C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y , Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
q 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4005-0004$3.00
Archaeological
Narratives and Other
Ways of Telling 1 theories of formal literary analysis in the early part of
by Mark Pluciennik
With a few exceptions, archaeologists have been far less con-
cerned with the form of their texts or problems of authorship
than have ethnographers. Typically, archaeologies are presented
in the form of narratives understood as sequential stories. Ap-
proaches to narrative analysis drawn from literary theory, philos-
ophy, and sociology and definitions of characters, events, and
plots are examined, together with particular problems these may
pose for the discipline of archaeology. It is suggested that neither
literary analysis nor the tendency to write and evaluate archaeo-
logical and historical narratives in terms of explanatory value
takes sufficient account of the often hybrid nature and aims of
these texts and the contexts in which they were produced. This
argument is illustrated with particular reference to stories of the
Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Europe. It is argued that re-
considering archaeologys positioning across the 19th-century sci-
ence-humanities divide suggests a broader approach to the idea of
what constitutes a narrative which can offer fresh opportunities
for useful reflexivity and experimentation in presentation. Fur-
ther roles and possibilities of narrative and non-narrative ways of
writing archaeologies are also considered.
m a r k p l u c i e n n i k is Lecturer in Archaeology at the Univer-
sity of Wales, Lampeter (Ceredigion SA48 7ED, Wales, U.K.
[m.pluciennik@lamp.ac.uk]). He was educated at the University
of Sheffield (Ph.D., 1994). His publications include Deconstruct-
ing the Neolithic in the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition, in
Understanding the Neolithic of North-Western Europe, edited by
M. Edmonds and C. Richards (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1998),
Radiocarbon Determinations and the Mesolithic-Neolithic
Transition in Southern Italy (Journal of Mediterranean Archae-
ology 10:11550), and At Home with Others: Anthropologists,
Archaeologists, and Historians in Europe (Journal of European
Archaeology 3:22127). He is currently conducting a survey with
Enrico Giannitrapani in central Sicily. The present paper was
submitted 11 v 98 and accepted 24 ix 98; the final version
reached the Editors office 15 x 98.
1. I thank my colleagues Yannis Hamilakis, Cornelius Holtorf, and
especially Sarah Tarlow for their close readings of and detailed com-
ments on an earlier version of this paper and an anonymous referee
for many helpful suggestions.
In archaeology as in most other disciplines, the past two
decades have seen the increasing use of textualist anal-
yses, both in terms of using reading and writing as
analogies for all forms of meaningful social practices and
their analysis and as a way of engaging reflexively with
problems of authority, representation, and politics in dis-
ciplinary discourses. These ideas can be traced in part to
this century and to the linguistic studies of Ferdinand
de Saussure at around the same time, though for many
archaeologists and anthropologists the proximate stim-
ulus came from Levi-Strauss (e.g., 1963 [1958]). However,
while formal (structuralist) analysis has been critiqued
and absorbed within both disciplines, the Saussurian
move to undercut the supposed transparency of language
and any necessary one-to-one correspondence between
words and things was given new impetus in 1960s Paris
(e.g., Foucault 1970 [1966], Barthes 1975 [1970], Derrida
1976 [1967]; for a critical review of the relationship be-
tween these two strands see Merquior 1986). What has
come to be called the linguistic turn in philosophy
and the humanities emphasized rather the slipperiness
of language and the deferral and indeterminacy of mean-
ing, led to both the death of the author and the de-
centring of the subject, and in general promoted a ten-
dency towards an anti-foundational constructionism.
Recent debates in anthropology and archaeology have
tended to concentrate on the ontological and episte-
mological implications of this second move.
Simultaneously, the crisis of representation has led
to renewed interest in the ways in which members of
the disciplines characteristically present their work, in-
cluding the role of narratives. Yet despite much interest
in the forms and rhetoric of texts in other disciplines
such as anthropology (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986,
Strathern 1987, Geertz 1988, Sangren 1988, Roth 1989),
archaeologists have rarely explored the formal structure
of their output. Such few examples as there are tend to
concentrate on discourse analysis of the content of
particular categories or terms (e.g., Hodder [1989a] on
excavation reports, Tilley on inaugural lectures at Cam-
bridge [1989], modernist language [1990a], and British
university prospectuses [1993a], and Thomas [1993] on
the changing associations and content of the term Ne-
olithic). Otherwise the relationship of archaeologists to
text has tended to be on a much more abstract level,
concerning the aptness or not of treating material culture
or social action as text (e.g., Moore 1986, Hodder 1989b,
Baker and Thomas 1990, Tilley 1990b, Gosden 1992).
The role of narratives (or other forms) as a generic class
of writing in archaeology has only rarely been considered
within archaeology (Terrell 1990, Landau 1991, Tilley
1993b, Johnson 1994; see also Bowler 1991). The analysis
of narratives qua narratives has been much more fully
explored within other spheres and disciplines, apart from
fictional literature (e.g., Scholes and Kellogg 1966, Chat-
man 1978, Cohan and Shires 1988, Miller 1990), ranging
from natural science (Gross 1990, Harre 1990, Myers
1990, Lewin 1994) to anthropology (e.g., Bruner 1986;
Rosaldo 1993 [1989]; Denzin 1997:23149), sociology
653
654 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
(Abbott 1990, 1992; Atkinson 1990; Griffin 1992; Qua-
dagno and Knapp 1992), psychology (Polkinghorne 1988,
Ochs and Capps 1996), philosophy, law, and economics
(Nash 1990), geography (Crang 1992), ecology (Cronon
1992), and, most exhaustively, history (e.g., Gallie 1964;
Mandelbaum 1967; Ely, Gruner, and Dray 1969; Mink
1978, 1987; Dray 1971; White 1973, 1987a; Gardiner
1974; Ankersmit 1983; Ricoeur 1984, 1988; Danto 1985;
Carr 1986a; Kellner 1987; Roth 1988; Callinicos 1995).
Although it is not the only form employed, given ar-
chaeological preoccupations with chronologies and
hence sequences whether absolute (e.g., through radio-
carbon dating), relative (stratigraphic), or implied (typo-
logical), archaeology and the writing of narratives, un-
derstood as sequentially ordered stories, have an obvious
affinity. Archaeological topics such as the Mesolithic-
Neolithic transition, when defined as the change from
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic farmers, vir-
tually demand the use of the narrative form, as do other
synthesized issues such as the evolution of . . . or the
origins of . . . However, rather than revisiting debates
which have been taking place in history, for example, for
the past 40 years and more (and before that see, among
others, Hegel and Croce [White 1987b (1980), 1987c
(1984)]), I wish to concentrate on the use and status of
narrative and narrative types within archaeology and par-
ticularly prehistory. I shall examine the concept of nar-
rative, especially in relation to ideas developed in the
philosophy of history, and whether narratives in them-
selves need only represent knowledge or explanation.
What Is a Narrative?
Although narrative is sometimes used as a synonym
for texts, I shall use the more common restricted def-
inition of narrative as storya chronologically ordered
and somehow unified or related sequence of events with
a beginning, middle, and end. Propps (1968 [1927]) for-
mal analysis of Russian folktales is often cited as the
origin of modern narratology in its identification of re-
curring structural motifs, some essential and others op-
tional, within the genre. This kind of analysis has been
much extended in the study of fictional narrative (e.g.,
Barthes 1977 [1966], Chatman 1978), and anthropologists
and archaeologists are familiar with this type of formal
structural analysis of elements and their repetition and
transformation through, for example, Levi-Strausss
work on myths (1994 [1964]). In archaeology Landau
(1991) and Terrell (1990) have examined tales of human
evolution and Pacific prehistory respectively through the
lenses of Proppian hero motifs, with the characters un-
dergoing trials, overcoming setbacks, returning home,
and so on. Others have preferred to work from the lit-
erary categories described in Aristotles Poetics and his
broader identification of narratives in terms of mimesis
and muthos (e.g., Ricoeur 1984). A third strand derives
from phenomenological arguments (especially as ad-
vanced by Husserl) that a basic structure of human ex-
perience (perceptions of duration and beginning, middle,
and end or past, present, and future) is in narrative form.
Philosophically and in relation to history, this position
is most clearly and cogently elaborated by Carr (1986a,
b) and Ricoeur (1988), though it appears anecdotally in
many introductions to narrative studies in the form of
the question Why are humans storytelling animals?
Narratives do not always have to be presented in a
purely linear sequential form, although one should be
able to extract such a chronological sequence and, in-
deed, this is often the intention and effect of the ending
or conclusion: to present the overall view, in effect a
summary of the plot, of how a certain state of events
arose by examination of preceding situations. We are all
used to making narrative sense of scenes, images, and
arguments which may include distorted (stretched or
compressed) and non-sequential time in the form, for
example, of flashbacks, memories, and condensed or im-
plied biographies of new characters. Thus narratives of-
ten also include descriptive and explanatory passages and
subsidiary narratives, not necessarily presented in se-
quential chronological order.
Unless we are using narrative in the broadest pos-
sible sense, then, the distinguishing features of narra-
tives as opposed to other forms of writing would seem
to be sequentiality and emplotment (Ricoeur 1984:
3151)the way in which the story achieves overall co-
herence, the way in which it unfolds so that the end
result or situation can be understood as a logical or at
least plausible consequence of previously described sit-
uations or conditions. Out of the selective (re)description
of objects, elements, events, conditions, and characters
and the myriad possible relationships between them in
time, space, and nature, it is the plot, the thread of the
story, which emphasizes particular paths, possibilities,
and plausibilities of the characters and events and
which draws the text together as a narrative. It is the
relationship of emplotment to other concepts such as
causality, understanding, and explanation and hence the
relationship of (narrative) history to science which has
provoked the debate most relevant to archaeology.
In 1858 Johann Droysen suggested in his Grundrisse
der Historik that there were three scientific methods:
the speculative (formulated in philosophy and theology),
the mathematical or physical, and the historical. Their
respective essences are to know [Wissen], to explain [Er-
klaren], and to understand [Verstehen] (quoted in Polk-
inghorne 1988:38). Droysens statement can be taken as
a crucial point in the formulation of history and, more
broadly, the splitting of the humanities from the sci-
ences as an autonomous realm of understanding and
the subsequent development of hermeneutic approaches
from Dilthey to Gadamer and Ricoeur. It is in the context
of the debate over the validity of this move that the
arguments over the status of narratives took place, par-
ticularly in relation to history and especially from the
1960s onward. This general background has had two con-
sequences. First, historical narratives have often been
evaluated according to how they might measure up to a
scientific standard of explanation rather than whether
there might also be other legitimate aims or functions

(see, for example, the papers in Gardiner 1974). Secondly,
within history there has been a tendency to take tradi-
tional political biography as the epitome of narrative
history, though one might argue for a much broader
view of what constitutes a narrative. Much of the recent
debate about the role and nature of narratives in history
has centred round the work of Hayden White (1973,
1987a).
The Constituents of Narratives
characters
Narratives can be analysed in terms of at least three
constituent parts, often termed characters (subjects),
events, and plots. In fictional narratives, characters are
usually human individuals; the archaeological (and so-
cial historical) equivalents are normally collectivities,
which may range from gendered subgroups (young men,
postmenopausal women) and roles or statuses (elders,
chiefs) to communities or even larger and vaguer social
entities (Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Linear Pottery
households) which may either subsume or ignore poten-
tial subdivisions. For the purposes of this paper I there-
fore prefer to call them subjects (what Ricoeur [1984:
197200] calls quasi-characters). Although such sub-
jects may be the focus of a narrative, they are not nec-
essarily the object of analysis or the narrative, which
may be a site, a landscape, or an event or process such
as the transition to farming, adaptation, or evolution.
The relationship between and nature of subjects and ob-
jects, as well as the scale of analysis, are neither fixed
nor unambiguous.
events
Neither are events easily defined or analytically sep-
arated. To begin with, events are problematic because
a given set of happenings can be plotted in many dif-
ferent ways (Abbott 1992:438). Generally, events com-
prise a sequence or agglomeration of selected elements
or occurrences. Although some historical events such as
a war may seem to be obvious, it is never clear where
the boundaries of an eventits antecedents (or causes),
beginning, end, constituents, and effectscan be drawn.
The search for definitions which can be operationalized
has perhaps recently been most closely explored in his-
torical sociology within the strand called narrative pos-
itivism, referring to the fact that within a field still
largely dominated by quantitative and causal analysis,
many sociologists will only be convinced by narrative
approaches which can be rigorously modelled and in
which the narrative logic can be made explicit (e.g., Ab-
bott 1992, Stryker 1996). According to Griffin (1992:416),
an event is a historically singular happening that takes
place in a particular time and place and sequentially un-
folds or develops through time. . . . Events are thus tem-
poral processes characterized by the emergence of nov-
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 655
elty. Thus they can be understood as historical
colligations (Walsh 1974 [1967]), that is (p. 417), as
relational constructs that unify a number of past or
contemporaneous actions and happenings that might
otherwise have been viewed as discrete or disparate
into a coherent, configured whole that gives mean-
ing to and explains each of its elements and, simul-
taneously, is constituted by them. . . . What is in-
cluded as a description of an event, then, is a
problem of sociological-historical purpose, and that
is a property of the analyst rather than of history
objectively given.
plots
Finally, what is the nature of the emplotment which
distinguishes narrative from other ways of (re)presenting
events? White (1981) and Mink (1981) contrast historical
annals, chronicles, and narratives as a way of illuminat-
ing the difference. For White, if annals are mere se-
quences of (apparently) unrelated events, chronicles dis-
play greater narrative coherency in that they may have
a central subject. However, they are still reliant on chro-
nology as the organizing principle of the discourse
(White 1987b [1980]:16) and lack (moral) closure, that
summing up of the meaning of the chain of events. A
narrative, however, as a fully realized story . . . endows
events . . . with a significance they do not possess as a
mere sequence (p. 14). For White, it is the moral judge-
ment involved in possible types of stories (such as epic,
romance, tragedy, comedy, farce, or satire) and the
readers subsequent recognition of the story type which
produce the meaning of the discourse. Comprehension
is nothing other than the recognition of the form of the
narrative (White 1987c [1984]:43).
Although it should be emphasized that White is gen-
erally dealing with grand visions of human history (what
are elsewhere called meta-narratives), for him the
narrative serves to transform into a story [emphasis
added] a list of historical events that would otherwise be
only a chronicle:
In order to effect this transformation, the events,
agents, and agencies represented in the chronicle
must be characterized as the kind of events [etc.]
that can be apprehended as elements of specific
story types. . . . The historical discourse directs the
readers attention to a secondary referent, different
in kind from the events that make up the primary
referent, namely, the plot structures of the various
story types cultivated in a given culture. When the
reader recognizes the story being told . . . [e.g., epic,
romance] he can be said to have comprehended the
meaning produced by the discourse.
It is therefore arguably not enough for a narrative simply
to list or describe events in sequence as does an annal
or chronicle (for discussion see Mink 1981; White 1981,
1987b [1980]; and Waldman 1981), though one should
note that even an annal may have an unwritten context
656 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
within which it is understood and which may be argued
to supply the missing plot. Thus, for example, a se-
lection of kings and other apparently disparate occur-
rences may be understood to represent the unfolding of
Gods will or a genealogy of entitlement, usurpation, and
consequences, just as a sequence of pottery styles, simply
described, may be understood as the record of invasions
of different peoples, even though this is never made ex-
plicit in the text. In some cases these assumed contexts
comprise meta-narrative pre-understandings or plots
which may be as culturally specific and external to the
text as is the readers recognition of the form.
Archaeologists and others have for a long time been
aware of the existence of meta-narratives such as social
evolution, evolutionary theory, and marxism. Such
meta-narratives, persistent though often seen, at least
since Lyotard (1984), as misguided or untenable, are now
generally characterized (usually pejoratively) as all-en-
compassing though often unquestioned and unstated
frameworks (Klein 1995). Thus Tilley (1995:338) suggests
that probably no other concept has wreaked such dam-
age within the social and historical sciences as the notion
of social evolution, and similar criticisms are made
within archaeology by Rowlands (1989, 1994; cf. Kuper
1988 and Fabian 1983 for anthropology). I take meta-
narratives to refer to the explicit or implicit intellectual
framework within which narratives sensu stricto are
composed, but clearly such meta-narratives or, more
broadly, unexamined assumptions can and do provide
one sort of coherence or emplotment. It is with these
grand visions of history, in which events such as the rise
and fall of nations are seen to have a further significance,
that White (1973) is mainly concerned. Although nar-
ratives and meta-narratives are not limited to modern
Western times and places (we have, for example, Judaeo-
Christian tales of salvation), these goal-oriented inter-
pretations which are used to impose a telos on the past
seem to have a particular political resonance with co-
lonialist, imperialist, and nationalist projects.
In contrast to Whites literary approach, Mink (1987)
begins from analytical philosophy in his attempt to char-
acterize narrative understanding in the form of a Kantian
a priori categorization. For Mink, there are three mu-
tually exclusive modes of comprehension (1987:51), the
theoretical, the categoreal, and the configurational. The
first is typically scientific and refers to the comprehen-
sion of objects as instances of the same generalization.
