Remembering the basics. Social and stratigraphic debates and biases

Abstract

Steve Roskams (2001, 267–70) has challenged archaeologists to theorize excavation practices and Patricia McAnany and Ian Hodder have responded in a cogent manner. They draw the most fundamental of archaeology's field methods – stratigraphy – into the light of social theory. The product is ‘social stratigraphy’ and the authors offer an array of interpretive schemes and processes through which social stratigraphic approaches might be considered and developed. McAnany and Hodder want us to think beyond the geological facets of stratigraphy, including our section drawings, photographs, matrices, phase designations, chronologies, thin sections and artefacts. They suggest we strive to do more: to discern and interpret social meanings, patterns and practices in every deposit, cut, pit, erasure, concealment, return and episodic rebuilding. The great bulk of their discussion focuses on the study of past contexts, though in closing they address how strata and stratigraphy can be altered or used to influence present-day social and political contexts. It is here – that is, in their concluding comments – that their emphasis on memory (and forgetting), repeated like an incantation throughout the paper, comes full circle.