Teaching historians and archaeologists: pondering the difference September 27, 2008
Posted by gesta in Academia, Boundaries, Debate, Medieval.Tags: archaeology, big questions, teaching
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Once upon a time, I was an archaeologist; a real hands (and knees, legs, arms, face) dirty spending a lot of time in holes whilst getting very wet field archaeologist. In fact, I was a field archaeologist before I was an academic historian, having picked up a trowel before I picked up a UCAS form. I have switched between the two disciplines for much of my working life. At my current institution, I’ve done the occasional class on monasteries or the church for colleagues needing a break. Now I find myself co-teaching a survey course on the archaeology of the medieval world: it’s a scary prospect.
What follows is probably more self-reflexive than it ought to be, but these are problems that are not unique to my teaching and are very current in discussions of pedagogy and the teaching of medieval studies more broadly. I hope this post generates some sort of debate, if actual answers are unlikely.
Several things strike me about the way the course is structured and how this differs to the way we do operate in History. First, there is no small group teaching whatsoever. Everything is taught by lecture in a double-slot, sometimes one person talking for the duration, sometimes both of us. In History, our small groups are sometimes more myth than actual fact, but we maintain the commitment, believing critical thought is best enhanced by the ability to engage in debate. The archaeologists are more didactic it would seem. I fear the finer nuances of the themes under discussion will be lost.
The course is structured thematically, with the same themes for both the European and Islamic halves. This is not that dissimilar to the way we might do things in history, but the division is interesting. Twice as much time is spent on discussing power as is on religion for example. I am not saying which should be considered the more important theme here, but the division raises several questions, not least of which is the ideologies of the people who set it up in the first place.
Aside from the conceptual problems of such themes (What is power? What is religion vs superstition? etc.) I worry, perhaps excessively, about how much historical background and understanding I should be giving the students. One of the problems I have with a lot of archaeological writing is the lack of synthesis. This is beginning to change, but much is still site specific and loses sight of the bigger picture and historical processes. How can I discuss the archaeology of power without discussing state formation? If I embark on state formation and its problems, consequences and historiography, when do I start talking about palaces, assembly sites, churches, ‘landscapes of lordship’ (R. Liddiard) and, heaven help me, castles? Somewhere in all of this ‘feudalism’ rears its ugly head, a concept that is taken on trust by quite a few archaeologists, with little effort to understand what it is we are looking at. Equally, in much otherwise good historical writing, archaeological and architectural evidence is used only for illustrative purposes with little attempt at explanation.
The chronology and geographical spread is interesting too. We start in the mid-seventh century, a date that owes more to the Islamic rather than European half and finish in the middle of the fifteenth. We focus on N-W Europe and the middle east (so not Spain, Italy, central Europe or China -we’d need a couple more people for that). In an ideal world, we’d have about four different lecture series supported by tutorials, but we live in a decidedly less than perfect world and so negotiation and compromise is necessary.
Clearly I cannot cover assemblies, palaces, castles, landscapes, approaches, methodologies, theories, etc. for all the period across all of N-W Europe in two hours without being so general it makes a nonsense of it all. So those dreaded case studies that can lose sight of the broader context (and I’ve just criticised the archaeologists for doing this) come into play. We can use assemblies to discuss government in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian realms; palaces for France and Germany; castles for methodology and approaches, supported by an enormous bibliography (most of it on Britain and in English as the students won’t read other languages), including historical surveys and hope for the best.
The students, I suspect, want to hear more about boiling oil, grisly executions and the crusades than state formation, social relations and administration. After all, one can look at Durham cathedral or the White Tower and understand that these buildings took a great deal of time, effort and resources to construct and that someone or some group of people needed the authority to be able to order this. Understanding the processes behind that authority is trickier.
Any thoughts?
There’s a bunch of things to say here, but the first of them would definitely be: you know, you’re right, I can’t remember when I heard of archaeology taught in small groups except at postgrad level. Likewise, medieval archaeology does fall generally, I think, into big schools (processualist, post-processualist, etc.) in a way that history, being much more fragmented, does not. I’ve seen historians complain that medieval history has no overarching discourse that guides its enquiry such as do the sciences, and I’ve usually thought, “Good!” Archaeology as a subject is closer to that single-discourse idea, though, and I think perhaps that leads to the sort of difference you’re describing.
Hunting for power in the ground does seem to be the hot thing in archaeology just now, though I think power and authority are hot subjects over medieval studies in general at the moment, perhaps because there is so much political disenfranchisement in our home societies. My initial reaction, though, was, “of course they do that more than religion, you can’t get religion from archaeology!” This is overstated of course, but you and I must have both met the whole `we don’t know what this object was therefore it must have had a RITUAL function’ argument? In general, there are ways that archaeology has to tell us about a people or a society or a site that history can’t match, but a lot of what you seem to be struggling with here is the reverse, areas where only history really has the material.
Some archaeologists I have talked with would try and keep the historical background to the absolute minimum. This is partly because they appear to think that historians are feckless text-based wastes of funding, partly because they are aware that interpretations change faster than is feasible to stay current with or that in many areas the debate is not over and the consensus that archaeologists would like is not yet available, and mainly because they think that the approach to the past should be led by archaeology only and not guided by texts. I don’t know how far you, as someone who believes in the utility of texts, can swallow this as a justification for giving the history short shrift. Equally, if you’re going to wind up sending them to survey works anyway, why not stick with what they can’t get there and leave out the background? And I know that the answer is, because they won’t do the reading till later and thus won’t understand the lectures. Oh well, it was a nice idea.
