Strategies for the Reproduction of Prestige in Archaeological Discourse [1]
S. Hutson
Department of Anthropology, University of California at
Berkeley
Strategies for the Reproduction of Prestige in Archaeological Discourse [1]
S. Hutson
Department of Anthropology, University of California at
Berkeley
Introduction
The term 'oligarchic' is accurate because prestige is unevenly distributed. A small number of
archaeologists, namely those who review grant applications and serve as referees for journals,
help constrain the production of archaeological knowledge by deciding who gets money to do
archaeology and who is allowed to publish. Unlike some fields, there is no absolute standard
for judging which archaeology is 'correct'. Archaeological knowledge is therefore
inseparably intertwined with power (Foucault 1977: 27) and embedded in what Wobst and
Keene (1983) call a 'political economy'. This intersection of knowledge and power guides
the system of rewards and constrains the discourse.
The system of rewards, however, is never a given. It must constantly be produced and
reproduced. Those at the top have a vested interest in reproducing the structure of rewards,
because the current structure recognises their work as the most prestigous, thus perpetuating
their power. In his book Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu
concludes that
In the 1980s, archaeologists in both England and the United States called for a critical
sociology to examine the unevenness of archaeological capital and constraints on the
production of knowledge (Baker, et al. 1990; Gero, et al. 1983; Shanks and Tilley 1989: 9).
There were a number of questions to investigate: who gets grants and for what? who gets
employed and who does not? who gets promoted? who gets read? who gets ignored?
Although unpopular, this research uncovered a number of constraints, the most prominent
being the chilly climate faced by women who sought to participate in archaeology (Becher
1989: 124-126; Gero 1991; Nelson and Nelson 1994; Parezo and Bender 1994; Reyman
1994; Wylie 1994: 76). It was documented that fewer women than men are employed in
archaeology (Zeder 1997a), fewer women receive doctorates in archaeology compared to
other disciplines (Ford and Hundt 1994: 142), women receive lower salaries than men in
most sectors of archaeological employment (Reyman 1994; Zeder 1997a: 74-82), women
publish proportionately less than men (Bradley and Dahl 1994: 191), women are less likely
to hold tenure track positions (Zeder 1997a: 101) and are less likely to teach at graduate
institutions (Ford and Hundt 1994: 142). They take more time to be promoted (Reyman
1994), they receive less grant money than men (Kramer and Stark 1989; Yellen 1994; Zeder
1997a: 172-4), their research is less prestigious (Gero 1983, 1985, 1994), and many more
worrying trends. At least in the Society for American Archaeology, most archaeologists are
not just male, but also white (98 percent claim European heritage) and middle class (55
percent) (Zeder 1997a: 13-4). Other constraints discovered include the hierarchisation and
devaluation of certain types of archaeological labour (Blakey 1983; Embree 1989a and b;
McGuire 1992: 252; Paynter 1983), a tendency to focus on types of research which guarantee
tolls of citation (Becher 1989: 59-60; Tilley 1990b; Wobst and Keene 1983), a tendency to
focus on some geographic areas to the exclusion of others (Blakey 1983), and the use of
various rhetorical strategies (Tilley 1989, 1990a and b, 1993a). Finally, there are those cases,
past and present, in which the power of some archaeologists has unfortunate consequences for
the development of the field. In this paper, I attempt to isolate some strategies used both
consciously and unconsciously by individual archaeologists and archaeological institutions to
maintain discursive constraints and the unequal distribution of archaeological capital that
these constraints perpetuate. Although this study focuses heavily on archaeology in the
United States, I hope it will serve as a useful study for anyone interested in how power
intersects with the practice of modern archaeology.