The second, claims Mink, is comprehension of things as
examples of the same category, including the use of
analogy or aesthetic judgements (p. 52). Finally, the con-
figurational mode includes narrative comprehension,
such as the pattern of words, gestures, and actions
which constitute our understanding of the personality of
a friend (p. 53). He suggests, for example, that the ac-
tions and events of a story comprehended as a whole are
connected by a network of overlapping descriptions (p.
58). Mink goes on to argue that none of these modes can
ultimately be combined with another within a single act
of comprehension, though they may be juxtaposed. Thus
he too offers a way of separating what we may sum-
marize as scientific, aesthetic, and social modes of com-
prehension. An important point to note is that empha-
sizing in this way the act of comprehension suggests that
the mode is at least partly dependent on the reader rather
than inherent in the form of the constituted object or
text (even if Whites forms must be actively recognized
for comprehension to take place). However, I would also
see more blurring and overlap between Minks catego-
ries: to understand something as analogy, homology, and
through aesthetic judgement, for example (his categoreal
mode of comprehension), would seem to me to be pre-
cisely elements which are involved in the overlapping
descriptions of his narrative configurational mode. I
shall return to the notion of complex and simple de-
scriptions below.
In a related view from a historical sociologist, Griffin
(1992:419) attributes narrative coherence to the inter-
dependence of the actions described and the presence of
a single central theme:
Narratives are orchestrated by the narrator to in-
clude a particular series of actions in a particular
temporal order for a particular purpose. . . . This very
temporal relatedness, when coupled with the purpo-
sive nature of narrativethe telling of a central
theme as a storylends narrative its coherence. In-
deed, it is this qualitywhat the philosopher Louis
Mink (1987) calls narratives configurational rhet-
oricthat fosters intelligibility in ways not reduci-
ble to what is learned from theoretical deduction or
classification, causal generalization, or statistical
covariation. It also is largely this rhetorical form
that endows narratives with their followability
(Gallie 1964) and imbues them with the potential
for rigorous sociological-historical explanation.
This is the crucial point on which narrative viewed as
a form of knowledgewhether we call it comprehen-
sion, explanation, or something elserests: that narra-
tive is in some way more than a sequential and selective
description of possible events. Thus for these and many
other theorists it is the configuring function of plotits
ability to bring potentially disparate events within an
overarching framework and attribute a common mean-
ing which is more than the sum of its partswhich de-
fines narrative.
scales, contexts, and explanation
There are several different strands here which need to
be unpacked. We may agree that narratives and their
constituent parts are selections from a potentially infi-
nite number of elements, occurrences, and events, which
are (re)configured into a wholea storyusually by
demonstrating spatial and temporal proximity and se-
quence. The nature of the linksthe interrelatedness of
the events, conditions, and processescan range from
the individual, such as reason-action and other proxi-
mate and specified cause-effect explanations, to the

grand, generalized, and abstract, such as the Hegelian
progressive individuation of Spirit and other philoso-
phies of history examined by White (1973). Thus nar-
rative configuration may be effected by showing simi-
larity (of nature, form, cause, or effect) between events
widely separated in space and time and hence arguing
for relatedness only in terms of common process. This
latter strategy is more common in science but can
equally be used or implied in histories which purport to
identify an underlying facet of human nature (storytell-
ing, male aggression, the Oedipus complex) or social pro-
cess (cultural evolution, structuration).
In history there has been a tendency to insist that nar-
ratives relate only to the historically specific (thus in-
validating predictive lawlike explanations). The element
of choice in what constitutes events and differentiates
them from objects, subjects, and plotsthe ambiguities
of analytical scalesuggests of course that what is his-
torically specific is also a judgement. Griffin (1992:417),
for example, argues that colligations are formulated
through the interpretation of the temporal and spatial
relatedness of historical particulars. . . . Thus the concept
of revolution is not a colligation. . . . The French Revo-
lutiona singular, unique, historical happeningis. At
another scale of analysis, however, all modern revolu-
tions could be seen as different expressions of some com-
mon historically particular situation or event
forms of social unrest, the combination of capitalism
and nationalism, or the political aspirations of previously
excluded classes, for example. Indeed, it is far from clear
what distinguishes Griffins definition of an event from
his more general definition of a narrative. This is a par-
ticularly cogent point for (especially prehistoric) archae-
ologists, used to dealing also with the long-term and spa-
tially diffuse. Is the appearance of anatomically modern
humans, for example, an occurrence, an event, a process,
or a plot? The answer would seem to be any or all, de-
pending on the selection of other facts and the context,
scope, and purpose of the narrative concerned.
If there is potential slippage between the categories of
narrative object, subject, event, process, and plot, then
this would seem to call into question the claim that
narrative formthe type of storyis itself and only re-
sponsible for the overall meaning. White insists that
there must be more to a historical narrative than the
simple demonstration or assertion of links between the
various elements and events. Yet why can a historical
narrative not be (merely) a selective description of related
events and process(es)a plausible and convincing ver-
sion of a chain/sequence of events? Why exclude explic-
itly scientific narratives which unify by purporting to
describe a process or processes without any overt judge-
ment of meaning? According to White, it is because the
nature of the coherence or configuration is given by dif-
ferent factors in different genres or discourses.
He suggests (1987c[1984]:39) that in poetry, for ex-
ample, coherence may be given by rhyme or meter. An-
other candidate is logic, as in scientific discourses, in
which functions such as communication (description,
demonstration, explication) may be privileged while in
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 657
fiction expression and conation may be emphasized.
(In fact, recent work on rhetoric in science suggests that
White may have underestimated the role of these latter
functions elsewhere [see below].) According to White,
those who view historical narrative as a form of expla-
nation stress the communicative function
(1987c[1984]:40) in which the coherence of the narrative
is given by logic (e.g., in terms of sequence and causality).
Hence in this view narrative is only a medium for the
message (just like a syllogism or mathematical equation).
However, here and elsewhere White argues that in a
sense the forms of narrative possibilities are culturally
preconfigured, hence his tropological analysis. Thus he
emphasizes the performative aspect of narrative, in
which a discourse is seen as an apparatus for the pro-
duction of meaning rather than as only a vehicle for the
transmission of information (1987c[1984]:42); to
change the form of the discourse might not be to change
the information about its explicit referent, but it would
certainly change the meaning produced by it. Theorists
such as Ankersmit (1983) go farther by pointing out that
any change (e.g., in element, style, or emphasis) will alter
the nature of the typically complex referents which are
the (constructed) objects of historical narratives. In fact,
historical and archaeological narratives are likely to dis-
play both individually and collectively a range of both
functions (logic, suasion, explication, description) and
configurationsnot only plots but ways of producing
those plots. Nevertheless, even if we refuse to limit our-
selves to literary topoi (story types) as does White, we
can agree that insofar as there is an overall meaning to
a narrative, the sources of that meaning will include both
the plots that are brought to bear on events explicitly by
the author and those brought from outside by the reader.
White is insistent, however, on the separation of ar-
gument from the attribution of meaning in historical
narratives, which takes place only via literary (rather
than, say, scientific or logical) topoi: Certain narra-
tive discourses may have arguments embedded within
them, in the form of explanations of why things hap-
pened as they did. . . . But such arguments are more prop-
erly considered as a commentary on, rather than a part
of, the narrative (1987c[1984]:43). As we have seen, ac-
cording to White (p. 44) it is the choice of the story type
and its imposition upon the events that endow them
with meaning. While he concedes that the effect of
such emplotment may be regarded as an explanation,
he insists that the generalizations are literary topoi
rather than scientific laws. It is this second move which
is the more provocative: that the secondary referent
for the reader is the plot structure or story typethe form
rather than the content or other effects of the style and
configuration. Although I think Whites approach some-
times works well in the analysis of meta-narratives, the
consequent reduction of the meaning of historical nar-
ratives to categories of literary topoi is limiting. An al-
ternative is to follow Ankersmit (1983) in considering
the effect and function of a historical narrative to be the
construction of an integrated but complex referenta
narrative substancewhich may or may not draw part
658 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
of its meaning from resonances or homologies with the
broad literary story types described by White.
Whites claim for the importance of story recogni-
tion derives from the human desire to have real events
display the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of
an image of life that is and can only be imaginary (White
1987b[1980]:24). I think we can accept Whites point
when applied to human history on the larger scale. Ar-
guably, however, life always does appear to us at least
partly as a series of (variably interwoven) stories be-
cause of repetitions, continuities, beginnings, changes,
and closure ranging from completed actions to birth, life,
and death and at least the possibility of understanding
the sense of our own lives as projects or biographies. It
appears more plausible to argue that stories (like in-
terpretations) go all the way down (cf. Carr 1986a, b;
Ricoeur 1984:52; see also Ochs and Capps 1996).
While Whites approach has been immensely stimu-
lating, his insistence on the dominance of the literary
form over the content seems overdrawn. Arguably,
Whites and others refusal to abandon the idea of a basic
difference in kind between history and the natural sci-
ences in the ways in which meaning is comprehended
is due as much to their philosophical heritage as to any
intrinsic contrasts. In fact, because of the 19th-century
split between the humanities and the sciences noted
above, the status and function of historical narratives
tend, implicitly or explicitly, to be compared with an
ideal and valorized model of scientific explanation from
which history differs negatively by reason of imprecision
(the lack of quantifiable factors), complexity (the lack of
systemic closure), and unprovability (the impossibility
of repetition by experiment). However, in recent years
many people adhering to the strong programme of the
sociology of knowledge have pointed to the importance
of rhetoric, suasion, power, and consensus in the pro-
duction and acceptance of scientific truths (e.g., Latour
and Woolgar 1986, Knorr-Cetina 1993). Others have an-
alysed the narrativization of scientific discoveries and
ideas (Harre 1990, Myers 1990, Lewin 1994). Going even
farther, it is equally possible to consider the most basic
of scientific statements and explanations as particular
and simplified forms of narratives. For example, consider
the chemical equation Na 1 Cl = NaCl. In words and
from left to right, the elements sodium and chlorine
brought into sufficient proximity in time-space form salt
(sodium chloride). This (repeatable) idealized event (or
process) can of course be described in many different
ways and produce many different images and under-
standings (for example, there was an explosion and this
white stuff appeared, or atoms are like planetary systems
with orbiting electrons and combine by the exchange of
electrons and the binding of nuclei). It should be noted
that the ability to read this equation meaningfully de-
pends precisely on the capacity of the reader to recognize
this particular story type, even though it is clearly not
a Whitean literary topos.
I would argue that emplotment understood as the
(re)presentation of coherence, a particular configuration,
can at one level be applied equally to such scientific
explanations or descriptions of process, as well as to the
complex narratives as traditionally understood in the
philosophy of history, whether construed as explanation
or not. The very act of selection or constitution of events
or objects is a form of emplotment as applicable to sci-
entific equations as to chronicles or more complex nar-
ratives. In this view scientific and historical narratives
merely represent two points in a constellation of possible
ranges of expression and representations of (parts of) the
world. However, we may note that it is equally possible
to treat historical events and processes as if they were
reducible to causal processes in the same way as scien-
tific explanations or to provide simplified and homoge-
neous subjects and historical processesas in many na-
tionalist texts or meta-narrative interpretations of the
rise of the West. Different forms of explanation con-
struct different objects of analysis (Mahajan 1992). Sim-
ilarly, Ankersmit (1983) proposes that whole historical
narratives, even when dealing with apparently the same
object or event, are not strictly comparable, since each
narrative contains slightly different facts, emphases, or
interrelationships and hence constructs its own nar-
rative substance. While in scientific narratives the ob-
ject is often the (causal) process or a deliberately sim-
plified entity, typically described in only one of its
potential aspects, in social or literary explanations the
object is typically the event or subject(s). Characteristi-
cally, then, scientific narratives aim to isolate and ex-
plicate as generalizable examples events or generative
processes (for example, the production of a chemical
compound or evolution)the medium is the message,
the process is the object and plot, and the causes and
conditions are necessary and sufficient. In contrast, so-
cial and historical narratives often concentrate on the
description of the conjunction of multiple necessary and
contingent conditions and processes producing complex
and often overdetermined events, even if archaeological
interpretations are subsequently equally underdetermi-
ned by the empirical evidence. It is because of the need
to provide coherence to seemingly various and disparate
elements that the unifying role or form of the narra-
tivethe plotis highlighted. Thus we may agree with
Polkinghornes summary of Ricoeur when he suggests
with regard to human history that the plot, insofar as
it functions to synthesize the heterogeneous, may be the
way to integrate the variety of explanatory forms . . . into
one intelligible whole to include circumstances, goals,
interactions, and unintended results (Polking-
horne 1988:49). However, this does not have to imply
(contra White) that it is therefore the form rather than
the explicit content of the plot which ultimately deter-
mines meaning.
The fact that scientific events, conditions, and pro-
cesses may be repeatable (though, for example, many
geological and cosmological events, whether scientifi-
cally or otherwise described, are not) and hence lead to
both laws and predictions does not seem to exclude their

analysis within a broad understanding of narrative.2 Nei-
ther does historical specificity have to exclude the aim
of being general or lawlikethe point of a particular case
study may be precisely to demonstrate the character of
certain natural or human processes, such as evolution
or adaptation, by presenting an exemplar of a quasi-uni-
versal plot or process. However, both (or all) types of
narrative are always framed by and presented within a
wider contexta preferred meta-narrative, pre-under-
standing, or worldviewwhich presupposes the exis-
tence of particular types of entities and hence ways in
which the world works and may be described, grasped,
manipulated, explained, or understood.
In this view, the coherence of a narrative describing a
sequence of events could be given equally by, for ex-
ample, physical causality in the context of a particular
chemical equation or the demonstration of a particularly
complex intersection of physical and cultural conditions
and social processes. What is clear is that to emphasize,
for example, systemic process, material causality, social
agency, or a specific combination of all three is neces-
sarily to engender a particular vision of the world, how
it works, and by implication our place and powers within
it. In this sense all narratives of whatever type do make
a moral or political judgement and attempt to persuade
us of the cogency, relevance, and coherence of that par-
ticular vision.
What, then, makes a good narrative rather than a bad
one? In science, replicability and material efficacy may
be prime criteria. For the historical disciplines, apart
from decisions about the accuracy and appropriateness
of the elements and aesthetic criteria such as breadth,
richness, style, and followability (Gallie 1964), eval-
uations of narratives will depend on whether consistency
(the demonstration of same/similar ordering relations)
and complexity, for example, are perceived as good things
and whether the choice and nature of ordering relations
individually and collectively appear both interesting and
(logically or otherwise) plausible (cf. Cronon 1992:
137176). Hence what makes a narrative good is highly
subjective and will ultimately depend on wider cultural,
communitarian, disciplinary, and individual pre-under-
standings, needs, dispositions, and prejudices (sensu
Gadamer; cf. Lewin 1994, Lampeter Archaeology Work-
shop 1997). Any text is the result of a series of choices
regarding form, content, and style. For narratives, certain
fictional genres such as the avowedly avant-garde are the
least constrained by tradition, while innovation in pre-
sentation (rather than content) is most frowned upon in
science, where codes of representation are consensual
and often taken to be unproblematic and transparent. In
this sense, ethnographers have tended to be far more
experimental than archaeologists.
Although virtually all the theorists discussed above
speak of purpose or moral judgement vis-a`-vis the 3. I must emphasize that in the case studies that follow I am con-
plot as though it were the prerogative of the writer, it
2. My argument for a broader application of narrative mirrors to a
certain extent the arguments of Roy Bhaskar (1989) for ontological
and epistemological naturalism in the social sciences.
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 659
seems clear (however much we may mourn the death
of the author) that the capacity for emplotment resides
equally with the reader and is not necessarily given by
the form of the narrative. Although the author may often
offer explicit guidance in the form of the moral or pre-
ferred meaning, a discourse that one person may read as
a romance of social evolutionary progress may be seen
by another as tragedy or satire. In fact we are all used to
doing exactly this, for example, with 19th-and earlier-
20th-century historical and ethnographic accounts. This
is more than merely disagreeing with any empirical de-
tails, premises, or conclusions but rather a reevaluation
by bringing new contexts to old stories. More broadly,
those predisposed to explanation as causal and scien-
tific will tend to favour Occams razorthat (ceteris
paribus) the simplest explanation is best; those who en-
visage the world as messy, incoherent, and ruled by con-
tingencies and indeterminacy may justifiably prefer nar-
ratives which mirror that vision of the world.
archaeological narratives
Because of the background discussed above, it is impor-
tant to understand the different positionings and trajec-
tories of Anglo-American archaeology and history as
disciplines.3 To oversimplify, pre-World War II culture-
historical archaeology and traditional historical narra-
tive can be seen to have many facets in commonin
essence, the unproblematic description of sequences of
change, however they were explained (e.g., as folk mi-
gration or as the effects of powerful elite individuals).
