Marcia-Anne Dobres
Weatherhead Resident Scholar 1996-1997
Structuring an Anthropological
Framework for Archaeology
"Technology is a web consisting of things, people, cultural values, and
social interactions," says Marcia-Anne Dobres. In a manuscript titled Technology
and Social Agency: Outlining an Anthropological Framework for Archaeology,
Dobres challenges mainstream contemporary archaeology's approach to understanding
the technology of prehistoric peoples, an approach characterized by the long-held
Western distinction between technology as practical science on one hand and art
and symbols on the other.
"Archaeologists miss the big picture by trying
to explain an ancient culture through its tools," Dobres said. "An
archaeological site was actually an arena of social interaction. The bottom line
is, you don't have a technology without people."
Dobres' goal is to facilitate an analytic shift of attention
beyond the artifact. "The legacy of archaeology is that we find a hand ax
and call it technology," she said. "This reaffirms Western beliefs
that technology is about stuff and not people, and that material technology is
what allows us to survive and adapt." These views, she writes, "are
foundational to why contemporary archaeologists ask certain questions about technologies
of the past and how they go about trying to answer them." Christopher Hawkes' "ladder
of inference," for instance, argues that technology rests at the bottom
of what is knowable about the past and determines everything deriving from it—social
organization, politics, symbolism.
When she did fieldwork at Upper Paleolithic occupation
and cave art sites in France, Dobres found herself wondering why people changed
or didn't change the particular ways they made and used things. "People
are my subject, not artifacts," she said. "Artifacts are a means to
an end. I believe that concrete material choices are constrained more by people's
ideas about the right and wrong ways to do things than by mechanical properties
of natural resources." To make this argument, Dobres shifted from archaeology's
traditional focus on the region and began examining particular sites as the arenas
wherein specific individuals interacted while making and using tools.
To find inspiration for the humanistic framework she
believes is missing in archaeology, Dobres turned to philosophy and contemporary
anthropological theory. Her work synthesizes her readings of Mumford, Heidegger,
Kant, Marx, and Giddens, among others. "What I'm doing is merging three
bodies of theory: Marcel Mauss's ideas about the chane opratoire,
which is both an analytic methodology and conceptual framework for linking sequences
of artifact manufacture and use with the social milieu in which they take place;
contemporary social theory about how relationships and values are created and
challenged during acts of material culture production and use; and the philosophers'
emphasis on how such bodily experiences create both practical and esoteric knowledge."
It is Dobres' hope that an actor-centered vision of
technology will provide a meaningful alternative to the entrenched techno-deterministic
understanding that archaeologists have held for almost two hundred years. "We
must do more than simply describe artifact use," she said. "We have
to understand something of the dynamic social conditions within which these things
were made and given cultural meaning."
Affiliation at time of award: Research associate
in the Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, University
of California-Berkeley
Return to Resident
Scholars 1996-97