Teaching and the sovereignty of academia
What strategies do academic archaeologists use to reproduce in students a discourse that
favours the position of academic archaeology? It seems that professors only teach issues of
academic concern. This is verified by the recently published results of the 1994 Society for
American Archaeology (SAA) survey: the degree of satisfaction with education in
archaeology is highest among academics and lowest among public and private sector
archaeologists (Zeder 1997a: 120), indicating that school is geared mostly toward careers in
academia. Perhaps a more tangible guide to what issues are given priority in archaeological
education is the textbook. I have looked at seven recent textbooks that claim to be
introductions to archaeology as a whole, not simply to world prehistory, in order to see what
topics are stressed. Of the 3327 pages of text in these 7 books, only 94 pages, or 2.8 percent,
focus on topics important to traditional non-academic archaeologists, like conservation,
repatriation, CRM, and legislation [3]. (See Appendix 1 for a list of the textbooks and the pages
in each of them devoted to these topics).
It is important, however, to ask how these texts are read. Although the author of the text
might highlight certain issues at the expense of others, the author is 'dead', as the literary
critic Roland Barthes commented (1974): the critical student may embark on an unintended
reading or even toss the text into the rubbish bin, regardless of the author's meaning or
desires. Does students' understanding of archaeology reflect the topical biases of the
textbooks? There is indeed evidence that professors succeed, either through textbooks or
lectures, in using their privileged position as teachers to propagate a view that favours their
own interests as academic archaeologists, a view that elevates the archaeology of the
academy and of the museum above all other archaeologies. Students prefer academic
employment more than any other sector represented in the SAA, and research interests of
students match most closely the interests of their professors and least closely the interests of
public-sector and private-sector archaeologists (Zeder 1997a: 138-141). The results of the
SAA survey reveal that archaeologists of all types prefer employment in a graduate
university over any other job (Zeder 1997a: 60-61). Although this might simply mean that
the types of activities conducted by academic archaeologists are the most preferable, other
evidence corroborates the idea that academic archaeology is the most prestigious. For
example, while most academic archaeologists felt that their current career path matched their
expectations, public- and private-sector archaeologists (outside of academia) were more
likely to feel that their current employment was inconsistent with what they expected to do
(Zeder 1997a: 114), which shows that when archaeologists complete their degrees, they feel
that academic archaeology is the 'proper' archaeological employment. In sum, academic
archaeologists succeed in convincing many of their students that the archaeology of the
academy is the most valuable type of archaeology. Perhaps the preference for jobs in a
graduate institution as opposed to a two-year or four-year university signifies that other
archaeologists are aware of the special discursive power that comes from being in a position
to train those who will carry the discourse in the future -- today's postgraduate students.
Hiring practices and institutional prestige
The fact that elite departments prefer to hire PhDs from elite departments suggests that where
one obtained one's degree is an extremely important factor in hiring practices in general.
Obviously, there is a huge constraint on who gets to teach archaeology these days; in almost
all cases, only those with a PhD can teach at the university level or above (Zeder 1997a: 55).
However, it might also be the case that graduates of the most prestigious programmes are
most often hired to teach. To evaluate this, I took a closer look at hiring practices between
1991 and 1996 (the most recent years for which data were available) and compared the
number of PhDs awarded in this range of years to the number of these PhD recipients who
held jobs listed in the 1996-97 AAA Guide to Anthropology Departments. These data were
coded by postgraduate institution so that PhDs from the 12 'elite institutions' could be
separated from PhDs from all other institutions. If there are constraints on which
archaeologists are allowed to become professors and shape the discourse, we would expect to
find that most of the teaching jobs available are held by people who receive their PhD from
elite institutions. The data are presented in the following table. 'Teaching jobs' consist of
either full-time or part-time positions, not includng adjunct positions.
As the table shows, people who received degrees from elite institutions have a better chance
of finding a teaching job. If there were no 'institutional effect' on employment, we would
expect that the percentage of people from non-elite schools who find jobs to be the same as
the percentage of people from elite schools who find jobs. In fact, the deviation of the data
from these expectations is significant at the 0.10 level of statistical significance (chi-square =
3.4711, df=1).