After the war, both disciplines went through phases of
modelling themselves on the hard sciences to a greater
or lesser extent, with the advent of cliometrics in history
(Stone 1979) and versions of cultural ecology and then
New Archaeology in anthropology and archaeology (Trig-
ger 1989). Similar concerns can also be seen within the
philosophy of history, with the discipline being charac-
terized as a young or immature science and hence
one in which the (desired) explanatory or covering laws
were often unstated, implicit, only lawlike or ex-
planatory sketches (see, e.g., Gardiner 1974). However,
explicitly quantitative scientific and explanatory modes
and rhetoric never became as important in history as in
archaeology. From the 1980s onward there was a partial
reaction in prehistoric archaeology against what were
seen as prescriptive and overly scientistic goals and
(again as in many other disciplines) a movement towards
hermeneutic, structuralist, and more broadly textual
social or interpretive archaeologies. However, most
archaeologists have always acknowledged that their dis-
cipline overlaps both sides of the 19th-century divide
between the natural and the human sciences and that
cerned with American and North European (predominantly British)
examples. In many other parts of Europe, discussion is often still
framed in broadly culture-historical terms, and, consequently, dis-
cussion of the tensions between the myriad scientific, processual,
historical, postprocessual, ethnographic, postmodern, and other ap-
proaches to the past is less well developed.
660 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
many of its techniques and specialisms are based on in-
disputably hard science. This suggests that many dif-
ferent types of description, explanation, and understand-
ing may be deeply embedded in archaeological texts:
archaeology may be considered more hybrid in this re-
spect than the persuasive fictions of ethnography
(Strathern 1987).
Despite the differences among theoretical schools, ar-
chaeology as a discipline has characteristics which may
pose particular problems for or emphasize particular
forms of writing. Typically, archaeologists are often con-
cerned with a variety of time spans, and therefore the
definition of and relationship between subjects, events,
and processes and plots is distinctive to the discipline.
Unlike those in traditional historical narratives, individ-
uals are generally unnamed, and the characters are usu-
ally collective and may be communities, societies,
traditions, cultures, styles, activities, technologies, sites,
landscapes, or even regions. Archaeologists are often
working at three or four removes from, say, a traditional
historians text with a purported eyewitness account or
record of other people, events, or conditions, let alone
an ethnographers oral reports and direct observation.
While archaeologists do not have to eschew individual
intentions and reasons as part of their narratives, typi-
cally they are dealing with implied constructs and ab-
stracted notions of human behaviour or action and their
outcomes, often with great uncertainty as to their nature,
chronology, intentionality, and representativeness. Es-
pecially in syntheses, archaeologists must also deal with
a mix of methods and data from various sources and of
differing explanatory weight and utility. All archaeolo-
gists routinely use lawlike causal explanation to explain
outcomes related to the invariable properties of certain
types of materials and natural processes such as the ta-
phonomy of a site and may invoke broad ecological prin-
ciples, for example, as well as using more contentious
explanations, generalizations, analogies, and specula-
tions derived from social theory, ethnography, ecology,
or biology. It is generally at the level of the appropriate-
ness of approach and attribution of possible mean-
ingthe nature of the plot and the type of narrative ob-
ject constructedthat paradigmatic archaeological
debates take place.
While singular and simple narratives may offer a sense
of final closure, it is equally possible (and normal in an-
thropology, history, and archaeology) to present partial
rather than totalizing narratives, in the sense that the
end of the story is obviously arbitrary and provisional
(e.g., the establishment of a community fully dependent
on agro-pastoral subsistence) without claiming that no
other stories remain to be told or that other narratives
referred to within the text (e.g., gender relations, cultural
dynamics) must begin or finish at the same point. Char-
acteristically, then, archaeological narratives involve a
great range of elements and occurrences, from individual,
cultural, social, species-specific, and natural dispositions
to local and global conditions. Whether some of the
causes which may be given in such narratives are de-
rived from implicit generalizations which could be cast
as laws (e.g., a person of this type would tend to think
or do this in this sort of situation) need not concern us
here. Any descriptions or explanations of human history
involve some explicit or implicit assertions and gener-
alizations, namely, that humans behave or can be un-
derstood like this, where this can range from the naive,
personal, anachronistic, and andro- and ethnocentric via
the culturally and historically specific to the broadest
definitions of humans as, for example, language-using,
competitive, or biologically constrained. But to argue
that the acceptability or explanatory value of a his-
torical account must therefore only be cast in the form
of in principle generalizable laws, processes, and hy-
potheses which are either proved or disproved (e.g., Mur-
phey 1994, Nettle 1997) unhelpfully narrows our under-
standing of what form a hypothesis, theory, or narrative
must take.4
Crucially, archaeological (like any other) narrative ob-
jects are post-hoc constructions. The relationship of
events to their constituent elements, particulars, or oc-
currences, which may themselves be complex and de-
pendent on the results of prior analysis or reasoning, is
analogous to the relationship between plots and events.
Similarly, the constitution of events and their relation-
ship to past occurrences and other cognized or narrated
events is analogous to the construction of appropriate
time-scales and definitions for those working within a
broadly Braudelian temporal framework: what consti-
tutes lhistoire evenementielle, conjoncture, and the
longue duree will depend upon the intention and pre-
figuration of the analyst concerned (for archaeology, see
Knapp 1992; cf. Ricoeur 1984:21725; Aminzade 1992).
Thus events or processes in archaeological narratives,
such as the origins of agriculture or the Mesolithic-Ne-
olithic transition, are always constructed from elements
or occurrences in the past or the present; those elements
may be the presence (or absence) of a single potsherd,
domesticated bone, or cereal grain at a particular site or
archaeological facts at a much broader temporal and
spatial scalethe appearance of particular material cul-
tures or practices, settlement patterns, or contemporary
gene frequency distributions, for example.
As Abbott (1992) notes, since events have duration and
overlap, the attribution of sequence may become prob-
lematic despite being a defining characteristic of narra-
4. Thus Murphey (1994:285), discussing Jack Greenes Pursuits of
Happiness, about Englands western colonies in the 17th and 18th
centuries, argues that it is implicit in the theory that, were it
possible to replicate the exact socio-cultural, psychological, bio-
logical, and physical conditions in a different spatio-temporal re-
gion, the same process would be observed and so this is an example
of a testable and generalizable causal hypothesis. Apart from Mur-
pheys peculiar assertion that in principle the exact conditions
could be replicated in a different spatio-temporal region, his
claim seems to be the rather confused one that if history repeated
itself exactly, then exactly the same causal processes would be (or
could be said to be) responsible. For further problems with Mur-
pheys approach, see Roth (1995). In a far narrower and less so-
phisticated comment, Nettle (1997:284) merely asserts that there
is only one coherent candidate for a background theory on which
anthropology can be founded, and that is Darwins theory of
evolution.

table 1
Whites (1973) Narrative Forms
Trope Emplotment Argument Ideology
Metaphor Romance Formist Anarchist
Metonymy Tragedy Mechanist Radical
Synecdoche Comedy Organic Conservative
Irony Satire Contextual Liberal
tive and one which is especially important for those at-
tempting to offer causal explanations. Arguably, because
of the particular nature of (especially prehistoric) ar-
chaeological dataindeterminate, ambiguous, or uncer-
tain and chronologically imprecise and/or inaccu-
ratethis is a particular problem for archaeologists. As
discussed above, discrete events, characters, and plots
viewed as process may become mutually constituting
and their boundaries blurred. However, this changing re-
lationship between (textual and analytical) entities may
itself be symptomatic of certain kinds of archaeologies
(see below). There would seem to be two main strategies
which can be pursued in the construction of archaeo-
logical narratives. First, uncertainties and gaps can be
subsumed by positing a continuation of the same, often
within a deliberately large-scale and explicit meta-nar-
rative, of which social evolution in one form or another
has been the most persistent. The telos of progress, usu-
ally understood as the recent or present state of the au-
thors society (local, national, or global), is used as a mea-
sure to offer retrospective judgement on past events or
societies and their place within that process. Another
recent and often explicit meta-narrative is represented
by neo-Darwinian views of cultural evolution, which
also attempt to give meaning to all events and behaviours
by placing them within a general understanding of cul-
tural process (e.g., Boyd and Richerson 1985, Dunnell
1989). The second strategy is to celebrate or feel liberated
by the apparent openness, discontinuity, and indeter-
minacy of human affairs. This second strategy rather em-
phasizes the importance of contingency and agency over
(especially teleological) process, though such views are
usually underpinned by another generalization such as
the understanding of social process as structuration (Gid-
dens 1984) or habitus (Bourdieu 1990). In recent years
both strategies have had their adherents.
Archaeology and the Transition to Farming
To my knowledge, the only rigorous attempt to apply
Whites type of topological analysis to archaeological
narratives (but see Hodder 1995) is Rudebecks (1996)
excellent analysis of 1980s papers on the transition to
farming in southern Scandinavia. Rudebeck draws
largely on Whites (1973) analysis of 19th-century phi-
losophers and historians, in which he identified various
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 661
dominant narrative forms and figures and their affinities
(table 1).5 However, White himself commented (p. 29):
These affinities are not to be taken as necessary
combinations. . . . On the contrary, the dialectical
tension which characterizes the work of every mas-
ter historian usually arises from an effort to wed a
mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or of
ideological implication which is inconsonant with
it.
On this reading and Rudebecks analysis, however, al-
most every prehistorian writing about the transition to
farming in the early-to-mid-1980s could be characterized
as a master historian. In terms of the arguments, for
example, Rudebeck concludes: It is hardly possible to
discern only one formal argument in the texts. . . . not
one author finds a formist argument to be sufficient as
explanation [and] . . . therefore the formist argument is
coupled with mechanistic or organicist arguments. . . .
we find tendencies towards both formist and mechanis-
tic and also contextual arguments in [Jennberts] text
(1996:74). Rudebeck also finds that Mesolithic people are
variously positioned as romantic, tragic, and comic char-
acters. In only one of the six works discussed is Whites
proposed affinity of emplotment with argument fully
supported.
5. Tropes describe types of indirect or figurative language; thus,
through metaphor, phenomena can be characterized in terms of
their similarity to, and difference from, one another (White 1973:
34); metonymy is a part-whole relation (as in crown for king-
ship); synecdoche uses a part for a quality of the whole (Tilley
[1993b:18] gives the archaeological example of changes in pot design
standing for changes in social relations), and irony uses the con-
tradictory, absurd, or paradoxicalrecently highlighted in the ques-
tioning of the status of the author or the text. The point for White
is that metaphor can be considered representational, metonymy
reductionist, synecdoche integrative, and irony negational (White
1973:34).
The four emplotment types chosen by White (following Northrop
Frye) are perhaps more easily recognizable: romance may be sum-
marized as heroic transcendence (and hence has obvious resonances
with progressive, social evolutionary plots), while satire reveals the
ultimate inadequacy of the visions of the world (White 1973:10)
and hence has affinities with postmodern ironic commentaries.
Comedy displays (at least temporary) reconciliation or harmoni-
zation in a positive sense, while tragedy shows the limits to human
nature and aspirations.
In the types of arguments White identifies, those characterized
as formist are largely descriptive classifications of the chosen ob-
jects, with few or vague generalizations about process. Mechanist
explanations seek causal laws that determine the outcomes of
processes (White 1973:17), and Marx is cited as a prime example.
Organicist arguments take individual entities as components of
processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than, or
qualitatively different from, the sum of their parts (p. 15), while
the contextualist strategy is to trace threads linking events out-
ward in space and time, linking (often synchronically) rather than
integrating events and trends.
White further argues that these various linguistic, literary, and
explanatory levels tend to produce distinctive types of worldviews
or political ideologies. It should be noted that many of these ap-
parently rigid categorizations are heavily qualified in footnotes.
Thus, for example, regarding tropes, he adds that all of the tro-
pological strategies of linguistic usage are present [in 19th-century
literature], but present in different degrees in different writers and
thinkers (White 1973:33).
662 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
Although Rudebecks close reading of these texts pro-
duces many pertinent comments, the degree of overlap
and lack of agreement with Whites categories suggests
that this approach is not necessarily the most fruitful for
archaeological narrative (rather than meta-narrative)
analysis. An examination of a selection of texts dealing
with the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Europe from
the past 50 years shows that although some can be con-
sidered in terms of their meta-narrative emplotment, the
shifts in approaches, motifs, styles, and arguments can
also usefully be analysed in a less programmatic fashion.
culture history
The fourth (1947) edition of Childes Dawn of European
Civilization, first published in 1925, represented a major
revision, though it is clear from the reprinting of the
earlier prefaces that Childe maintained his earlier social
evolutionary thesis in substance even if the detail and
chronology were changed. My theme is the formation
of European Civilization as a peculiar and individual
manifestation of the human spirit (preface to the first
edition, reprinted in 1947:xiii). In fact the volume was
part of the publishers History of Civilization series, de-
signed to form a complete library of social evolution.
Childe himself noted that progress is an indivisible
whole (p. xv) but after the Neolithic revolution the
leading part was played by the European West, which
adapted the gifts of the East and united the contribu-
tions made by Africa and Asia into a new and organic
whole capable of developing on its own original lines.
By the sixteenth century b.c. the new organism was al-
ready functioning and the point had arrived when the
Westerners were ready to assume the role of masters
(p. xiii).
The text comprises a series of sequential narratives
arranged by chapter in geographical areasGreece, the
Balkans, western Mediterranean islands, and so on.
These tend to be largely descriptions of archaeological
materials and burial practices, with very little theoretical
exposition or, indeed, clear view of process except in the
broadest culture-historical terms (though of course
Childe did present such views elsewhere [1951, 1964]).
Childe does make reference to several sorts of transi-
tion: in the Pontic zone we have, for example, the
conversion of autochthonous food-gatherers to food-pro-
duction by agents of Oriental civilization (1947:149);
the origin and spread of the Danubian are considered
possibly due to migration from the Mediterranean or An-
atolia, population overflow from the Morava sites, or
acquisition of Neolithic traits from the Morava or Koros
peoples (p. 101); in southern Sweden we may have im-
migrants or merely descendants of hunter-fishers who
had adopted various traits (p. 162) and in northern Ger-
many the development of hybrid cultures (p. 165).
Elsewhere we have acculturation, absorption, in- north-west cline shown by radiocarbon dates for earliest
filtration, invasion, conversion, influence, as farming sites, when plotted for the Near East and Europe,
well as population expansion and trade. In short, Childe
is perfectly happy to see a mosaic of social processes as
explaining changes in the archaeological record of Europe
from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.
His explanation (or emplotment) is clearly pro-
videdthough not very explicitly in this textwithin a
broadly materialist social evolutionary framework, oc-
casionally using marxist terminology such as mode of
production, primitive communism, and ideological
superstructure. This is not culture history in the ster-
eotyped sense, in which culture change is inevitably
equated with folk migration, but rather culture dif-
fusion. Characters, then, are peoples, and events are so-
cioeconomic changes expressed in or shown by material
culture. In the wider sense the narrative substance and
plot is the rather Hegelian manifestation of the human
spirit, though in pan-European rather than Teutonic
form.
culture process
This social evolutionary view of culture diffusion
(though often with much more emphasis on migration
as the primary force for change) can be said to have lasted
until the late 1960s. At that time new or processual
archaeologies began to make their impact, though fre-
quently in relation to the origins of agriculture (e.g., Bin-
ford 1968) rather than its spread across Europe. Such in-
novative approaches as systems theory, in which
societies were presented as essentially closed systems
with supposedly specifiable and quantifiable relations
between parts and wholes, provided extremely coherent
narratives judged in terms of formal logic (e.g., Flannery
1972). There was a shift to narratives concentrating on
cultural, biological, and ecological processes rather than
historical events and hence providing models and expla-
nations (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971, 1973; Ren-
frew 1973) analogous to those found in science. Thus in
New Archaeology, process (plot) often became conflated
with the event (or vice versa)which may be valid in
that perceptions of events and plot are intimately linked
and mutually determining. But this relative downgrading
of the importance of specific events per se in favour of
generalized processes is a large part of the reason this
new archaeology was rightly seen as anti-historical (e.g.,
Binford 1977). What made processual archaeology pro-
cessual was precisely this concentration on highly spec-
ified plots out of which events naturally developed and
could with hindsight be given causal or quasi-causal ex-
planation. Such attitudes perhaps reached their epitome
in such examples as Renfrews (1978) catastrophe theory
and Renfrew and Cookes (1979) mathematicized
archaeologies.
One influential approach in this vein to the Meso-
lithic-Neolithic transition in Europe was that proposed
by Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza (1971, 1973, 1984; see
also Renfrew 1987, 1992; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and
Piazza 1994). They argued that the broad south-east-to-
suggested a model of roughly steady spread of the Ne-
olithic. This, they proposed could be understood in
terms of a wave of advance model in which small

random moves caused by the fission of settlements under
conditions of slow but steady growth of agricultural pop-
ulations produced an outward ripple effect. Although
they did not deny the possibility of other mechanisms
of diffusion, they argued that modern European genetic
distributional data retained evidence of this genetic (and
cultural) swamping of sparse indigenous Mesolithic pop-
ulations by people of genetically exogenous origin. These
cultural, demographic, and genetic processes were mod-
elled mathematically and again represent a scientific and
quantifiable version of the transitional event very much
as a process.
