Conceptions and Perceptions

Abstract

The first academic conference I attended was held in 1970. Its proceedings were published two years later with the title Man, Settlement and Urbanism. The book was notable for including contributions from both archaeologists and anthropologists. The meeting itself had an unusual format—part of the audience was hidden from view. Instead of participating in the discussion, we gathered in another room and watched the proceedings on closed circuit television. Only at the final reception was the barrier removed so that we were able to see the protagonists in the flesh. As this chapter will suggest, obstacles to communication still remain. At the time, one paper had a special impact—Kent Flannery’s discussion of ‘The origins of the village as a settlement type in Mesoamerica and the Near East’ (Flannery 1972). Four decades after it appeared in print it is still being quoted. Other contributors to the meeting covered some of the same themes, but, true to the spirit of the conference, the distinguished social anthropologist Mary Douglas considered the perils of archaeological interpretation. Her paper ‘Symbolic orders in the use of domestic space’ presented a series of cautionary tales which compared the approaches of prehistorians with those of contemporary ethnographers (Douglas 1972). If Flannery’s paper had an immediate impact, Douglas’s was rarely cited, perhaps because it dismayed so many of those at the conference. There could have been other reasons why it was overlooked. The article was short and lacked much direct reference to archaeological research. That is ironic, for a decade later her work was to exert a major influence on theorists in archaeology. Indeed, it played a growing role in their thinking through to her death in 2007 (Gosden 2004). Although she appreciated the attention, it was a role that she was reluctant to assume. The differences between Flannery’s paper and Douglas’s are not those between the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Flannery was well aware of ethnographic accounts of settlements in traditional societies. Rather, their articles reflect two different strands in twentieth-century thought. Flannery’s approach was influenced by functionalist anthropology and Douglas’s by structuralism. That is why her work provided a source of inspiration for those who became disenchanted with processual archaeology.