Approaching material culture. A history of changing epistemologies

Abstract

The relationship between archaeology and anthropology has been debated and it is still controversial. Materiality matters, but the role material culture plays in the construction and constitution of humans and societies is blurred in the current archaeological debate. Processual archaeology stressed a methodological collectivist approach representing vulgar materialism in which human behaviour was more or less shaped by non-human constraints. The postprocessual counter-reaction favoured a methodological individualism stressing the acting individual, from which evidence regarding society or social units could be deduced. Both these approaches are, in their extreme forms, misleading, because the former advocates only determinism and the latter only free will. By defining archaeology as material culture studies one may incorporate the structuring principles which both create and restrain human agency. Material culture studies as a post-disciplinary science incorporate both methodological collectivism and methodological individualism in their approaches, and as such bridge the processual and post-processual archaeologies, not on these paradigms’ own premises but as an acknowledgement of the role that materiality has in both constraining and creating human behaviour.