Almost the last approach exclusively in this vein was
that of Jarman, Bailey, and Jarman (1982), which, how-
ever, drew on and summarized earlier work from the
1970s (Higgs 1972, 1975). Explicitly generalizing and sci-
entific in approach though it was, the authors recognized
the possibility of other forms of explanation or under-
standing: It was never the intention . . . to imply that
palaeoeconomy offered the only acceptable framework
for the treatment of archaeological data (1982:1). They
recommended a scientific approach (which would lead
to the postulation of laws) and argued that a long-term
time-scale and an evolutionary approach were virtually
demanded by the imprecision, poor resolution, and in-
completeness of prehistoric archaeological data. Humans
must archaeologically be understood as biological ani-
mals rather than as social beings. Archaeological in-
formation is peculiarly well fitted to such a generalizing
role, but . . . is hopelessly inadequate in almost all cases
to deal effectively with the particular (p. 253). They
continued: With this in mind, it seemed to us that the
nature and development of subsistence economies could
usefully be viewed in terms of the interplay between
three primary variables: the population [population pres-
sure], the available resources, and the technology for
their exploitation. Population pressure was regarded as
the key causal factor (p. 71). Further, their (biologically)
evolutionary approach was still set within an under-
standing of progressive directionality and in this sense
is part of the set of romantic social evolutionary nar-
ratives, in which there is a gradual development from
simple to complex and controlled exploitation systems
(p. 58).
culture contact
Although one can point to the work of Bender (1978,
1981) and her structural marxist insistence on social con-
tradictions within and competition between forager
groups as important factors for change, these papers of-
fered generalized frameworks for understanding subsis-
tence intensification. The major switch in approaches to
the European Mesolithic-Neolithic transition can be
seen in published works from the mid-1980s onwards
(e.g., De Atley and Finbow 1984, Bender 1985, Dennell
1985, Zvelebil 1986). Most important, ideas of the tran-
sition as highly variable and dependent on social context
returned, only this time with more rigorous definition
of the processes involved. Nevertheless, meta-narratives
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 663
of various forms of evolution continued to frame many
works. For example, Boguckis (1988) volume, which
concentrates on central and northern Europe, is ecolog-
ically oriented: human adaptation as the concatenation
of solutions to environmental problems will be the un-
derlying theme of this book (p. 5). However, he is also
interested in regional differences and offers a sophisti-
cated and complex understanding of the social and other
contexts of relationships between households and com-
munities. Bogucki criticizes the narrow obsession with
subsistence of Jarman et al. and their insistence on the
long-term as the only scale and focus. Like Gregg (1988)
and Zvelebil (1986), Bogucki demonstrates much more
concern with interrelationships between foragers and
farmers (whatever their origins as colonists or in-
digenes) in what can now be seen as part of the 1980s
postcolonial/postimperial reevaluation of this portion
of the past. Nevertheless, one could note that Boguckis
framing meta-narrative can be regarded as romantic
sensu White or heroic sensu Propp insofar as the process
of adaptation represents the progressive overcoming of
adverse conditions through evolutionarily conditioned
human cultural advances (p. 8). Bogucki displays a ten-
dency towards ecological functionalism but never na-
ively. Nevertheless, the ultimate cause of the spread of
agriculture by indigenous adoption on the North Euro-
pean Plain, for example, is seen to be climatic deterio-
ration. Thus Bogucki tentatively suggests (p. 219):
As the central European climate became more vari-
able after 3500 bc . . . the additional carbohydrate
source of domestic grain and the protein source of
domestic animals became more important in main-
taining the growing local hunter-gatherer popula-
tions. Some areas such as the west Baltic coast were
buffered against this variability at first by the mari-
time resources, but soon they too adopted
agriculture.
The most influential volume on the Mesolithic-Neo-
lithic transition in Europe in the past decade has been
Zvelebils (1986). The full titleHunters in Transition:
Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their
Transition to Farmingwas symptomatic of a changed
cultural and political context in which the simple im-
plicit identification of the reader and author with the
progressive farmers in a social evolutionary sense was
deliberately challenged, an atmosphere also seen in the
contemporaneous reevaluation of hunter-gatherers more
generally (e.g., Price and Brown 1985; see Bender and
Morris 1988). Drawing on frontier-zone models, Zvelebil
has since gone on to use a descriptive and abstract three-
stage availability model as a heuristic device (1996:
325) for examining the transition to farming in the cir-
cum-Baltic region in detail. Partly, of course, this is made
possible by the great increase in data and dating since
the time of Childe, but the article also shows much more
explicit use of theory and explanatory devices in terms
of both specified social processes and ethnographic anal-
664 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
ogies. As part of the central narrative, Zvelebil proposes
various social processes such as cooperative forager-
farmer exchange and then those with disruptive ef-
fects, including social competition for prestige items,
exploitation of hunter-gatherer lands by farmers, over-
exploitation of certain natural resources used for trade
and/or prestige, and hypergynythe loss of forager
women to farming communities (pp. 33738). These tend
to be generalized processes, though in many cases they
bear a clear relationship to possible reason-action expla-
nations. For example, the results of the postulated hy-
pergyny can be cast in terms of males individually or
collectively seeking to increase their standing with
women as potential partners by increasing their hunting
for exchange purposes or adopting farming to gain access
to socially valued commodities (p. 338). But clearly the
thrust of the paper is towards a narrative form of expla-
nation, invoking both contingency, historical specificity,
and the dialectic of structure and agency, determination
and intentionality referred to by Mahajan (1992:100).
The forager-farmer contacts, through which the tran-
sition to farming was mediated in many areas, acted as
a mechanism regulating the rate of transition, and may
be counted as one among the causes of the transition
(Zvelebil 1996:341). Simple or quantified causal expla-
nations are rejected, and room is offered for hermeneutic
input. For example, Hypergyny . . . is an ideologically
contingent practice (p. 338). This paper can be taken as
an exemplar of a series of regional narratives which Zve-
lebil sees as relevant to the larger plot of the transition
to farming in Europe. However, we can note that if the
event described is the transition to farming in the Baltic,
this event is several thousand years long. During the
1980s exploration of (often continent-wide) processes
was emphasized at the expense of that of events (e.g.,
Redding 1988). Plots tended to remain social evolution-
ary in character, with the progress downplayed or reev-
aluated, but the transition was not explicitly written as
tragedy. Nostalgia for a golden past of originally afflu-
ent hunter-gatherers and identification with Meso-
liths was often jokingly asserted or admitted but rarely
in print.
writing culture
The 1990s in Britain have also seen the publication of
works which are much more clearly influenced by the
linguistic turn and can be seen as part of what was
initially called the postprocessual critique.
Although pre- and post-faced by reflexive and theo-
retical sections, Hodders The Domestication of Europe
(1990) is, like Childes earlier work, largely a narrative
organized by geographical areas. Each area is given a
chronological treatment, but the book as a whole also
shows an overall sequence, since the chapter order
largely mimics the direction of the spread of farming
through time. Hodder is interested in how potentially
long-term conceptual structures may relate to practical
strategies and the material remains of archaeology. This
often binary structuralist analysis attempts to overcome
the criticisms of determinism and lack of agency. People
have needs, intentions, and desires which are fulfilled
on a pragmatic level, but the way in which these acts
are performed and the conditions that surround them
necessarily draw on earlier and contemporary practices,
understandings, and meanings and both reproduce and
transform them. Thus the spread and development of the
Neolithic may be read as the reception, reproduction,
elaboration, and transformation of binary or tripartite
structures or ideasdomus-agrios or domus-agrios-foris.
Although Hodder has been criticized for underempha-
sizing the role of agency (e.g., Last 1995), it is quite clear
that much of his depersonalized narrative could easily
be put in such terms. For the development of the Linear
Pottery complex, for example, he often describes changes
at a general levelvillage formation, the will to ag-
glomerate, the new emphasis on boundaries and en-
trances along linear graded space (Hodder 1990:129), but
elsewhere he refers explicitly to social actors elabo-
rating boundaries of the domestic unit in order to cre-
ate, compete for, and control prestigious social relations
within and between communities (p. 135).
Sometimes the mechanisms are unsatisfyingly
vagueIt is as if the inhabitants of Erteblle sites were
unable to adopt agriculture until transformations had
taken place within central European society which made
agriculture more compatible with Erteblle principles
(p. 182)but the typical postprocessualist concern with
power usually makes competition and dominance the
driving forces at the individual and the group level: I
assume that the discourse between the cultural and the
natural was used within social strategies to enhance the
domination of certain age, gender, descent, and spatial
groupings (p. 285). While the event of the narrative is
clearly the spread of the Neolithic understood in sym-
bolic terms, again we are faced with the recursive rela-
tionship between event(s), structures, and processes, and
each chapter can also be treated as a regional event or
process. The whole is set within a larger plot of culture-
nature elaboration and social competition from the Pa-
laeolithic onward and in that sense at least can still be
viewed as a progressive and romantic meta-narrative. Al-
though Hodder asserts tentatively that the particular
style, at least, of the origins and spread of the Neolithic
in South-West Asia and Europe is contingent and his-
torically specific, his wider plot would seem to have to
be understood either as encompassing the whole of hu-
manity or, alternatively, as a particular (Western) con-
temporary gloss (culture-nature).
By contrast, Thomas (1991, 1996) consciously rejects
any possible meta-narrative in the obvious sense of a
telos of history. Both his books are organized themati-
cally rather than chronologically: the first is arranged in
fairly traditional terms of subsistence, monuments, pot-
tery, etc., and the second (on which I concentrate here)
comprises a long theoretical part followed by three case
studies at differing spatial scalesnorthern Europe, Brit-
ain, and a British site. However, the case studies are
themselves arranged in chronological order from the
Mesolithic-Neolithic transition to the later Neolithic

and the early Bronze Age. Each contains overlapping de-
scription and subnarratives as a way of providing the
context for the themes, which can be characterized as
cultural bricolage, personified artefacts, and landscape,
respectively. If there can be said to be a plot beyond the
sequences of social and material change described and
interpreted in the book, it is found in a Heideggerian
notion of the historicality of being. It may be said to be
ironic insofar as the problems of multivocality and
representation of the past are foregrounded: the relevance
(if not truth) of Thomass account is firmly placed in the
(contingent) present context. His plot as generalization
says as much about how archaeologies are produced as
about how past lives were lived. Identity and meaning
are both relational constructions, which emerge through
the process of human Being-in-the-world (1996:30). Al-
most 100 pages of a 238-page text are explicitly philo-
sophical and theoretical, and the three case studies also
involve much focused theoretical discussion. Thomass
account of the spread of the Neolithic in northern Europe
involves the explicit rejection of a chronological and so-
cial evolutionary directionality in which the Neolithic
is superior to and more advanced than the Mesolithic
in favour of processes of cultural bricolage: The Mes-
olithic/Neolithic transition was not a one-way process.
. . . What seems more likely is that the experimental hy-
bridisations of cultural knowledge created in the en-
counters between farmers and foragers . . . had a trans-
formative impact on both Mesolithic and Neolithic
communities (p. 124). The Neolithic, insofar as it can
generally be characterized at all, was a set of material
forms which allowed communities with diverse eco-
nomic strategies to build a sustainable set of relation-
ships amongst themselves and with their landscape (p.
125). Although Thomass books do include subsidiary
narratives sensu stricto, such as the development of re-
gionalized pottery styles, chapters tend to be themati-
cally organized, and chronological differences are used
to contrast social strategies and understandings rather
than to extract generalizing processes. A variety of char-
acters, events, and processes are all presented at many
overlapping scales within each case study.
Finally, Tilleys (1996) An Ethnography of the Neo-
lithic, dealing with the late Mesolithic and early Neo-
lithic of southern Scandinavia, demonstrates some sim-
ilar concerns to those of Hodder and Thomas. Here the
characters are the earlier prehistoric societies of the cho-
sen study area, but the Neolithic is deliberately played
down as an event in favour of ethnographically informed
social prehistory. Like Hodders, the book is organized
in the form of a traditional archaeological narrative with
the sections in chronological order. Tilley is also equally
self-conscious about language, insistent upon specificity
or historical particularism, and scathing about tradi-
tional meta-narratives: There are no cross-cultural gen-
eralizations going beyond either the mundane or the triv-
ial. Similarly grand evolutionary theories positing stages
or general processes of world historical development
have proved to be blind alleys (p. 1). Inevitably, however,
Tilley does use cross-cultural generalizations, only
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 665
rather than drawing on ecological or functional compar-
isons he utilizes insights from ethnography, linguistics,
social theory, and philosophy (e.g., the importance of the
body as metaphor or metonym, the importance and sa-
cralization of landscape to non-Western societies, phe-
nomenologies of experience) as ways of homing in on
the practices evidenced in prehistoric Scandinavia. Sim-
ilarly, his eschewal of meta-narratives is (knowingly)
reintroduced with an acknowledgement (p. 68) of his debt
to marxism in a form of primitivism, which we can read
either as tragic nostalgia (the loss of an irretrievable past)
or romantic optimism (if we take his reconstruction as
also an ideal for the future):
I am politically old-fashioned enough even to want
to describe [late Mesolithic southern Scandinavia] as
a kind of Garden of Eden before the fall. These were
a series of communities in which ownership of land
and resources was common or collective, sharing
was generalized and no one is likely to have gone
hungry.
By contrast, after the formation of Early Neolithic prac-
tices and understandings through a kind of bricolage (cf.
Thomas 1996), Developing notions of group and private
property were, in the long term, contradictory and had
a pernicious influence in Neolithic societies leading to
ever more status competition between groups and the
development of social inequalities and exploitation
within and between them (p. 115). For Tilley, meta-
narrative understood as grand theory is better consid-
ered at the meta-levels of language and interpretation.
Yet he insists on the importance of working towards a
systematic general theory of the meanings of things
rather than (just) a deconstructionist retreat into a my-
opic particularism (p. 336), even if working at archae-
ology is primarily working with metaphors. Fresh met-
aphors will produce new and alternative pasts (p. 341).
For Tilley, very definite events/social processes fall into
a pattern which can be redescribed within a broadly
marxist meta-narrative.
beyond narrative analysis
In this brief digest of selected Anglo-American narratives
of the European Mesolithic-Neolithic transition I have
tried to suggest that, given the ambiguities inherent in
the terms, concentration on delineating what each au-
thor might mean by character, event, or process is helpful
but not the whole story. The broader contexts within
which these works are produced and those in which they
are read, reread, and quoted influence not only styles and
topics but also the meanings read into or out of or at-
tributed to them. Nor does an analysis predominantly
concerned with the form of the narratives per se rather
than their content necessarily help us make sense of the
shorter-term changes and trends within particular topics
and discourses. We might wish to say that until the 1980s
most of these texts were written within some sort of
romantic (progressive, social evolutionary) emplotment
666 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
and that satirical plots or at least partly ironic tropes,
understood as a concern with the impossibility of truth-
ful representation, have only become more apparent
among certain mainly British prehistorians in the 1990s.
For example, the process of adaptation necessarily rep-
resents the overcoming of adverse conditions, even if it
does not have to be couched in an overtly teleological
manner or understood as a heroic tale analysed via
Proppian motifs. The reevaluation of the status of
hunter-gatherers and hence the Mesolithic can be un-
derstood partly as a rejection of (simple) social evolution
and consequent moral evaluations (Fabian 1983, Plu-
ciennik 1998) and as the academic response to broader
political postcolonial understandings and desired pasts
(see Ammerman 1989, Zvelebil 1989; cf. Keeley 1992:
91). One notable result has been that much of the lit-
erature on the transition (and see also, e.g., Whittle 1996)
is now to do with the dynamics of culture contact in-
stead of exogenously driven culture change. Equally,
changes in the content, style, and emphasis of archae-
ological narratives are related to wider movements such
as the revival of romantic primitivism in ecological or
spiritual guises and the questioning of the certainties of
both meta-narratives and modernism (Kellner 1987,
Klein 1995). These shifts are in reaction to the 1960s and
1970s attempts to provide simplified, parsimonious, and,
if not monocausal, at least monoprocessual explanations
in an archaeology explicitly understood as a science. Al-
though much less hard-line, this strand of relatively con-
servative processual explanatory narratives continues to
dominate recent Anglo-American versions of the tran-
sition to farming in Europe and elsewhere (e.g., Cowan
and Watson 1992, Gebauer and Price 1992a, Price and
Gebauer 1995, Harris 1996a). These papers, though look-
ing at specific aspects or areas as (long-term) events, tend
to fall within a progressive meta-narrative of the tran-
sition viewed globally. Thus Gebauer and Price (1992b:
1) in their review and introduction call the transition
the most remarkable happening in our prehistory as a
species and a dramatic shift in the trajectory of cul-
tural evolution. Keeley (1992:92) adopts an unasham-
edly modernist standpoint to draw a parallel between
potentially violent relations between foragers and farm-
ers in prehistoric north-western Europe and recent North
America and to suggest that it is sometimes difficult
to remember that it was the better organized, unheroic,
yet relentless farmers who eventually remained. For
Harris too the transition from foraging to farming is the
most fateful change in the human career (1996b:ix). De-
spite changed nuances of language and much more de-
tailed data and models, the basic framework of most con-
tributors to recent volumes is still that of Childes
Neolithic Revolution. They have remained equally
untouched by recent concerns about language and
representation.