If we expand the range of analysis to include not just recent PhDs, but all PhDs from 1967
(the first year in which the AAA Guide to Departments listed this information) to the present,
the trend becomes clearer. The relevant data are displayed in the table below. In this table,
the '12 most successful schools' are not the same twelve 'elite' schools selected by the 1992
SAA survey and presented in Appendix 2, but those schools whose graduates between 1967
and 1996 held the most jobs as documented by the 1996-97 AAA Guide to departments. Not
coincidentally, these two lists of 12 schools are about the same. The 12 'most successful'
schools are listed in Appendix 4. The database of PhDs awarded begins with 1967 and
continues to the spring of 1996, with a gap for the years 1969-
1970.
The information in the table again demonstrates that getting a degree from one of the top 12
schools improves one's chances of finding a job. If the school from which one received one's
degree was not an important factor in finding employment, then we would expect those who
received PhDs from the 12 elite programmes and from all other programmes to be hired in
equal numbers (relative, of course, to the total number of PhDs awarded in each of these
categories). However, the numbers presented above deviate from this expectation, and the
deviation is highly statistically significant (p=0.001, chi-square = 31.5329, df=1). I
underscore the fact that the most successful schools awarded 39.5 percent of the PhDs but
took 49.3 percent of the jobs. Although all other schools awarded about 60 percent of the
PhDs, these archaeologists hold only half of the teaching jobs.
Considering all job positions in the 1996-97 school year (not just those held by PhDs from
1967 to the present), we find again that some schools have many more of their PhDs placed
in jobs. Appendix 5 shows the 12 schools that have been most successful in finding teaching
appointments for their PhDs. (The list differs from the list in Appendix 4, because the Appendix 4 does
not include teachers who received PhDs before 1967). When combined, these 12 schools
control a majority of the archaeology teaching positions (full- or part-time) in the United
States. The table below summarises this information.
As the chart makes clear, 14.6 percent of the nation's archaeology graduate programmes
control 54 percent of the teaching jobs -- a dominant and constraining presence in
archaeological discourse. Of the 82 schools that have awarded PhD degrees between 1967
and 1996, seven programmes have been completely unsuccessful in finding teaching jobs for
their degree recipients.
I mentioned above that the power of professors lies in their ability as gatekeepers to
influence the archaeologists of the future. Because professors control (at least to some
degree) the production of new archaeologists, whatever schools can control the reproduction
of the professorial body will accrue the most academic power (Bourdieu 1988: 78). The
disproportionate ability of certain graduate institutions to make professors out of their PhD
recipients is therefore a source of academic power for those insitutions, and we should expect
them to attempt to reproduce this advantage from year to year. However, the structure of
rewards is never static; it must constantly be produced and reproduced (Giddens 1979).
Competition for scarce awards ensures that the structure will be dynamic; the structure of
inequality is never perfectly reproduced. In 1968, the first year the AAA published the
doctoral affiliation of professors, 23 US graduate programmes succeeded in placing one or
more of their PhD recipients in the teaching jobs listed in the AAA Guide. In 1981, 66
graduate programmes succeeded in placing one or more of their PhD recipients in teaching
jobs. In 1996, 75 graduate programmes succeeded in placing one or more of their PhD
recipients in teaching jobs. Despite this opening of the discourse to many more schools, in
each of the three years examined here (1968, 1981, and 1996), the 'distribution of wealth'
among these programmes was considerably lopsided. In 1968, 13.3 percent of the successful
programmes held 54 percent of the jobs; in 1981, 12.1 percent of the successful programmes
held 52 percent of the jobs; and in 1996, 14.6 percent of the total held 54 percent of the jobs.
It thus seems that the job positions tend to cluster at the top. Although more and more
programmes enter the discourse over the years, in each year a similarly small proportion of
programmes controls an inversely proportional number of jobs.