Not finished solutions I’m afraid, merely thoughts, but being echoed by a conversation on my own blog as well, interesting…
Well, I decided that the students could have Gesta’s guide to those weird ‘German’ and ‘French’ kings with funny names in the introductory lecture and then I’ll send them in the direction of Ian Wood and Jinty and hope for the best. Maybe I should also refer them to Jarrett, ‘Spoleto Series’ 2008.
I’m not sure that medieval archaeology does fall into the big schools as you suggest. Archaeology, yes; med arch, no. It’s one of the main criticisms that other archaeologists level at the medievalists along with the tyranny of documents. Certainly medieval archaeologists speak in a language that is much closer to an historian’s than the prehistory people.
I really must take issue with you on the subject of religion, but you would expect me to!
Thanks for your thoughts as always. I shall add them to the swirling, unformed mass in my head in the hope that something coherent will eventually emerge.
Feel free to take issue with me about religion of course. How many different sorts of settlement might one put a vallum round, though, eh? and so on. As to the divisions in archaeology, I guess maybe you have a point in as much as there are archaeologists, just as there are historians, of the period, who would rather not get involved in the theoretical debates and just get busy with their material. I am often like this myself but years of association with Matthew Innes and Chris Wickham have left me aware of the need to know where I’ve got my interpretations from. So I observe, in like wise, that I have seen medieval archaeologists who didn’t bother with theory over much, and some who really do get involved with it (one example of whom I’ve written about, indeed).
What you are I think right about is that even they get their theory from outside the period, especially the prehistoric lot like Barry Cunliffe or even, gods help us, Lord Renfrew Now is it the availability of non-archaeological frameworks of interpretation in the medieval period that prevent such alternative-seeking, or is it just that there simply are more ancient and pre-historic archaeologists so they have to struggle harder to distinguish themselves?
Ah, but Jonathan, power does not necessarily equal fortification; can passive defence be classed as power at all? You possibly don’t know this, but I have a sideline in castles (article out next year) and find all these questions rather fraught. The way power operates and is evidenced through both written and material sources is generally very subtle (even if it is a great hulking mass of a castle) and so two hours of lecture on the subject can only ever hope to be simplistic. Now, if the course was on the archaeology of power across east and west during the entirety of the middle ages, I would have much less of a problem with it.
As for theory, it all comes down to where medieval archaeologists situate themselves: is the subject taught as part of history or archaeology? In all seriousness, I have had archaeologists tell me that a department that otherwise only teaches pre-history includes the Anglo-Saxons (but not the classical period) as ‘the Anglo-Saxons are like prehistory because there are no written sources’. Ignoring the idiocy of that comment, it is instructive that some (perhaps only a few) archaeologists think that med arch belongs in history.
I also have a complete lack of patience with historians who think archaeology can’t tell us anything more than the written sources, or who think that documents aren’t themselves objects of material culture and need to be studied as such. There are indeed areas where historians have led the way, but equally, archaeologists have pioneered new approaches, particularly in my area of use of space, and this is where the association with prehistorians comes into its own. Medieval archaeologists at their best can take the theory, make it human and use it to open up new areas of study; that doesn’t mean that they let the theory dominate. But then I believe you can’t do good medieval history without looking at the archaeology and vice versa and this is what the prehistorians would really object to.
Have you read D. Austin’s ‘The “proper” study of medieval archaeology’ in _From the Baltic to the Black Sea: studies in medieval archaeology_ (London, 1990), 9-42? It’s polemical, I disagree with a lot of it and it is of its time, but instructive nonetheless.
I shall save castles for another day.
I don’t think I was talking about castles! I was using a pet example of the problems with detecting religion in archaeology. But, OK, let’s talk about castles. You probably know more than me, but I would say straight away that passive defence may not be classifiable as power (actually I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, if you can be sure you can survive opposition you’ve got a kind of power, but there’s something more important here) but that the ability to construct it implies enough control of labour and so on that someone coordinating such a building is clearly in power somehow. So no, power does not necessarily equal fortification, because there’s many other ways of bolstering status, but I think that fortification implies those ways operating successfully.
I hope that I count as a historian who knows that archaeology can tell us stuff, but I don’t really read enough archaeology, I am aware (and I haven’t read that Austin article but I probably should). For someone as interested in peasants as I am, though, it’s pretty essential, and historians who ignore archaeologists do very much annoy me also, though I can’t think of more than one I’ve actually heard say that they do (and that one is doing quite well for themself).
I have annoyed archaeologists before now by saying that I think, ultimately, we’re all engaged with our different specialities in the project of recovering the past, as far as it can be recovered, and by then saying “and that’s the definition of history, really, isn’t it?” and ducking instinctively. It’s still true though.
You were talking about castles in your own blog, but no, you weren’t here, I was: I just didn’t explain or introduce that particular jump in the conversation very well. I agree with you entirely on the subject of resources. That, for me, is where real power lies in a ‘I have the people, money and access to building materials to construct this castle’ almost for the sheer hell of it type of way.
It is very hard to be fully conversant in more than one discipline now, and I would say that by trying to keep up with history and archaeology, I often lose out on things on both sides, but that is a price I am willing to pay. We _have_ to keep talking to each other though.
From discussing the difference in teaching approaches, we have encompassed virtually the whole methodological shebang here!
I think it’s hard to be fully conversant in one discipline! At least I’m always being surprised by things I thought were new being old hat for other periods. We mainly have to pitch to our peers, though, and that’s still just about manageable. I like keeping some kind of finger in archaeology because it gives me evidence that most of my peers don’t really know about or care about (more fools them). But yes: since we can’t keep up fully, it’s vital to keep talking to people who are kept up with the bits you want to cite!
Speaking of building castles for the sheer hell of it, did you see this?
I did indeed see that. Absolutely extraordinary!