In some areas, however, developments in the philos-
ophy of language and the feminist critique in archaeology
and elsewhere (e.g., Conkey and Spector 1984, Haraway
1989, Gero and Conkey 1991) have promoted an increase
in self-consciousness about language and the loss of in-
nocence about writing. It is notable that Tilley (1996),
with his Epilogue, Thomas (1996), with his After-
word, and Hodder (1990), with his Beginning by End-
ing, avoid finishing their texts with anything so final,
positiv(ist), or totalizing as a conclusion. That may
suggest the power of agency (writing), the fluidity of in-
terpretation, and the possibility of reappraisal, but it may
also imply a tragic, overcautious, or pessimistic view of
the postmodern present. Such texts may be read as dem-
onstrating that all we can do is play around as bricoleurs
of materialswords and ideasundoubtedly in changed
and changing conditions and with different empirical and
theoretical resources but without the comfort of either
a secular or a spiritual vision of salvation in the future
any more than of truth in the past. For many, our jour-
neys have become circular or spiral in nature, our
thought rhizomic (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), and lin-
ear certainties no longer act as a measure of progress.
Other Ways of Telling
If we consider other possible functions of narratives and
texts, it is clear that prehistoric archaeologists have been
generally conservative in their ways of presenting pasts.
All the texts discussed above (and many more) tend to
have at least two things in common: the use of narrative
as the form of presentation and explanation as the goal.
Another important factor to consider is that of the au-
thorial or narrated viewpoint which has been the subject
of so much debate in ethnography because of the more
obviously politically charged relationship between the
author and the represented. Ankersmit (1983) among
others highlights the ways in which historical narratives
(and other texts) provide a viewpoint in the sense of an
intellectual, moral, and political place from which one
is invited to see the events or object concerned, as well
as constructing unique narrative substances. One re-
sult of this approach is that once we get beyond com-
paring narratives in terms of their explanations for
(supposedly identical) analytical constructs, it is clear
that very different narratives are not necessarily
contradictory.
This is in contradistinction to the typical narratives
of hard science, which are often expressed in a logi-
cally precise notation amenable to confirmation (or con-
tradiction) by replication of the logical steps or proce-
dures involved and which may be considered to occupy
one extreme of the scale of narrative types. At the other
end of the scale we might place fictional works, which
are explicitly imaginative (i.e., they do not claim to rep-
resent in any direct way aspects of the real world) and
which may also intentionally problematize modes and
the status of representation itself. However, archaeolog-
ical, historical, and ethnographic narratives typically
comprise a complex mixture of descriptions, arguments,
tropes, and explanations which often defy overall cate-
gorization sensu White except at the broadest or most
explicit level, at which it may be useful to employ the
terms emplotment and ideology. Even if all texts seek

to persuade, not all are or should be amenable only to
characterization or evaluation in terms of causal expla-
nation of historical process. There are (and were) mul-
tiple ways of interpreting and constructing pasts and
presents. If Ankersmits idea of situated perspectives
(and similarly much feminist epistemology [e.g., Hara-
way 1988]) is accepted, then different viewpoints, goals,
and meanings can be welcomed as more in sympathy
with the diversity and richness of the past. This should
equally be reflected in a variety of styles, approaches,
and aims expressed through experimentation with the
forms and functions of archaeological texts and images.
What is noticeable in all the archaeologies so far dis-
cussed is that they present not only a characteristic nar-
rative chronological position and tensethat of hind-
sight offered as a sequential story of, rather than in, the
pastbut also a markedly external or birds-eye view.
The story is typically told in the third-person passive,
giving an often spurious sense of objective description,
and less rarely (though increasingly) in the (authorial)
first person, which at least emphasizes the intervention,
constructed interpretation, and manipulation of the ma-
terial by the writer. There is usually little sense of ac-
tions, events, or history considered from the actors point
of view (but see Spector 1991, 1993; Schrire 1995). If there
is a rhetoric of empathy, it is with the intellectual (and
less often emotional) journey and experience of the au-
thor rather than of any past Others, who are represented
in a distanced manner. This is just as true of most texts,
which even when attempting to engender the past or
otherwise put invisible people back into history (e.g.,
Gero and Conkey 1991, Moore and Scott 1997) still do
so within a single voice and story-line. In this context
it is worth noting Flannerys (1976, 1982) pioneering at-
tempts to present dialogues between archaeologists. Yet
multivoiced or multiple narratives of the past are rarely
explored, and even multiauthored or more reflexive and
readerly texts seldom present more than an illusion of
dialogue, either with a conflated aggregate of views or
with the single author generally interrogating himself
about or commenting self-consciously upon his text
(Bapty 1990; Hodder 1990: chaps. 1, 10; 1992:15559; Til-
ley 1991:17277; Shanks 1995a; cf. Olsen 1998:110). Al-
though presenting more voices, a recent paper which in-
cludes the phrase alternative narratives in its title
(Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 1997) proves to be mainly
interested in self-referential narratives by and about ar-
chaeologists working on site rather than exploring ways
of constructing or listening to others in the past or the
present. However, Benders (1998) volume on Stonehenge
includes many verbatim dialogues with various people
with a present interest in the site, and archaeologists are
also beginning to explore the possibilities of hypertext
as a medium for disrupting methods, the order of reading,
and the authority of writing and perhaps reaching and
involving unexpected audiences as participants (Hodder
1997).
Some may worry that these comments are preparing
the way for a further blurring of the line between fact
and fiction. Yet if we accept that no language can ade-
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 667
quately and fully represent the world or the past, ar-
chaeologists (who are emotionally and experientially as
well as intellectually involved with the worlds mate-
riality) should at least be more open to exploring alter-
native forms of (re)presentation (cf. Shanks 1992:18093;
1995b). A recent book dealing with some of these issues
in the context of historical colonial culture contact is
Schrires (1995) Digging through Darkness. Through its
mixture of biography, archaeological and historical evi-
dence, discussion of an archaeologists relationship with
her site, and constructed autobiographies, Schrires
rigorous yet imaginative, sensitive, and evocative book
raises questions of narrative form, the history-fiction re-
lationship, the role of empathy, and, implicitly, the
ethics and politics of representation in both constructing
and speaking for necessarily silent past Others. Thus
texts can also aim at presenting different understandings
of the past, for example, by offering what Mahajan (1992:
92) and Louch (1967) call a proxy experiencethe ev-
ocation of possible orientations, understandings, and
emotions. In this context, it is also worth comparing
Schrires work with that of a novelist such as Atwood
(1996). Alias Grace is a culturally and historically sen-
sitive imaginative reconstruction of 19th-century char-
acters in the form of a novel but based on detailed schol-
arship and dealing with intentions and emotions as well
as social structures of class, gender, and institutional
power. Using a broader range of sources, Schrire attempts
in various ways (with different emphases and addressed
to different audiences) to give voice to those who often
left little more than fragmentary material culture behind
them. Yet the two texts surely share the aim, among
others, of attempting to evoke portions of the past from
particular perspectives.
Narratives, then, may not only have functions other
than explanation, persuasion, or simple description but
also attempt to fulfil them by different means. One can
conceive of anti-narratives whose storytelling purpose
is precisely not only to deny any overall meaning or plot
(as telos or process) but to display fragmentation, dis-
continuities, partial and temporary understandings, and
the lack of fixed meanings while equally claiming to
mimic or evoke the nature of the past world as experi-
enced. There are alternative ways, such as multistranded
narratives and non-consensual collective pieces, of pre-
senting and subverting the dominance and authority of
single-authored and single-voiced texts, even if archae-
ologists can never achieve any genuine dialogue with
their narrative subjects. Beyond sequential narratives, we
can also conceive of non-linear forms and presentations
of experience, understanding, and even reading, such
as visual perceptions, even though these take place in
time (Baxendall 1988); memory, which may include the
conflation of times; dreams, with distorted and non-
time; and simultaneous multisensory experiences from
film to artistic installations. In contrast to ethnogra-
phers, archaeologists rarely directly explore other genres
and media such as poetry, performance, fiction, and film
as ways of presenting archaeologies and pasts. Com-
mentary upon archaeological fiction and film has often
668 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
been critique from inside the academic citadel (e.g.,
Evans 1993, Piccini 1996) rather than, say, collaborative
projects. Many academic archaeologists are still dismis-
sive of rather than critically engaged with or interested
in producing material in the heritage or cultural re-
source management context, though it is often in this
context that innovative attempts at multiple narratives
have been produced and discussed (e.g., McDavid and
Babson 1997, Kamp 1998;6 see also Leone et al. 1995).
Unlike many ethnographers, historians, and philoso-
phers of history, I have initially been concerned not with
the problem of representationthe possible relation-
ships of texts to either Others, the past, lived experience,
or truthbut with whether literary and narrative anal-
ysis allows us to think about types of archaeologies and
archaeological texts in a fruitful and meaningful way.
Narratives have been and are the dominant form in
which the past is presented, yet for historical philosoph-
ical reasons there has been a tendency to analyse them
only insofar as they can be treated as a form of expla-
nation or knowledge analogous to that science. Archae-
ologists, partly because of the mode of production of ar-
chaeological knowledge and ordering and partly because
of dominant and persistent structures of Western
thought such as the separation of subject and object and
the linearity of time, have tended not only to work
within limited understandings of the possibilities of nar-
ratives but also rarely to step outside the single-voiced,
third-person narrative form itself. To understand both
the nature of and changes in narratives produced by ar-
chaeologists, I have suggested that formal analyses of the
kinds proposed by Hayden White or Vladimir Propp may
be illuminating but require broader contextualization
and an attention not only to form but also to style, aim,
and content. I suggest that it is worthwhile not only to
reflect on our textual output to date but also to consider
equally valuable but underexplored other ways of telling.
Comments
felipe criado boado
Laboratory of Archaeology and Cultural Forms,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
(phcriado@usc.es). 26 iii 99
Commenting on an article like this is a risky business,
particularly when the commentator starts by recognizing
the interest of the subject and its effectiveness in dealing
with it. Applying the methodology and suggestions con-
tained in the article, its author (the first author) or any
other informed reader (certainly another author) could
discover behind the critical commentary any possible
intention of the second author. I shall start by trying
6. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing these works
to my attention.
out a type of radical writing and then return to a more
conventional narrative style.
Other ways of narrating archaeology: But narrating
what? Other ways to talk about the Others who do not
talk? In front of the author is the text. Behind the text
is the Other. But where is this Other presented? The
Other is prehistoric. The author is modern. The author
is our social I. The author is perhaps the best reincar-
nation of the modern subject. Narrative is the way in
which the author comes to exist. Criticism of the nar-
rative means the death of the author, the reinterpretation
of the text, and the recovery of the original deconstruc-
tive project. The death of the author means the re-
emergence of the Other.
This experiment has two objectives: responding to Plu-
cienniks call to try out new narratives in archaeology
and, by doing so, questioning some of his proposals. Any
informed reader can construct a meaning from the pre-
ceding paragraph despite its conciseness and fragmen-
tation; it has an argumentative linearity despite lacking
rhetorical linearity. This illustrates something which
should not be forgotten: the antinarratives to which Plu-
ciennik refers have always been constructed by the
reader, a free agent. There is no need for the intentional
intervention of the author. Indeed, the suspicion may
arise that the authors pretension to producing a narra-
tive and its antinarrative simultaneously may be the last
resort of the modern intention of defending the absolute
hegemony of the figure of the author.
Plucienniks text demonstrates the extent to which
the independence of a text and its author are chimeras
reproduced, rather than simply being produced, through
the modern model of the author. The author and his/her
text are part of a far broader discourse. This hypothesis,
which is not new, could be verified through the meth-
odologies of rhetorical and formal analysis that Plucien-
nik properly introduces into archaeology. If an objection
could be raised here it would be regarding the need to
conduct an analysis of the rhetorical figures through
which the meaning of the text is created with a certain
autonomy with regard to the authors intention. How-
ever, the author is not to be blamed for having this need;
instead it demonstrates the urgency of establishing a
multiauthor line of investigation of this subject: the or-
der of words, the character and position of adjectives, the
substantivization of adjectival things or expressions, the
verbalization of nouns, etc. These are all rhetorical
mechanisms for imposing a particular narrative style
that is often not intentional but instead reflects the un-
conscious mind of the author. As a teacher I have become
used to recognizing the personalities of students in the
rhetorical procedures that they use.
From this point onward I shall go a little farther than
the text. For me, any analysis of the rhetoric of archae-
ology and any experiment with other ways of narrating
have to be deconstructive. They must deconstruct the
figure of the author and through it the reification of the
modern model of subjectivity which, by privileging the
individuation of the author, has largely inhibited the fig-
ure of the reader and still inhibits the figure of the Other.

Critical reflection about language and discourse is re-
quired to deconstruct the model of subjectivity that is
produced, and spoken, through them. Lamentably, the
development of narrativism in the 1980s and of rhetor-
ical directions in the human sciences has contributed to
the recovery of the hegemony of the author, which rep-
licates individualism and is coherent with the current
system of power. (In these proposals I am indebted to
Bermejos criticism of Hayden White and rhetorical
history.)
Prehistoric archaeology is not anthropology (or history
or sociology), as it has no linguistic subjects available.
While the existence of such subjects is what makes his-
torical archaeology and ethnoarchaeology particularly
profitable, the problem of prehistoric archaeology is
making sense of a silent society and its individuals from
mute material objects. This silence biases the interpre-
tive triangle (archaeology and its actual context 1 the
archaeological record 1 the original context) toward the
first vertex and leads to an increase in the interpreters
self-meaning and a decrease in the original meaning,
which is often considered impossible to find (as is the
case with many post-processual archaeologists). These
traps of subjectivity are built with narrative resources.
Archaeological narrative (re)presents subjectivity. Mak-
ing it visible should be the ultimate objective of narrative
analysis and other ways of telling archaeology.
alessandra manfredini
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Archeologiche e
Antropologiche dellAntichita`, Universita` degli Studi
La Sapienza, Citta` Universitaria, Rome, Italy.
10 v 99
The interest of this work consists in the originality of
its themehow Anglo-American and North European
archaeologists present the results of their research: in
recent decades our approach to archaeological data and
consequently to the way in which they are presented has
profoundly changed without our having stopped to re-
flect on the analysis of textson the influence of formal
structure on the argument. This theme is developed
through a combination of logical passages and references
to various phases of the history of research, and this
makes it difficult to choose what to focus on in this
comment.
The narrative form is considered as a sequential story,
provided with plot, in close correlation with processes
and changes and especially with concepts of causality,
comprehension, and explanation. In this context consid-
erable attention is given to Whites analysis of narrative,
although his essentially formal interpretation is rightly
criticized.
Particularly interesting is the singling-out of the
meta-narrative, which according to Pluciennik is an
intellectual framework within which narratives sensu
stricto are composed and that provides one sort of co-
herence or emplotment. The examples given perhaps
purposely indicate the vagueness of this category, in-
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 669
cluding social evolution, evolutionary theory, and
marxism, which have different weight and significance
in their explanatory and methodological valences.
Even emplotment or plot, considered a compo-
nent of narrative, is sometimes equated with meta-nar-
rative, sometimes considered as a process, and some-
times viewed as a unifying aesthetic element; it is
defined mainly in terms of its function, which is to com-
bine separate events in an understandable form. In my
opinion this very indefinite category oscillates between
a formal value (as a homogeneous way of narrating,
partly as in White) and a substantive one (as a process,
the opposite of an event), serving as a universal key for
reading and comprehension.
Pluciennik speaks of the potential overlap of narrative
object, subject, event, process, and plot, which may rep-
resent different times and levels, some objective, some
more significantly related to the authors intervention.
He arrives at a more complete definition of narrative
than Whites through the identification of its functions
(logic, suasion, explication, and description) and config-
urations (not only plots but ways of producing those
plots).
One of the most important points of the discussion
concerns the complicated question of the historical
split between the humanities and the sciences and its
reflection in language and in narrative. Attempts to raise
historical narrative to the level of scientific explanation
lead Pluciennik to list the characteristics of history that
prevent this. However, imprecision, in the sense of non-
quantifiability, is not always characteristic of archaeo-
logical situations; complexity characterizes both cul-
tural processes and situations and scientific laws and
experiments, as the applicability to both of models as
simplified representations of reality implies. With regard
to its non-experimental nature, the repetition of an ex-
perimentas Pluciennik observesis impossible in
some natural sciences, such as astronomy or geology, and
I would add that it is possible in archaeology, for ex-
ample, in the reconstruction of a chane operatoire. Fur-
ther, in stressing the minimal difference between the two
narratives it is important to point not only to the nar-
ratability of science but to the presence of logical pro-
cesses even in the humanities.