In sum, there is a pattern of unevenness in hiring practices that constrains certain
archaeologists (those from outside of the traditional top programmes) from participating in
the discourse through teaching. We might interpret this unevenness by stating that the
dominant archaeology schools have better professors and resources and therefore attract the
best students, who are then most successful in finding jobs. There are many other elements
that affect hiring practices that are not so easily documented, such as campaigning by
professors, subjective preferences of the schools that hire, and any number of other political
factors. However, I believe that the data presented here are strong enough to demonstrate that
power structures and attempts to reproduce them are part of the many factors contributing to
this unevenness, and that this discursive formation constraining to the benefit of those schools
that are most successful. Although many archaeologists might deny that the reputation of
their school put them where they are, being attached to a prestigious institution still seems to
be a powerful resource for those seeking jobs. This is simply the power of a name. Therefore,
I reach a conclusion similar to that reached by Bair, et al. (1986: 412) in their 1986 analysis
of top-ranked general anthropology programmes: 'no more in [archaeology] than in the rest
of the world do the deserving get their just reward'. As strategies of reproducing the power
structure intersect with hiring practices, where one obtained one's degree can be more
important on the job market than what one did to get that degree.
Citation pratices and rhetoric
The debate over processual archaeology is also a good place to examine how rhetorical
strategies constrain discourse. According to Foucault (1981: 64), 'Doctrine binds individuals
to certain types of enunciation'. There is a reductionist tendency at work (Bourdieu 1988: 14),
in which key words serve as academic capital whether or not they even retain any meaning
(Baker, et al., 1990: 1; Moran and Hides 1990: 212). These words constrain creativity,
because archaeologists have to place emphasis on these rather empty words as a strategy to
conform to the requirements of the system of rewards. An excellent example is the word
'science' (see Tilley 1990a: 139-140). 'Scientific' New Archaeology was explicitly crafted as
a reaction against the non-scientific archaeology that preceded it. (Of course,
oversimplification, like what I have done in this statement, is a rhetorical strategy in itself.)
In reviewing the rhetoric of the first issues of American Antiquity, I noticed, to my surprise,
that many authors were also talking about a scientific archaeology in a polemical fashion
(Ford 1938: 260; Mason 1938: 300; McKern 1935: 82; Steward and Setzler 1938: 10) [7]. The
scientific archaeology of the 1930s was certainly different from the scientific archaeology of
today, but in the theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s, New Archaeologists used the
word 'science' without reflection on its complexity and historic meaning in archaeology. In
this case, rhetorical strategies -- 'doctrine' in Foucault's terminology -- suppress the
interesting and dynamic genealogy of the word 'science' and make it a buzzword used
simply to gain currency. Another empty buzzword, this one used generously by processual
archaeologists criticising the post-processual archaeology of the 1980s, is 'relativism'
(Johnson 1998).
Another strategy I have noticed in polemical writings of various archaeologists is that of declaring
archaeology 'difficult'. For example, George Cowgill writes (1993: 560), 'We must
acknowledge the unavoidable difficulties, roll up our sleeves, as it were, and try to deal with
them'; Richard Watson writes (1990: 673), 'The social sciences are truly the hard sciences';
Mike Shanks and Chris Tilley (1992: 107) -- 'Archaeology, and history, are the most difficult
of all disciplines ...'; Robert Kelley (1992: 255) -- 'It would be nice if archaeology were
easy, but it is not'; Bruce Trigger (1991: 552) -- '[Developing a holistic archaeology] is
perhaps the most challenging and potentially important task ...'; Julian Thomas and Chris
Tilley (1992: 107) -- 'the understanding of past societies on the basis of their material
remains is surely one of the most complex philosophical problems human beings have ever
set themselves'. What is funny here is that nobody in this recent debate has said that
archaeology would be easy. This rhetoric of archaeology as difficult is therefore gratuitous
and, as you can see, ridiculously exaggerated, but archaeologists have stuck to this rhetoric
because whoever says that archaeology is hard can empower her or his voice by sounding
sophisticated.
