists and nomological approaches.  The authors conclude that ".......on any reasonable criteria or characteristics of science one wishes to use, much of postprocessual archaeology qualifies as science. In fact, postprocessual research may more fully meet several of these criteria than does processual archaeology."   Hmmm.....

Back to the real world.  We need to openly discuss journal publishing policy. I'm not talking here about the glossy popular magazines like Current Archaeology or British Archaeology, whose sales depend on "impact" and spectacular headlines rather than academic rigour.  But in my opinion, based on a string of Stonehenge-related articles, the journal called Antiquity (for example) appears to me to be quite happy to connive in the process of dressing up non-scientific papers as scientific, and facilitating the publication of peer-reviewed material (who, I wonder, are the reviewers?)  which should be rejected out of hand by any journal that seriously adhered to the conventions of scientific publishing. You can dig up my criticisms of the following, one of which was described by a senior academic as "probably the worst paper he has ever had to read":

1. Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2015. Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity 89: 1331–52.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.177

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-antiquity-paper-critical-assessment.html

2. Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2019. Megalith quarries for Stonehenge's bluestones. Antiquity 93: 45–62.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.111

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/yet-more-on-quarries-scientific.html

3. Pearson, M. et al. 2021. The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales. Antiquity, 95(379), 85-103.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.239

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2021/02/antiquity-article-on-lost-circle-review.html

Strange that MPP should be the senior author on each of these articles, but he's not entirely to blame -- there are more than a dozen authors altogether, and they cannot avoid corporate responsibility for this state of affairs.  As I see it, the Editor and the publishers must share responsibility as well.  As for other archaeological journals, I don't know them well enough to work out what they are up to, but I would not be surprised to find that post-processualism is having an insiduous and destructive influence on their academic integrity as well.........

So here's my suggestion. One of the big journal publishing giants should start a new journal called "ArchaeoMythology" which is honest enough to recognise that there is a readership for pseudo-science and a group of pseudo-scientific archaeologists who need an outlet for their work.  They can then all happily publish in the magazine, and read articles written by like-minded academics in its pages, and the rest of us can ignore them and get on with life........

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

Next, we come to Monty Python and the lessons we might learn from that wonderful film about the hunt for the Holy Grail.   Symbolism in bucket loads. In the scene where King Arthur meets Dennis the Peasant we have comic genius, as Dennis, while grovelling in the mud, gives the king a lesson in political theory.  It's hilarious because of course, if King Arthur had really existed, the following would have applied:

(1)  Dennis would never have heard of King Arthur;

(2)  Dennis would not have known what a king was; and

(3)  Dennis would not have known that there was a country called Britain.

This is a timely reminder that archaeologists who are digging in the mud in this day and age must not presume to know what was inside the heads of peasants who were digging in the mud during the Neolithic.  But that is exactly what MPP and his team have done in proposing their narrative of stones with special properties being quarried from sacred places and transported all the way to Stonehenge during a coordinated series of heavy lift expeditions.  The narrative is so extraordinary that it has to be underpinned by an extraordinary set of beliefs imposed from afar, 5000 years later, by modern academics onto a distant tribal group.  So MPP, in his abundant writings, speculates on ancestor cults, political unification, stones with special qualities, tributes, orgies, sacred sites, rituals, ceremonial landscapes etc with gay abandon, much to the irritation of people who prefer to see some facts.  He even claims, in order to justify the sophistication which he imposes on the Neolithic tribes of Preseli, that “this was one of the great religious and political centres of Neolithic Britain."  As many others (including archaeologists) have pointed out, that claim is simply not supported by the evidence on the ground, and is just another piece of interpretative inflation.

As Hitchens reminds us: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" and as Carl Sagan further reminds us: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

To assume that the tribes of West Wales had the technical skills, the mental maps, the motivation, the manpower and raw material resources, and the leadership to make 80 or so monolith transporting expeditions by sea or overland is to enter a quagmire with no escape. And this is what MPP and his team will be forced to confront as they see their narrative collapsing, bit by bit, around their ears. When Stephen Briggs argued for opportunistic, rather that deterministic, stone gathering in the Neolithic, he was basing his argument on rather solid evidence; and as I have argued many times before, the great mass of the population at the time were not driven by rituals, belief systems, political aspirations or economic ambition but by things that were much simpler -- the need for warmth, clothing, food, safety and comradeship within secure family groups. It was all very utilitarian. The locals inhabiting the slopes of Mynydd Preseli  would have had much in common with Dennis the Peasant. They would have had no knowledge at all of Stonehenge, which was at that time in any case just a circular earthwork no more significant than hundreds of others. They would have had no reason to cart lots of stones from here to there, involving a stupendous logistical challenge. They would in any case not have known how to get there................

If Mike and his colleagues want to continue to elaborate their wondrous narrative, let them do it in the pages of this new journal which somebody will surely wish to create -- and in its pages they can entertain each other with fantastical narratives and jolly romps for many years to come, while leaving the rest of us in peace.