Turning to Plucienniks example, it is true that a
chemical formula can be considered a form of narrative,
a process that is readable from different points of view,
but it is also true that even scientific interpretations
change over time as natural-objective-immutable pro-
cesses are related to the progressive history of discov-
eries. From this viewpoint, the history of scientific dis-
coveries can perhaps be considered a kind of narrative
in that it is in history that science finds its cultural di-
mension. I therefore agree with Pluciennik when he
speaks of plot as a representation of coherence which is
applicable to both scientific and historic explanations
and when he considers the possibility of viewing his-
torical events as referable to causal processes just as in
scientific explanations.
In my opinion not only can archaeological approaches
670 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
be based on lawlike premises or make use of biological
categories such as evolution or adaptability but an in-
terdisciplinary approach to archaeological issues, even
specific ones, can yield an explanatory framework in
which the two languagesthe scientific and the histor-
icalcomplement and merge with each other (for ex-
ample, as an anthropological and genetic study of the
individuals of a cemetery can provide information about
society, economy, and symbols, which are usually the
object and the content of historical research properly
speaking).
The last part of the article deals with different ap-
proaches to the transition to agriculture, from Childes
Neolithic revolution through the biological models of
Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza and Higgs and Jarman to
Benders Marxist structuralism, Zvelebils ecological
functionalism, Hodders symbolism (Romantic meta-
narrative), and Tilleys skepticism about the possibility
of generalizing or creating meta-narratives. From an
initial phase in which the transition was seen in Ro-
mantic terms as progress and social evolution, we have
arrived at a more pessimistic and skeptical one: the data
are partial and fragmentary, our knowledge is circular.
The conclusion is more optimistic: the pursuit of a
new mode of expression and the revision of a language
that is now codified and therefore inadequate can lead
to a broader approach, a more diversified and articulated
reading of archaeological data. Still open are questions
of the connection between plot and causal explanation,
the relationship of content, plot, and the ideological con-
figuration of the author, and the readers interpretation,
all of which are nodal points in the work under
consideration.1
james l. peacock
Department of Anthropology, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3115, U.S.A.
(Peacock@unc.edu). 15 iii 99
Pluciennik contributes usefully to reflection about the
kinds of narrative conventions that constitute archae-
ology. One could push farther yet, as Northrop Frye did
in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957, mentioned but not
cited by Pluciennik), to postulate which patterns of
thought are generated by which narrative form. An il-
lustration of this, with specific reference to archaeolog-
ical, physical anthropological, and ethnological modes of
narrative, was developed in The Anthropological Lens
(Peacock 1986). Here an evolutionary/historical mode of
narrative associated with a positivistic mode of expla-
nation and thought was contrasted with an interpretive
form of narration and analysis. (That such points are
ignored, perhaps they are embedded in a textbook di-
rected to students rather than colleagues, is itself an ex-
ample of the relation between knowledge and form of
narration.) In any event, Plucienniks analysis and call
for critical reflection on modes of narration in archae-
1. Translated by Carla Bossola.
ology are well taken and ideally will, as he suggests, lead
not to the excesses of ethnography and the humanistic
fields (e.g., paralysis of empirical research, dismissal of
previous research, and excessive emphasis on critical re-
flection about forms of presentation) but to creative de-
velopment of alternative forms.
e l i s a b e t h ru d e b e c k
Institute of Archaeology, Lund University, Sandgatan
1, SE-223 50 Lund, Sweden. 15 iii 99
Pluciennik discusses many aspects of the writing and
reading of archaeological texts that are worthy of more
in-depth debate. In this brief comment I want to focus
on a few issues that I feel could be emphasized more and
present some variant interpretations concerning the
meta-narrative of the transition to farming.
Narratives and all other forms of telling about the past
presuppose an image of the present. Images of the present
are the point of departure for images of the past, while
at the same time the past defines the present (Friedman
1989:12021). Irrespective of the particular way in which
the past is presentedas a linear grand narrative or as
nonlinear, multivocal and impressionistic fragmentsif
we are to accept the presentation it has to be conceivable
as a past. In archaeological narratives the present may
be not only the actual present but also the archaeological
period(s) subsequent to the one(s) discussed. For example,
since the Bronze Age in Europe is generally understood
as a time of social competition and hierarchization, the
Late Neolithic must be described as a viable predecessor.
This teleology, the narrative of prehistory, mediates an
image of prehistory as a credible past and an image of
the present as the result of this particular past. It tends
to lock our minds and shut our eyes to other ways of
thinking and seeing. However, it also gives us narratives
to confront and contest, frames to bend and break. It
gives us something to oppose, and thereby we ought to
confront images of the present as well. However, images
of the present are rarely made an issue in archaeology.
The present is often accepted a priori. I would like to
see more debate among archaeologists about how differ-
ent images of the present relate to different images of
the past and more self-critical reflection concerning our
tendency to project images of the present onto the past.
Suggestions as how to avoid the reproduction of the tel-
eology of prehistory in teaching would also be welcome.
I see some problems with avoiding narrative ways of
telling and would argue that it is preferable to be given
a narrative to opposethat is, particular characters,
events, plots, and explanations rather than merely a
chronicle or a story (sensu White) of dates, strata, and
artefacts. The ambition to present not a linear narrative
of the past but a past open to contested and multivocal
interpretations may lead archaeologists to refrain from
interpretation and instead to present data allegedly open
for all to read as they choose, forgetting that data are
theory-dependent. Moreover, to present sites, dates, ar-
tefacts, and previous interpretations without explicit

ideas of relevant contexts and relations would turn ar-
chaeologists into mere compilers of remains and repro-
ducers of implicit assumptions. Pluciennik emphasizes
that, although having some formal components, narra-
tives are not fixed and characters, events, plots and ar-
guments, and the scale of analysis may be constantly
redefined and reinterpreted. Hence, the narrative form is
far from exhausted. We must not refrain from interpre-
tation and narration on the pretext of not having exclu-
sive access to the past or merely because we choose not
to try to explain. I agree with Pluciennik that we should
explore more profoundly the possibilities of narrative
ways of telling. We should take responsibility for the
narratives that we present and be able to argue them
openly, fully aware that we have images of the past and
the present that may be contested and criticized.
Finally, I want to argue against some of Plucienniks
interpretations of texts dealing with the transition to
farming. As I see it, Hodders (1990) Domestication of
Europe is a tragic meta-narrative (sensu White) and not
a progressive and romantic meta-narrative. According
to Hodder, the process of domestication was about the
taming of the wild, about power, about discipline and
control of species, things, and spatial and human rela-
tions. People were trapped and ensnared, both prac- help them) to look at the kinds of tropes we use. I suspect
tically and symbolically, by the arrangements of delayed
return and the increasing dependencies of agricultural
labour. Furthermore, I would argue that most narratives
of agricultural origins during the second part of this cen-
tury have been presented as tragedies, the issue being
not whether human beings were subjected to forces ex-
ternal to themselves (the theme of tragedy) but rather
whether these forces emerged from nature or society.
According to my interpretation, Darwinian-selectionist
explanations and sociocultural understandings of the or-
igins of agriculture have more in common than is usually
acknowledged. The deconstruction of social evolution-
ary ways of apprehending human prehistory has tended
to obscure an equally pervasive narrative, that of agri-
culture and of culture as the fall of man (Rudebeck 1999).
john edward terrell
New Guinea Research Program, The Field Museum,
Chicago, Ill. 60605, U.S.A. (terrell@fmnh.org). 9 iii 99
Some anthropologists today write as if they were creating
historiography out of whole cloth (Geertz 1995); some
archaeologists avoid the word history like the
plagueperhaps because of its guilt-by-association with
the word culture in the phrase culture history. Plu- many ways of telling into claims that we judge to be
ciennik clearly knows and respects what historians and
others outside archaeology are writing about history.
Throughout most of this fine article he takes the stance
of an observer of the academic scene. It is not always
clear what he wants us to do and why. While I think he
is right that narrative analyses of archaeological texts do
not always help us make sense of the shorter-term
changes and trends within archaeology, it is not obvious
until the end of his narrative what he sees as the payoffs
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 671
of promoting an increase in self-consciousness about
language and the loss of innocence about writing. The
answer he gives sounds moral rather than utilitarian. If
we accept that language cannot adequately and fully
represent the world or the past, then we should at
least be more open to exploring alternative forms of
(re)presentation.
I agree, but I think (and Ill bet he does, too) that there
is more to be gained. Discourse analysis, for example, is
a great way to teach students how to look carefully at
what they and others write (Terrell 1996). Furthermore,
most archaeological narratives are complex intellectual
models. It is frequently said that a characteristic of sci-
entific theories is that such presentations of ideas can
be formalized. Even when they are expressed in ordinary
language, good theories are ones that can be made more
precise by stripping away the words used to reveal their
underlying logic. Narrative analysis, as Pluciennik
points out, is one way to accomplish this difficult task
of rigorous formalization.
There may be another payoff, too. I am often shocked
by what some biologists and geneticists write about hu-
man diversity and prehistory. How can people obviously
so bright get things so awfully wrong? It helps (and would
that anthropologists are likely to favor the trope of the
encounter (e.g., Obeyesekere 1992, Pomponio 1992).
Archaeologists sometimes also use this trope to establish
the authority of what they have to say. But archae-
ologists may be more inclined to use the one-sided var-
iant of this trope, that of discovery.
Now, I suggest that scientists working outside of ar-
chaeology and anthropology may get what we write
wrong (I cannot possibly support this claim here) because
they have a different trope in mind, the trope of the
crucial element. Instead of paying attention to all the
uncertainties and complexities of anthropological and
archaeological scholarship that we so love to argue
about, outsiders to our fields may not see that we do
not always think the way they do. Not all of us, at any
rate, use what the physicist John R. Platt (1964) called
strong inference (the simple and old-fashioned method
of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon).
We do not routinely reduce all our issues to neat al-
ternative hypotheses that can be answered by simple
the solution must be either this or that experiments.
I suspect that taking the trope of the crucial experiment
as a universal characteristic of all good thinking leads
some outside anthropology and archaeology to turn our
astonishingly simple-minded arguments assuming that
only two alternatives are necessary (i.e., crucial) and suf-
ficient (i.e., the answer must be either one or the other)
and can be fully (and adequately) specified. The kinds of
narrative analysis favored instead by Pluciennik may not
help people who think like this to understand what we
are saying, but it is not just we who need to become
more self-conscious about language and our innocence
about writing.
672 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
sebastiano tusa
Via Pietro Bonanno 61, 90412 Palermo, Italy. 26 iv 99
If we wanted to find the roots of this essay and, espe-
cially, of its most stimulating aspects, we would go back
to the 80s, when, in prehistory in particular, there was
an increasing rejection of anything too scientific, in the
sense of excessive reliance on the hypothetical-deductive
approach based on socioeconomic facts and anthropol-
ogy. In reality what was happening in those years was
not new for the discipline; archaeology being a border
science, it has always had a tendency towards an extreme
scientific approach as opposed to the extreme baroque
philosophizing of a certain mannerist classicism. None-
theless, the subject of this essay is the reproposal of a
less technical and more verbal approach.
The proposal to improve archaeologys narrative is
new. This is the first time anyone has addressed the prob-
lem so deeply, with so many valid historical, philosoph-
ical, and epistemological facts. A vigorous debate has
developed on the necessity of popularizing archaeology
and, consequently, on the best use of language and nar-
rative logic. Even in a country like Italy, traditionally so
conservative in this field of study, there is a need to
confront and change the format of archaeological
publications, both popular and specialized. In this light,
it is also necessary to confront the relationship with
other concepts such as causality, understanding, and ex-
planation and the relationship between narrative and sci-
entific data.
This becomes the more important when we consider
the urgent and difficult problems of preservation of cul-
tural resources. The broadening of archaeologys narra-
tive role and the paradigmatic amplification of certain
broad themes can contribute directly to the development
of more effective ways of safeguarding our heritage.
Archaeological narrative must be more than just a se-
quential and selective description of possible events; the
effectiveness of the narrative depends on its consistency,
its ability to put all the pieces together and arrive at a
story that is more than just the sum of its parts. We often
lose sight of the fact that the principal elements of nar-
rative are characters and events. Archaeological narrative
is in danger of losing sight of the phenomenal reality of
events, of getting lost in theoretical argumentation com-
pletely unrelated to the real context.
The crisis of representation has indeed stimulated in-
terest in narrative, but, while excessive philologism has
been replaced by an enriched archaeological narrative,
the tendency toward analytical approaches and the wide-
spread use of multiple media have generated a great
many overspecialized texts. These two schools, narrative
and specialist, seem today to be at risk of taking opposite
directions leading to opposite conclusions. Pluciennik
addresses this problem by discussing the relationship be-
tween science and fiction, paraphrasing some great the-
orists of narrative starting with White and then wan-
dering through the meandering formalist analysis of
Propp on the way to Husserls phenomenology. Then,
becoming more specific, he discusses the types of nar-
rative in prehistoric archaeology, taking as examples sev-
eral cases dealing with the Mesolithic and the Meso-
lithic/Neolithic transition.
The events of archaeological narrative in the case of
the origin of agriculture have often been elements
such as the presence or absence of a single fragmenta
bone of a domestic animal, a grain of cereal, or an ar-
chaeological fact on a larger spatial-temporal scale
such as the appearance of a new way of life. Very seldom
do we find examples of narrative such as Zvelebils,
which give us a sense of ongoing processes. Archaeolog-
ical narrative often employs a typical narrative logic,
chronological and sequential, in the third person, with
little action.
Far be it from me to offer solutions to this problem,
but I think that here, as in many other phases of the
development of archaeology, a comparison with anthro-
pology and ethnography might be helpful. In these fields
narrative has dramatically improved, overcoming sci-
entific sterility and reaching the level of poetry.
Alas, even as we speak, all the arguments of this bril-
liant essay are in danger of being relegated to historical
memory by the inevitable standardization that results
from the use of hypertexts and other electronic me-
diabut we can still have hope for the future.1
Reply
mark pluciennik
Lampeter, Wales, U.K. 22 v 99
I am grateful to all those who have responded to the
article with generally supportive and illuminating com-
ments about the nature of narrative in archaeology and
the implications of such narrative analysis. Perhaps the
logical point at which to start is with the philosophical
issues raised by Criado Boado, who questions the onto-
logical status of texts and their contents, as well as seek-
ing (if I have understood him correctly) to problematize
the positionality and constructedness of the writing sub-
ject. He argues that readers already supply antinarra-
tives to any given text and therefore the subversiveness
of reading acts against any notion of a given meaning or
the retention of authorial control. In this context, he
suggests, self-conscious theorizing about the problems
of narratives and authorial intention may in fact be a
way of defending the absolute hegemony of the author.
I am in considerable sympathy with this view, whose
broader implications were well spelled out by Mascia-
Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen (1989) when they argued that
the postmodern idea of the death of the author was
adopted by many of those in academic power (often male,
white) just at the time when many who had been denied
an authoritative voice (women, minorities) were starting
to find oneor, rather, were demanding to be able to use
1. Translated by Geri Hoff.

it. This is one powerful argument against treating texts
only as free-floating chains of signifiers and ignoring both
the agency and the conditions of production of texts in
favour of either formal content analysis or the commen-
tators own flights of fantasy. Both old-fashioned criti-
cism which claimed that the identity of the author per
se was not important and some postmodern work which
dissolves the author into intertextuality and discourse
analysis may end up being equally conservative (cf. Eag-
leton 1999). Who is able to write, publish, and read is
partly dependent on individual circumstances; the death
of the author is clearly somewhat exaggerated when the
authors individual identity (in terms of gender, status,
personal contacts, institution, and access to word-pro-
cessing or computer facilities, for example) may influ-
ence or determine access to different media of publica-
tion. I am in agreement with Criado Boado, then, that
authors and their texts are parts of (and structured by)
far broader discourses than their individual intentions
and, I would add, also by material conditions and not
just verbal traditions of rhetoric and other texts. What-
ever it may have added, the interest in narrativism in
the human sciences, as he argues, may also have served
to re-create a particular view of the subjectivity of the
author and authorial power.
One of the implications of this is emphasized by both
Rudebeck and Criado Boado: the need to investigate the
importance of the present for conditioning or framing
narratives of the past. Criado Boado also suggests that
prehistoric archaeology, in contrast to historical and con-
temporary studies of society, is particularly prone to
writing the present into the past (including contempo-
rary notions of subjectivity and authorship). In such sit-
uations he proposes that the writers narrative may be
disrupted by dialogue with, or subsequent rebuttal by,
the characters of any narrative or through the encounter
with textual evidence deriving from or directly about
those characters. I am in sympathy with what I see as
the point of his discussion (how can prehistoric archae-
ologists somehow attempt to give voice to the Other?),
though of course readings, whether of material cul-
ture, the archaeological record more generally, or texts
from different cultures, are all prone to the imposition
of present-day concerns and academic or other fashions.