Archaeology, like any discourse, produces knowledge. Knowledge, however, is always
produced by agents living and working in society. Archaeology is therefore social practice,
subject to the interests of its practitioners (Shanks and Tilley 1988: 197, 200). Many of the
interests of archaeologists conform to the system of rewards of the field. This system of
rewards establishes a guideline in which certain topics of research are more worthy, certain
styles of presentation are more appropriate, and certain research institutions are more
prestigious (see Gero 1995: 178). To succeed in procuring the scarce cultural resource
management (CRM) contracts, fellowships, and tenure tracks, one must follow these
guidelines. Adherence to the guidelines produces regularities, or what Foucault (1972: 32)
calls 'discursive formations'. As certain research topics become taboo and certain styles of
presentation become unacceptable, discursive formations become discursive constraints, or,
what Shanks and Tilley refer to as 'structures of oligarchic orthodoxy' (1989: 9).
the university field is, like any other field, the locus of a struggle to determine the
conditions and the criteria of legitimate membership and legitimate hierarchy -- to determine
which properties are pertinent, effective, and liable to function as capital so as to generate
specific profits ... (1988: 11).
Antedating Bourdieu's writing on the sociology of academia, Alison Wylie (1983: 120)
noted 15 years ago that 'the archaeological research enterprise can profitably be viewed as a
field of struggle to produce and control ... "scientific capital" -- a composite of competence
and authority which is built up by controlling the production of scientific knowledge'.
'In the 1980s, archaeologists in both England and the United States called for a critical
sociology to examine the unevenness of archaeological capital and constraints on the
production of knowledge ...'
In this section, I attempt to demonstrate that academic archaeologists teach archaeology in a
way that reproduces the prestige of the academy. The university degree is an obvious
constraint. To become a professional archaeologist, one must be authorised by a piece of
paper that takes many years and often lots of money to obtain. Payment of this membership
fee, however, engages a more subtle mechanism of control. Because you have to go to
school, you submit yourself to the influence of professors [2]. If you want to make a significant
contribution to the field -- through publication of work, direction of an archaeological firm,
or control over museum displays, for example -- you need a master's or doctoral degree,
which places you even more firmly in the indoctrinating grip of your professors. Professors
therefore have more control over the field because they have students as a captive audience
and can reproduce their own status and ideas in the next generation of archaeologists.
Because they are uniquely privileged to award degrees, professors are gatekeepers and can
even force students to accept their standards. Education in archaeology is thus a double
constraint: only certain people are empowered to pursue education, and therefore a
career in archaeology, while only certain archaeologists are authorised to teach archaeology.
'A student assigned ... these textbooks might
think that "real" archaeology is an exotic excavation in the jungles of Central America, while
CRM, for example, is but a second-fiddle career suitable only for those who are not good
enough for "real" archaeology'.
Although many chapters are of interest to all
archaeologists, it is easy to conclude that a student assigned one of these textbooks might
think that 'real' archaeology is an exotic excavation in the jungles of Central America, while
CRM, for example, is but a second-fiddle career suitable only for those who are not good
enough for 'real' archaeology [4]. Furthermore, it is important to note that archaeology texts are
much more than introductions for future archaeologists. The textbook, like the prospectus of
an archaeology department, is an important interface between archaeology and the rest of the
world (or at least that part of the educated world that may have taken a single archaeology
class during higher education) and thus carries the responsibility/privilege of representing
the field (see Tilley 1993b).
Within academic archaeology, postgraduate programmes compete for prestige. Beginning
with the fetishised assumption that capital breeds capital (Bourdieu 1988: 91), I now examine
strategies that elite postgraduate programmes use to reproduce their academic capital. One
strategy is inbreeding -- an elite institution hiring graduates of other recognised elite
institutions. Armed with a list of the 12 most highly ranked graduate programmes in the US,
based on a 1992 SAA survey that appeared in the 1993 SAA Bulletin (Appendix 2), and lists
of the archaeology faculties of these 12 institutions, as presented in the 1997 Association of
American Anthropology (AAA) Guide to Departments, I quantified the degree of elite
'inbreeding' by computing the percentages of professors, from each department, both full-time and part-time who received doctorates from the 12 most highly ranked programmes
(Appendix 3) [5]. The highest degree of elite inbreeding among elite departments was at the
University of California, at its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, where 90 percent of the
professors received their degrees from elite institutions. The average inbreeding percentage
for the top 12 was 75 percent (91 out of 121). In other words, 75 percent of the staff at elite
departments in the US got their PhDs from elite departments. This figure is significantly
greater than the percentage of elite PhD recipients employed as full-time or part-time
professors in all universities listed in the Guide, which is 54 percent (480 out of 884) [6], and
much greater than the percentage of total PhDs awarded by these top 12 programmes from
1968-1996, which is 39 percent (849 out of 2148). In sum, the percentage of people from
elite graduate departments hired by elite programmes is much higher than the percentage of
people from elite departments as a whole. It may be true that elite programmes hire products
of other elite programmes because these 'products' are the best on the job market, but if that
were the case, then why are not products of elite programmes hired in the same proportion
across the board? My interpretation of this discrepancy is that elites hire other elites
disproportionately to help boost their reputation.
No. of PhDs awarded,
1991-96
No. of recent PhDs
who found teaching jobs
Percentage of recent
PhDs who found teaching jobs
Elite
institutions
176
36
20.5
Non-elite institutions
326
44
13.5
TOTAL
502
80
15.9
PhDs awarded,
1967-96
Percentage of
total PhDs
Jobs held
Percentage of
total jobs
Percent chance
of finding a job
12 most successful
schools
849
39.5
369
49.3
43.5
All other schools
1299
60.5
380
50.7
29.3
TOTAL
2148
100
749
100
34.9
Number of PhD recipients
holding teachings jobs
Percentage of total
teaching jobs
Percentage of schools
Most successful
schools (n=12)
480
54
14.6
All other schools
(n=70)
404
46
85.4
All schools
(n=82)
884
100
100
Individual archaeologists also impose restrictions to gain prestige. Citation practices are an
excellent way to create a bottleneck around a concept. By constantly citing oneself or failing
to cite others, an author jockeys for ownership of ideas and becomes another kind of
gatekeeper, assuring that future discourse must be related to the author's contribution (Becher
1989: 59-60; Foucault 1981: 64). As for citation practices, Tilley (1990b) observed that
Michael Schiffer attempted to establish himself as a 'big man' in the archaeological tribe by
citing himself 66 times (about once every paragraph) in a paper about the structure of
archaeological theory. To this egregious example, I would like to add a recent paper (Spencer
1997), also about 'archaeological theory', in which the author cites himself 72 times. Non-processualists are equally guilty of what could appear to be self-promotional citation
practices. For example, Hodder's initial critiques of processual archaeology (Hodder 1982,
1985, 1986) carried arguments similar to those published by Bayard (1969) and Kushner
(1970), but he did not cite these prominent papers.
Coda
To conclude, I have modelled archaeology as a discursive practice and reviewed some of the
ways power has shaped the discourse through constraints on knowledge production. I have
attempted to emphasise, as does Bourdieu (1988), the strategic manner in which actors,
motivated by socio-politico-economic interests, struggle to reproduce the discourse.
Nevertheless, in cases like the discursive formation opposing women, there is no conspiracy
of powerful actors dominating the discourse -- no smoke-filled room of archaeological bosses
cooking up master plans for consent. Despite the fact that there are powerful actors that may
achieve the status of a gatekeeper, in some cases it seems more likely that constraints to the
discourse are perpetuated by subtle micro-processes diffused throughout the sites of practice.