However, it is worth noting that even in ethnography
the lengthy agonizing over these issues and the crisis
of representation has so far tended to lead to (single)
authors exploring their morally and politically uncom-
fortable position of authorial power. I have yet to see an
ethnography in which the written-about are given equal
textual space with their ethnographer or even a right to
reply. The myriad factors which constitute the field of
study in the first place inevitably condition perceptions
of others, as well as the possible narratives which are
the outcome (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, Pluciennik and
Drew n.d.). I agree with Criado Boado and Rudebeck that
making explicit the constructedness of texts is an im-
portant part of narrative analysis; so is consideration of
the debt that texts (and their authors) owe to contingent
conditions and enabling structures. I am not calling for
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 673
the avoidance of narrative ways of telling or a return to
chronicles or stories (sensu White) as Rudebeck seems
to suggest at one point; rather, I claim that archaeology
has been both conservative in its representations of the
past (and the archaeological present) and overly narrow
in its self-analysis. Greater awareness in general and a
self-conscious experimentation in both narrative and
non-narrative forms may have a part to play here.
The importance of discourse analysis, along with the
question of style and medium, is raised by several com-
mentators (Rudebeck, Terrell, Tusa). For reasons of space,
I intentionally gave little attention to this aspect of tex-
tual critique, which has been more widely evidenced in
archaeology than narrative analysis. Some of the pub-
lished work in this genre (Tilley 1989; 1993a; 1999:
83101; Thomas 1993) relies heavily on the quantitative
analysis of the occurrence of key words, with a conse-
quent failure to see the (contextual) wood for the (sig-
nifiers of) trees. The most influential aspect of discourse
analysis, in my experience, has been the critique of sexist
language, which has radically changed the content of
much archaeological writing and had wide ramifications.
In that instance, the criticism of certain androcentric
assumptions expressed through the choice of language
was of course part of a much wider intellectual, social,
and political movement, which again confirms that anal-
ysis of language cannot be the whole answer to questions
about the reasons for the forms and styles of archaeo-
logical texts. We should also remember the importance
as contributors to narrative and other understandings of
visual representations, which may in some ways be even
more deeply embedded and difficult to deconstruct (Con-
key 1995, Hurcombe 1997, Molyneaux 1997).
Tusa broadens the whole question to consider the im-
plications of the increasing split between specialist and
popular narratives within archaeology. One may cer-
tainly agree that the accessibility of texts and consequent
public understandings of (pre)history gained through ar-
chaeology directly influence the importance placed by
others (such as politicians) on cultural heritage and
hence the possibility of financing, conserving, protect-
ing, and promoting archaeology (cf. Gero and Root 1990).
He also raises the important point of the medium of
publication, arguing that the use of hypertext, for ex-
ample, is leading to standardization. I would be inter-
ested to hear more from Tusa on this issue. Others have
argued that the increasingly cheap forms of electronic
publication and the exponential increase in numbers of
people connected to the Internet can be seen as a de-
mocratization of both information and the ability to pub-
lish. Of course, this particular form of globalization is
also highly unequal in terms of who has access and who
does not, and it is clear that in academic circles at least
the process of peer review will continue to maintain
standards (or, depending on ones political viewpoint, re-
produce existing power structures and exclude others).
In terms of journals, as with the earlier electronic type-
setting revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, the role of the
distributors/publishers is probably more crucial here,
with the inflated distribution costs of many scientific
674 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
and on-line journals being more prohibitive than those
of the technological hardware. Nonetheless, some see
the flexibility of electronic databases and the ability of
many others to use and read this electronic information
in different ways as generally beneficial and empowering
(e.g., Hodder 1999). The World Wide Web and hypertext
may be seen as ways of enabling readers to construct
their own versions of archaeological narratives to a cer-
tain extent, at least by disrupting linear readings. How-
ever, I share Rudebecks reservations and her fear that
the ease of making archaeological material available on
the Web in an apparently pure empirical form may
encourage laziness in archaeologists through failure to
engage with and make explicit the process of interpre-
tation. Under a banner of multivocality and democracy,
it is thus potentially also a way of avoiding responsibility
for specific narratives, which may indeed be attractive
in certain political and cultural contexts where pasts and
presents are highly contested.
Finally, I wish to comment on issues of tropes and
forms (Manfredini, Peacock, Rudebeck, Terrell). Rude-
becks comments on the role of preceding and succeeding
archaeological periods and their characterizations are im-
portant. The need to relate these understandings to nar-
rative structures tends to demand, for example, conti-
nuity of development and makes it much more difficult
to deal with radical discontinuity. However, I am less
convinced by Rudebecks claim that most narratives of
agricultural origins during the second part of this century
have been presented as tragedies. Although I would not
disagree with her reading of Hodders Domestication of
Europe, I have trouble with this use of Whites literary
definition of tragedy. As I suggested, I do not find this
form of analysis necessarily the most enlightening when
it comes to considering the context and meaning of
the forms and styles of narratives about the transition
to (or origins of) agriculture. In my reading, progressive
social evolutionary views first systematized in the 18th
century (Meek 1976) have had and continue to have a
hegemonic effect on the nature of archaeological narra-
tives about this period and overwhelmingly endorse a
broadly romantic meta-narrative understood as a polit-
ical stance, not just a literary motif. The trope of tragedy
in relation to ethnographic Others and (pre)history may
be said to have been present from Montaigne (1958
[1580]) and Rousseau (1993 [1755]): it is associated with
a vision of the noble savage and hence of agriculture
as the beginning of the fall from grace and the disruption
of harmony with nature. This latter strand is certainly
present now, as I have suggested, as academic irony, but
this is itself a reaction to wider changes in attitudes to-
wards nature and indigenous peoples (often linked to-
gether by those promoting a vision of ecological and spir-
itual harmony which is to be regained), which in its
present form can be traced back to the 1960s. However,
further complications arise in that it is precisely the
backdrop of a romanticized and often nostalgic view of
particular others which enables the tragic reading of
historythat is, narratives of farmers and the rise of commentators for suggesting valuable ways in which to
civilization seen as the loss of authenticity. The var-
iable co-presence of these two strandsthe romantic and
the tragicin Euro-American attitudes towards indige-
nous peoples in many fields ranging from theological and
anthropological discourse to political policies over the
past 500 years is explored, for example, by Berkhofer
(1978) and Pearce (1988 [1953]). But without an under-
standing and analysis of social, political, and cultural
contexts, purely literary analysis in categories of ideal
tropes or narrative forms is unlikely, in my opinion, to
offer a sufficiently rich understanding of why archaeo-
logical narratives have tended to take the form that they
have in relation to any particular topic.
That a more flexible idea of what constitutes a trope
may be of help is suggested by the comments of Peacock
and particularly Terrell, who points to the common use
of the trope of discovery by archaeologists, in contrast
to the crucial experiment mind-set of some scientists.
Discovery is undoubtedly a common theme, in many
forms: Shankss (1992:5384) Desire and Metaphor: An
Archaeological Erotics contains examples such as the
literal uncovering and piecing together the past
found especially in more popular archaeologies. How-
ever, I find it more difficult to characterize many recent
and more specialized works, though Peacock suggests
one set of correlates related to the arts/science bound-
aries in archaeology.
Manfredini usefully emphasizes the overlap in con-
tent, form, tropes, and arguments in texts within the
sciences and the humanities. In part no doubt this ab-
sence of master tropes is due precisely to the self-con-
sciousness about language and suspicion of meta-nar-
ratives which is characteristic of our times. Discourse
analysis of figurative language usefully highlights this
change, with titles of papers and books more likely now-
adays to include terms such as nodes, networks,
contexts, interpretations, and constellations and
generally less fixed and more fluid metaphors compared
with, say, the earlier certainties that archaeologists were
either supplying answers or at least advancing along the
right road exemplified in the popularity of Towards an
archaeology of . . . as a title. Hayden White, Frederic
Jameson, and many others are right to point to the recent
resurgence of the ironic mode of cultural expression, but
the forms this irony will take are themselves culturally
and contextually mutable and contingent.
All this perhaps suggests that the most productive
means of analysis of archaeologicaland othertexts
will be themselves either variable or a mix of approaches.
Since closure towards alternative approaches in presen-
tation is partly what I am arguing against in this paper,
it would be ironic (if hardly tragic) if I were then to pro-
pose a single and rigid mode of either representation or
analysis. Differences of intellectual perspective and ap-
proach are usually productive: I am grateful to all the
think about these issues.

References Cited
a b b o t t , a . 1990. Conceptions of time and events in social sci-
ence methods: Causal and narrative approaches. Historical
Methods 23:14050.
. 1992. From causes to events: Notes on narrative positiv-
ism. Sociological Methods and Research 20:42855.
a m i n z a d e , r . 1992. Historical sociology and time. Sociologi-
cal Methods and Research 20:45680.
a m m e r m a n , a . 1989. On the Neolithic transition in Europe:
A comment on Zvelebil & Zvelebil (1988). Antiquity 63:
16265.
a m m e r m a n , a . , a n d l . l . c a v a l l i - s f o r z a . 1971. Mea-
suring the rate of spread of early farming in Europe. Man, n.s.,
6:7488.
. 1973. A population model for the diffusion of early
farming in Europe, in The explanation of culture change. Ed-
ited by C. Renfrew, pp. 34357. London: Duckworth.
. 1984. The Neolithic transition and the genetics of popu-
lations in Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
a n k e r s m i t , f . 1983. Narrative logic: A semantic analysis of
the historians language. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
a t k i n s o n , p . 1990. The ethnographic imagination: Textual
constructions of reality. London: Routledge.
a t w o o d , m . 1996. Alias Grace. London: Bloomsbury.
b a k e r , f . , a n d j . t h o m a s . Editors. 1990. Writing the past
in the present. Lampeter: St. Davids University College.
b a p t y, i . 1990. The agony and the ecstasy: The emotions of
writing the past, a tragedy in one act for three voices. Archaeo-
logical Review from Cambridge 9:23342.
b a r t h e s , r . 1975 (1970). S/Z. London: Jonathan Cape.
. 1977 (1966). Introduction to the structural analysis of
narratives, in Image, music, text. Translated by S. Heath, pp.
79124. London: Fontana.
b a x e n d a l l , m . 1988. 2d edition. Painting and experience in
fifteenth-century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
b e n d e r , b . 1978. Gatherer-hunter to farmer: A social perspec-
tive. World Archaeology 10:20322.
. 1981. Gatherer-hunter intensification, in Economic ar-
chaeology. Edited by A. Sheridan and G. Bailey, pp. 14957.
British Archaeological Reports International Series 223.
. 1985. Prehistoric developments in the American Mid-
continent and in Brittany, Northwest France, in Prehistoric
hunter-gatherers: The emergence of complexity. Edited by T.
Price and J. Brown, pp. 2157. Orlando: Academic Press.
. 1998. Stonehenge: Making space. Oxford: Berg.
b e n d e r , b . , s . h a m i l t o n , a n d c . t i l l e y. 1997. Lesker-
nick: Stone worlds; alternative narratives; nested landscapes.
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63:14778.
b e n d e r , b . , a n d b . m o r r i s . 1988. Twenty years of his-
tory, evolution, and social change in gatherer-hunter studies,
in Hunters and gatherers, vol. 1, History, evolution, and social
change. Edited by T. Ingold, D. Riches, and J. Woodburn, pp.
414. New York: Berg.
b e r k h o f e r , r . 1978. The white mans Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the present. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
b h a s k a r , r . 1989. 2d edition. The possibility of naturalism.
New York: Harvester Press.
b i n f o r d , l . 1968. Post-Pleistocene adaptations, in New per-
spectives in archaeology. Edited by S. Binford and L. Binford,
pp. 31341. Chicago: Aldine.
. 1977. Historical archaeology: Is it historical or archaeo-
logical? Society for Historical Archaeology Special
Publications 2:1322.
b o g u c k i , p . 1988. Forest farmers and stockherders: Early agri-
culture and its consequences in North-Central Europe. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
b o u r d i e u , p . 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity.
b o w l e r , p . 1991. Science and the narrative structure of theo-
ries. current anthropology 32:36466.
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 675
b o y d , r . , a n d p . r i c h e r s o n . 1985. Culture and the evolu-
tionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
b r u n e r , e . 1986. Ethnography as narrative, in The anthro-
pology of experience. Edited by V. Turner and E. Bruner, pp.
13955. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
c a l l i n c o s , a . 1995. Theories and narratives: Reflections on
the philosophy of history. Cambridge: Polity.
c a r r , d . 1986a. Time, narrative, and history. Bloomington: In-
diana University Press.
. 1986b. Narrative and the real world: An argument for
continuity. History and Theory 25:11731.
cavalli-sforza, l. l., p. menozzi, and a. piazza.
1994. The history and geography of human genes. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
c h a t m a n , s . 1978. Story and discourse: Narrative structure
in fiction and film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
c h i l d e , v. g . 1947. 4th edition. The dawn of European civili-
zation. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
. 1951. Social evolution. London: Watts.
. 1964. Revised edition. What happened in history. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin.
c l i f f o r d , j . , a n d g . m a r c u s . Editors. 1986. Writing cul-
ture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
c o h a n , s . , a n d l . s h i r e s . 1988. Telling stories: Theoretical
analysis of narrative fiction. London: Routledge.
c o n k e y, m . 1995. Palaeovisions: Interpreting the imagery of
Ice Age Europe, in The art of interpreting. Edited by S. Scott,
pp. 1029. Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State
University 9.
c o n k e y, m . , a n d j . s p e c t o r . 1984. Archaeology and the
study of gender. Advances in Archaeological Method and The-
ory 7:138.
c o w a n , c . , a n d p . j . w a t s o n . Editors. 1992. The origins
of agriculture: An international perspective. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
c r a n g , p . 1992. The politics of polyphony: Reconfigurations in
geographical authority. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 10:52749.
c r o n o n , w. 1992. A place for stories: Nature, history, and nar-
rative. Journal of American History 78:134776.
d a n t o , a . 1985. Narration and knowledge. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
d e a t l e y, s . , a n d f . fi n d l o w . Editors. 1984. Exploring the
limits: Frontiers and boundaries in prehistory. British Archaeo-
logical Reports International Series 223.
d e l e u z e , g . , a n d f . g u a t t a r i . 1988. Introduction: Rhi-
zome, in A thousand plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi,
pp. 325. London: Athlone Press.
d e n n e l l , r . 1985. The hunter-gatherer/agricultural frontier
in prehistoric temperate Europe, in The archaeology of fron-
tiers and boundaries. Edited by S. Green and S. Perlman, pp.
11339. New York: Academic Press.
d e n z i n , n . 1997. Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic prac-
tices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
d e r r i d a , j . 1976 (1967). Of grammatology. Translated by G.
C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
d r a y, w . 1971. On the nature and role of narrative in histori-
ography. History and Theory 10:15371.
d u n n e l l , r . 1989. Aspects of the application of evolutionary
theory in archaeology, in Archaeological thought in America.
Edited by C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, pp. 3549. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
e a g l e t o n , t . 1999. In the gaudy supermarket. London Re-
view of Books 21(10):36.
e l y, r . , r . g r u n e r , a n d w . d r a y. 1969. Mandelbaum on
historical narrative: A discussion. History and Theory 8:
27594.
e v a n s , c . 1993. Digging with the pen: Novel archaeologies
and literary traditions, in Interpretative archaeology. Edited
by C. Tilley, pp. 41747. Providence: Berg.
f a b i a n , j . 1983. Time and the Other: How anthropology
makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.
676 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
fl a n n e r y , k . 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. An-
nual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399426.
. Editor. 1976. The early Mesoamerican village: Archaeo-
logical research strategy for an endangered species. New York:
Academic Press.
. 1982. The Golden Marshalltown: A parable for the ar-
chaeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist 84:26578.
f o u c a u l t , m . 1970 (1966). The order of things: An archae-
ology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock Press.
f r i e d m a n , j o n a t h a n . 1989. Myte, historie og politisk
identitet: Nutidens Hawaii og en europisk periferi; to mod-
satte eksempler, in Brugte historier: Ti essays om brug og
misbrug af historien. Edited by Lotte Hedeager and Karen
Schousboe, pp. 11936. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. [er]
f r y e , n o r t h r o p . 1957. Anatomy of criticism. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. [jlp]
g a l l i e , w . 1964. Philosophy and historical understanding.
London: Chatto and Windus.
g a r d i n e r , p . Editor. 1974. The philosophy of history. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
g e b a u e r , a . , a n d t . p r i c e . Editors. 1992a. Transitions to
agriculture in prehistory. Madison: Prehistory Press.
. 1992b. Foragers to farmers: An introduction, in Transi-
tions to agriculture in prehistory. Edited by A. Gebauer and T.