Parezo and Bender (1994: 74) seem to refer to these micro-processes when they state that
'subtle techniques ... take over as the major mechanism for limiting effective and coequal
participation'. Equally subtle techniques seem to be at work in the teaching of archaeology.
Professors may not even be discursively conscious of the topical biases of their textbooks.
Likewise, the attitude of elite graduate departments toward hiring PhDs from other elite
departments is probably neither overt nor recognised by those who perpetuate this
practice. However, neither knowledgeable actors nor subtle micro-processes can fully dictate
the order of discourse. Established structures may guide the discourse but do not dominate it
entirely.
I suspect, however, that many readers are well aware of the conclusions that I have reached. Why, then, have I gone to pains to add extra details to a story that is already familiar? Some argue that this type of research can expose the historically constituted nature of truth and make it a target ultimately for a political critique (Baker, et al. 1990; Tilley 1990a: 327-8). In a similar vein, I consider this research useful for equity issues. To combat the chilly climate towards women in archaeology, for example, we must first make a detailed investigation of this climate to discover how and why equity is not realised. Beyond this, however, it would be useful to suggest ways in which the system could or should be reformed. True reform, I believe, is not possible. Since archaeology is a social profession, there can be no way of disentangling personal interests, institutional interests, and disciplinary interests from the pasts we interpret and produce. What we can do, however, is attempt to make these interests as explicit as possible. Although there is nothing new about this approach -- archaeologists have adopted an ironic trope (see White 1978) of critical self-reflexivity ever since the loss of innocence -- there are various ways to expose power structures in archaeological texts. One way is to recognise that archaeological texts, like all texts, are by nature intersubjective and intertextual. Every paper is driven by multiple motives and voices. Although many voices are acknowledged through citation, some motives are left unexplored. The reader is often left unaware of why and how a paper is getting published and the power relations embedded in textual production. Rather than suppressing these motives, we should call attention to them. This amounts to a sort of deconstruction that I will attempt to demonstrate by using my own paper as an example. A good place to begin is with the author. Who am I? The editors have asked me to append a 50-word biography to my submission. Such a biography should be part of the paper itself. Frankly, I am a postgraduate student facing a very difficult job market. I write papers like this and attempt to get them published partially out of concern for our field, but also in conformity to the system of rewards -- publish or perish. I have fretted over this paper to a great degree, knowing that it may offend 'the establishment', whatever precisely that is. Then again, do people who get offended by such papers even read an Internet journal like assemblage? Did this possibility guide my decision to submit this paper to assemblage? To continue the biography, I have recently entered the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, a programme with a good reputation and success on the job market. Although I came here for many reasons, I am highly aware that my move might maximise my chances on the job market. Parts of this paper are written to please the reviewers of assemblage, specifically, this last section on moving beyond documenting the 'situation' to considering how to reform it. Other parts of the paper have been written specifically to conform to ideas that carry heavy academic capital in current archaeology. Specifically, I am referring to the many times I have cited French intellectuals like Foucault, Barthes, and Bourdieu and the somewhat unnecessary mention in this same paragraph of Hayden White's 'tropics of discourse', a topic which I take to be quite prestigious in theoretical archaeology these days, given its prominent role in the introductions to two recent volumes edited by archaeological theorists of the highest profile (Shanks and Hodder 1995; Tilley 1993a).