Price, pp. 110. Madison: Prehistory Press.
g e e r t z , c l i f f o r d . 1988. Works and lives: The anthropolo-
gist as author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
. 1995. After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one an-
thropologist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [jet]
g e r o , j . , a n d m . c o n k e y. Editors. 1991. Engendering ar-
chaeology: Women and prehistory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
g e r o , j . , a n d d . r o o t . 1990. Public presentations and pri-
vate concerns: Archaeology in the pages of National Geo-
graphic, in The politics of the past. Edited by P. Gathercole
and D. Lowenthal, pp. 1937. London: Unwin Hyman.
g i d d e n s , a . 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the
theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity.
g o s d e n , c . 1992. Endemic doubt: Is what we write right? An-
tiquity 66:8038.
g r e g g , s . 1988. Foragers and farmers: Population interaction
and agricultural expansion in prehistoric Europe. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
g r i f fi n , l . 1992. Temporality, events, and explanation in his-
torical sociology. Sociological Methods and Research 20:
40327.
g r o s s , a . 1990. The rhetoric of science. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
g u p t a , a . , a n d j . f e r g u s o n . 1997. Discipline and prac-
tice: The field as site, method, and location in anthropology,
in Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a
field science. Edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, pp. 146.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
h a r a w a y, d . 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question
in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist
Studies 14:57599.
. 1989. Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the
world of modern science. London: Routledge.
h a r r e , r . 1990. Some narrative conventions of scientific dis-
course, in Narrative in culture: The uses of storytelling in the
sciences, philosophy, and literature. Edited by C. Nash, pp.
81101. London: Routledge.
h a r r i s , d . Editor. 1996a. The origins and spread of agriculture
and pastoralism in Eurasia. London: UCL Press.
. 1996b. Preface, in The origins and spread of agricul-
ture and pastoralism in Eurasia. Edited by D. Harris, pp. ixxi.
London: UCL Press.
h i g g s , e . Editor. 1972. Papers in economic prehistory. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
. Editor. 1975. Palaeoeconomy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
h o d d e r , i . 1989a. Writing archaeology: Site reports in context.
Antiquity 62:26874.
. 1989b. This is not an article about material culture as
text. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8:25069.
. 1990. The domestication of Europe: Structure and con-
tingency in Neolithic societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
. 1992. Theory and practice in archaeology. London:
Routledge.
. 1995. Material culture in time, in Interpreting archae-
ology: Finding meaning in the past. Edited by I. Hodder, M.
Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchhli, J. Carman, J. Last, and G.
Lucas, pp. 16468. London: Routledge.
. 1997. Always momentary, fluid and flexible: Towards a
reflexive excavation methodology. Antiquity 71:691700.
. 1999. The archaeological process. Oxford: Blackwell.
h u r c o m b e , l . 1997. A viable past in the pictorial present?
in Invisible people and processes: Writing gender and child-
hood into European archaeology. Edited by J. Moore and E.
Scott, pp. 1524. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
j a r m a n , m . , g . b a i l e y, a n d h . j a r m a n . Editors. 1982.
Early European agriculture: Its foundations and development.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
j o h n s o n , m . 1994. Ordering houses, creating narratives, in
Architecture and order: Approaches to social space. Edited by
M. Parker Pearson and C. Richards, pp. 17077. London:
Routledge.
k a m p , k . 1998. Life in the pueblo: Understanding the past
through archaeology. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.
k e e l e y, l . 1992. The introduction of agriculture to the west-
ern North European Plain, in Transitions to agriculture in
prehistory. Edited by A. Gebauer and T. Price, pp. 8195. Madi-
son: Prehistory Press.
k e l l n e r , h . 1987. Narrativity in history: Post-structuralism
and since. History and Theory 26:129.
k l e i n , k . 1995. In search of narrative mastery: Postmodernism
and the people without history. History and Theory 34:27598.
k n a p p , b . Editor. 1992. Archaeology, ethnohistory, and Anna-
les. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
k n o r r - c e t i n a , k . 1993. Strong constructivismfrom a soci-
ologists point of view. A personal addendum to Sismondos pa-
per. Social Studies of Science 23:55563.
k u p e r , a . 1988. The invention of primitive society. London:
Routledge.
l a m p e t e r a r c h a e o l o g y w o r k s h o p . 1997. Relativism,
objectivity, and the politics of the past. Archaeological Dia-
logues 4:16498.
l a n d a u , m . 1991. Narratives of human evolution: The hero
story. New Haven: Yale University Press.
l a s t , j . 1995. The nature of history, in Interpreting archae-
ology: Finding meaning in the past. Edited by I. Hodder, M.
Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchhli, J. Carman, J. Last, and G.
Lucas, pp. 14157. London: Routledge.
l a t o u r , b . , a n d s . w o o l g a r . 1986. 2d edition. Labora-
tory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
leone, m., p. mullins, m. creveling, l. hurst, b.
jackson-nash, l. jones, h. kaiser, g. logan, and
m . w a r n e r . 1995. Can an African-American historical ar-
chaeology be an alternative voice? in Interpreting archae-
ology: Finding meaning in the past. Edited by I. Hodder, M.
Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchhli, J. Carman, J. Last, and G.
Lucas, pp. 11024. London: Routledge.
l e v i - s t r a u s s , c . 1963 (1958). Structural anthropology. Trans-
lated by C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.
. 1994 (1964). The raw and the cooked: Introduction to a
science of mythology. London: Pimlico.
l e w i n , p . 1994. Categorization and the narrative structure of
science. Philosophy and Rhetoric 27:3562.
l o u c h , a . 1967. History as narrative. History and Theory 6:
5470.
l y o t a r d , j - f . 1984 (1979). The postmodern condition: A re-
port on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
m c d a v i d , c . , a n d d . b a b s o n . Editors. 1997. In the realm
of politics: Prospects for public participation in African-Ameri-
can and plantation archaeology. Historical Archaeology 31(3).

m a h a j a n , g . 1992. Explanation and understanding in the hu-
man sciences. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
m a n d e l b a u m , m . 1967. A note on history as narrative. His-
tory and Theory 6:41319.
m a s c i a - l e e s , f . , p . s h a r p e , a n d c . c o h e n . 1989. The
postmodernist turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist
perspective. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
15:733.
m e e k , r . 1976. Social science and the ignoble savage. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
m e r q u i o r , j . 1986. From Prague to Paris: A critique of struc-
turalist and post-structuralist thought. London: Verso.
m i l l e r , j . h i l l i s . 1990. Narrative, in Critical terms for
literary study. Edited by F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, pp.
6679. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
m i n k , l . 1978. Narrative form as a cognitive instrument, in
The writing of history: Literary form and historical under-
standing. Edited by R. Canary and H. Kozicki, pp. 12949.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
. 1981. Everyman his or her own Annalist. Critical Inquiry
7:77783.
. 1987 (1970). History and fiction as modes of comprehen-
sion, in Historical understanding. Edited by B. Fay, E. Golob,
and R. Vann, pp. 4260. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
m o l y n e a u x , b . Editor. 1997. The cultural life of images: Vi-
sual analysis in archaeology. London: Routledge.
m o n t a i g n e , m . d e . 1958 (1580). On cannibals, in Essays,
pp. 10519. Translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin
Books.
m o o r e , h . 1986. Space, text, and gender. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
m o o r e , j . , a n d e . s c o t t . Editors. 1997. Invisible people
and processes. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
m u r p h e y , m . 1994. Philosophical foundations of historical
knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press.
m y e r s , g . 1990. Making a discovery: Narratives of split
genes, in Narrative in culture: The uses of storytelling in the
sciences, philosophy, and literature. Edited by C. Nash, pp.
10226. London: Routledge.
n a s h , c . Editor. 1990. Narrative in culture: The uses of story-
telling in the sciences, philosophy, and literature. London:
Routledge.
n e t t l e , d . 1997. On the status of methodological individual-
ism. current anthropology 38:28386.
o b e y e s e k e r e , g a n a n a t h . 1992. The apotheosis of Captain
Cook: European mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press. [jet]
o c h s , e . , a n d l . c a p p s . 1996. Narrating the self. Annual
Review of Anthropology 25:1943.
o l s e n , b . 1998. Blurred genres? Archaeological contemporaries
in theory. Journal of Material Culture 3:10913.
p e a c o c k , j a m e s l . 1986. The anthropological lens. New
York: Cambridge University Press. [jlp]
p e a r c e , r . 1988 (1953). Savagism and civilization: A study of
the Indian and the American mind. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
p i c c i n i , a . 1996. Filming through the mists of time: Celtic
constructions and the documentary. current anthropology
37:S87S111.
p l a t t , j o h n r . 1964. Strong inference. Science 146:34753.
[jet]
p l u c i e n n i k , m . 1998. Deconstructing the Neolithic in the
Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, in Understanding the Neo-
lithic of North-Western Europe. Edited by M. Edmonds and C.
Richards, pp. 6183. Glasgow: Cruithne Press.
p l u c i e n n i k , m . , a n d q . d r e w . n.d. Only connect:
Global and local networks, contexts, and fieldwork. Ecumene
7. In press.
p o l k i n g h o r n e , d . 1988. Narrative knowing and the human
sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.
p o m p o n i o , a l i c e . 1992. Seagulls dont fly into the bush:
Cultural identity and development in Melanesia. Belmont, Ca-
lif.: Wadsworth. [jet]
p l u c i e n n i k Archaeological Narratives F 677
p r i c e , t . , a n d g . b r o w n . Editors. 1985. Prehistoric hunter-
gatherers: The emergence of cultural complexity. London: Aca-
demic Press.
p r i c e , t . , a n d a . g e b a u e r . Editors. 1995. Last hunters,
first farmers: New perspectives on the prehistoric transition to
agriculture. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
p r o p p , v. 1968 (1927). 2d edition. The morphology of the folk-
tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.
q u a d a g n o , j . , a n d s . k n a p p . 1992. Have historical sociol-
ogists forsaken theory? Thoughts on the history/theory rela-
tionship. Sociological Methods and Research 20:481507.
r e d d i n g , r . 1988. A general explanation of subsistence
change: From hunting and gathering to food production. Jour-
nal of Anthropological Archaeology 7:5697.
r e n f r e w , c . Editor. 1973. The explanation of culture change.
London: Duckworth.
. 1978. Trajectory discontinuity and morphogenesis: The
implications of catastrophe theory for archaeology. American
Antiquity 43:20322.
. 1987. Archaeology and language: The puzzle of Indo-Eu-
ropean origins. London: Jonathan Cape.
. 1992. Archaeology, genetics, and linguistic diversity. Man
27:44578.
r e n f r e w , c . , a n d k . c o o k e . Editors. 1979. Transforma-
tions: Mathematical approaches to culture change. New York:
Academic Press.
r i c o e u r , p . 1984. Time and narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by K.
McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
. 1988. Time and narrative. Vol. 3. Translated by K. Mc-
Laughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
r o s a l d o , r . 1993(1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of
social analysis. London: Routledge.
r o t h , p . 1988. Narrative explanations: The case of history.
History and Theory 27:113.
. 1989. Ethnography without tears. current anthropol-
ogy 30:55569.
. 1995. Review essay on Murray Murpheys Philosophical
Foundations of Historical Knowledge. History and Theory 34:
23144.
r o u s s e a u , j . - j . 1993 (1755). A discourse on a subject pro-
posed by the Academy of Dijon: What is the origin of inequal-
ity among men, and is it authorized by natural law? in The
social contract and discourses. Translated by G. Cole, pp.
31126. London: J. M. Dent.
r o w l a n d s , m . 1989. A question of complexity, in Domina-
tion and resistance. Edited by D. Miller, M. Rowlands, and C.
Tilley, pp. 2940. London: Unwin Hyman.
. 1994. The politics of identity in archaeology, in Social
construction of the past: Representation as power. Edited by
G. Bond and A. Gilliam, pp. 12943. London: Routledge.
r u d e b e c k , e . 1996. Heroes and tragic figures in the transition
to the Neolithic: Exploring images of the human being in ar-
chaeological texts. Journal of European Archaeology 4:5586.
. 1999. Elandets rotter och kulturens skordar kvinnan,
mannen och jordbrukets uppkomst i ett arkeologihistoriskt
perspektiv, in Han, hon, den, det att integrera genus och kon
i arkeologi. Edited by C. Caesar, I. Gustin, E. Iregren, B. Peters-
son, E. Rudebeck, E. Raf, and L. Strobeck. Lund: Institute of
Archaeology. [er]
s a n g r e n , p . 1988. Rhetoric and the authority of ethnography:
Postmodernism and the social reproduction of texts. cur-
rent anthropology 29:40515.
s c h o l e s , r . , a n d r . k e l l o g g . 1966. The nature of narra-
tive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
s c h r i r e , c . 1995. Digging through darkness: Chronicles of an
archaeologist. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
s h a n k s , m . 1992. Experiencing the past: On the character of
archaeology. London: Routledge.
. 1995a. Archaeology and the forms of history, in Inter-
preting archaeology: Finding meaning in the past. Edited by I.
678 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 40, Number 5, December 1999
Hodder, M. Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchhli, J. Carman, J.
Last, and G. Lucas, pp. 16978. London: Routledge.
. 1995b. The archaeological imagination: Creativity, rhet- . 1993b. Introduction: Interpretation and a poetics of the
oric, and archaeological futures, in Whither archaeology? Pa-
pers in honor of Evzen Neustupny. Edited by M. Kuna and N.
Venclova, pp. 5268. Praha: Institute of Archaeology.
s p e c t o r , j . 1991. What this awl means: Toward a feminist
archaeology, in Engendering archaeology: Women and prehis-
tory. Edited by J. Gero and M. Conkey, pp. 388406. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
. 1993. What this awl means: Feminist archaeology at a
Wahpeton Dakota village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Soci-
ety Press.
s t o n e , l . 1979. The revival of narrative: Reflections on a new
old history. Past and Present 85:324.
s t r a t h e r n , m . 1987. Out of context: The persuasive fictions
of anthropology. current anthropology 28:25181.
s t r y k e r , r . 1996. Beyond history versus theory: Strategic nar-
rative and sociological explanation. Sociological Methods and
Research 24:30252.
t e r r e l l , j . 1990. Storytelling and prehistory. Archaeological
Method and Theory 2:129.
t e r r e l l , j o h n e d w a r d . 1996. Lapita as history and cul-
ture hero, in Oceanic culture history: Essays in honour of
Roger Green. Edited by J. M. Davidson, G. Irwin, B. F. Leach,
A. Pawley, and D. Brown, pp. 5166. New Zealand Journal of
Archaeology Special Publication. [jet]
t h o m a s , j . 1991. Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
. 1993. Discourse, totalization, and the Neolithic, in . 1987c(1984). The question of narrative in contemporary
Interpretative archaeology. Edited by C. Tilley, pp. 35794.
Providence: Berg.
. 1996. Time, culture, and identity: An interpretive ar-
chaeology. London: Routledge.
t i l l e y, c . 1989. Discourse and power: The genre of the Cam-
bridge inaugural lecture, in Domination and resistance. Ed-
ited by D. Miller, M. Rowlands, and C. Tilley, pp. 4162. Lon-
don: Unwin Hyman.
. 1990a. On modernity and archaeological discourse, in . 1989. On the transition to farming in Europe, or What
Archaeology after structuralism. Edited by I. Bapty and T.
Yates, pp. 12852. London: Routledge.
. Editor. 1990b. Reading material culture. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
. 1991. Material culture and text: The art of ambiguity.
London: Routledge.
. 1993a. Prospecting archaeology, in Interpretative ar-
chaeology. Edited by C. Tilley, pp. 395416. Providence: Berg.
past, in Interpretative archaeology. Edited by C. Tilley, pp.
127. Providence: Berg.
. 1995. Clowns and circus acts: A response to Trigger. Cri-
tique of Anthropology 15:33741.
. 1996. An ethnography of the Neolithic: Early prehistoric
societies in southern Scandinavia. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
. 1999. Metaphor and material culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
t r i g g e r , b . 1989. A history of archaeological thought. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
w a l d m a n , m . 1981. The otherwise unnoteworthy year 711:
A reply to Hayden White. Critical Inquiry 7:78492.
w a l s h , w . 1974(1967). Colligatory concepts in history, in
The philosophy of history. Edited by P. Gardiner, pp. 17244.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
w h i t e , h . 1973. Metahistory: The historical imagination in
nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press.
. 1981. The narrativization of real events. Critical Inquiry
7:79398.
. 1987a. The content of the form: Narrative discourse and
historical representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
. 1987b(1980). The value of narrativity in the representa-
tion of reality, in The content of the form: Narrative dis-
course and historical representation, pp. 125. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press.
historical theory, in The content of the form: Narrative dis-
course and historical representation, pp. 2657. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press.
w h i t t l e , a . 1996. Europe in the Neolithic: The creation of
new worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
z v e l e b i l , m . Editor. 1986. Hunters in transition: Mesolithic
societies of temperate Eurasia and their transition to farming.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
was spreading with the Neolithic: A reply to Ammerman
(1989). Antiquity 63:37983.
. 1996. The agricultural frontier and the transition to
farming in the circum-Baltic region, in The origins and
spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia. Edited by D.
Harris, pp. 32345. London: UCL Press.