In sum, though strategies for prestige in archaeology may always mediate archaeological discourse, they can be understood if we try to make them transparent. Making these strategies and power relations transparent, perhaps through the sort of deconstruction attempted above, should be a top priority. Robert Preucel has recently suggested that archaeology can only begin its engagement with other social sciences and society at large if we reconstruct archaeology (conceptually) as a form of social practice (1995: 162-3). Along the same lines, Tilley has suggested that interpreting the past requires 'an understanding of the conventions and operations of that institution and discipline' that is archaeology (1993a: 15). To do this, we must recognise that what is said about the past, how it is said, and who says it, are always already mitigated by the power relations underlying the system of rewards in the present. Therefore, we must 'roll up our sleeves' and add to what we say about the past a critical study of the institutions, funding agencies, professional vehicles, etc. which on the one hand enable, yet on the other hand constrain archaeological practice.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Arthur Joyce for commenting on an earlier version
of this paper and Fred McGhee for support.
1986 In Search of the Past: An Introduction to Archaeology (J. Bower).
1989 Archaeology, 2nd ed. (D.H. Thomas).
1993 Archaeology: Discovering Our Past, 2nd ed. (R.J. Sharer and W. Ashmore).
1993 Out of the Past: An Introduction to Archaeology (D.L. Webster, S.T. Evans, and W.T. Sanders).
1993 Archaeology: The Science of Once and Future Things (B. Hayden).
1995 Archaeology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (K. Greene).
1996 Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 2nd ed. (C. Renfrew and P. Bahn).
| Text | Total pages | Pages devoted to CRM, conservation, restoration, legislation, etc. | % |
| Bower | 458 | 31 (pp. 10-11, 132-5, 216-7, 436-58) | 6.77 |
| Thomas | 605 | 6 (pp. 132-4, 223, 119-20) | 0.99 |
| Sharer, et al. | 575 | 25 (pp. 12, 33-5, 579-600) | 4.35 |
| Webster, et al. | 571 | 2 (pp. 61, 65) | 0.21 |
| Hayden | 467 | 1 | 0.21 |
| Greene | 176 | 7 (pp. 175-81) | 4.19 |
| Renfrew, et al. | 475 | 22 (pp. 463-84) | 4.63 |
| TOTALS | 3327 | 94 | 2.83 |
Appendix 2: Top-Ranked US Archaeology Postgraduate Programmes (SAA Bulletin 1993)
| 1. | Michigan |
| 2. | Arizona |
| 3. | University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley) |
| 4. | Arizona State |
| 5. | Pennsylvania |
| 6. | Washington |
| 7. | Harvard |
| 8. | University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) |
| 9. | New Mexico |
| 10. | Wisconsin |
| 11. | Chicago |
| 12. | Illinois |
Appendix 3: Percentage of Staff that is 'Inbred' in Top-Ranked US Archaeology Programmes
| Arizona | 93% (N=15) |
| Berkeley | 90% (N=10) |
| UCLA | 90% (N=10) |
| Chicago | 86% (N=7) |
| Pennsylvania | 82% (N=11) |
| New Mexico | 71% (N=7) |
| Arizona State | 69% (N=16) |
| Harvard | 60% (N=10) |
| Wisconsin | 56% (N=9) |
| Illinois | 50% (N=8) |
| Washington | 40% (N=5) |
Appendix 4: Programmes with Most Graduates from the Years 1968 to 1996 in Teaching Positions in 1996
| Michigan | 55 |
| Harvard | 46 |
| Arizona | 40 |
| Berkeley | 39 |
| UCLA | 33 |
| Pennslyvania | 32 |
| Illinois | 25 |
| Yale | 23 |
| University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) | 21 |
| Southern Illinois | 19 |
Appendix 5: The 12 Programmes with the Most Graduates in Teaching Positions, as of 1996-97
| 1. | Harvard | 74 |
| 2. | Michigan | 62 |
| 3. | Arizona | 51 |
| 4. | Berkeley | 45 |
| 5. | UCLA | 39 |
| 6. | Pennsylvania | 37 |
| 7. | Chicago | 33 |
| 8. | Yale | 30 |
| 9. | Illinois | 25 |
| 10. | UCSB | 21 |
| 11. | Columbia | 20 |
| 12. | New Mexico | 19 |
Copyright © S. Hutson 1998
Copyright © assemblage 1998