Metaarchaeology: An Essay on the Conditions of Knowledge about the Past comes from one of the key thinkers in archaeological theory from the Balkans. This book goes beyond local debates in Balkan archaeology and into detailed and provocative discussion on the nature of archaeological knowledge and its production. Although the book is written in Serbian, it deserves scholarly attention beyond the Balkan archaeological community, considering that it is the most up-to-date take on this topic. The book consists of a preface, four main chapters (each with its own bibliographical note), bibliography, summary in English, and indices of terms and names.
As the author states already in the preface, the goal of this book is a consideration of the ways in which archaeology creates knowledge. This goal implies questioning the general criteria on the basis of which one estimates the relevance of a researcher's observation or statement. Babić uses the term ‘metaarchaeology’ for a strategy of critical thinking about the conceptual frames, presuppositions, subject, method, and goals which constitute archaeology as a distinct research field (p. 7). One of the main ideas of this book is that gaining knowledge is a collective praxis (p. 8). This is demonstrated throughout this work, and especially reflected on in the last chapter.
The first chapter, titled ‘Knowledge about Knowledge’, deals with the ways in which problems are recognized and solved by researches. Babić opens the chapter by stating that there is a silent agreement between the academic community and the public that the knowledge produced in academic circles represents reliable facts, on the basis of which society makes decisions (p. 9). She also stresses that there is a significant difference between archaeological excavation and laboratory work, although there were and there still are archaeologists who would have excavation work functioning like laboratory work—not so much in its technical aspects, as in insisting on proving or disproving previously proposed hypotheses. However, this aim is complicated by social factors which very much determine when, where, how, and for how long one can excavate (pp. 10–11).
Using the discussion of Umberto Eco (Reference Eco2000) on Ornithorhynchidae (in which he reflects on categories as philosophical and semiotic tools) as her starting point, Babić introduces the reader to her book by asking how a problem is recognized, how the unknown is explained relying on the known, when we can say that we have obtained enough data, and how much and which data is needed to make a valid conclusion. These questions are not only relevant for archaeology but for all forms of research and critical thinking. Babić stresses that archaeologists always work with incomplete data sets no matter how meticulously they gather the data. She also asks how data are formed and how previous ideas and knowledge limit the field of the possible. As archaeologists make decisions on which data is relevant, they are responsible to the public which further uses, interprets, or appropriates archaeological knowledge. The chapter continues with a discussion on the ways problems were recognized and methods were suggested for solving these problems in the Western intellectual tradition, from Plato, to René Descartes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Immanuel Kant (pp. 18–23). Babić then discusses how these different ideas on knowledge found their way in archaeology as logical positivism/empiricism and the deductive-nomological method.
Before reflecting on the question of whether knowledge is gained through refutation of previous knowledge or through revolution, Babić points out that it is important, over and over again, to come back to the ideas (sensu L. Fleck Reference Fleck1979 [1935]) which form the basis of later upgrades, and to understand these ideas in the context in which they were formed (p. 31). The chapter continues with an introduction to the ideas of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Babić is negatively critical towards viewing the history of archaeologies through paradigm shifts. This is because she argues that Kuhn's concept of the normal state of science neglects the fact that in every community, including the scientific community, one finds constant internal conflicts of varying intensity, and that what constitutes normal states is a consensus which does not necessarily reflect the real states of affairs (p. 35). Furthermore, not all archaeological communities went through the supposed paradigm shifts of culture-historical/new or processual/postprocessual archaeology, and certainly not in the same way. Numerous examples can be found of ideas living on long after their initial formation, sometimes in a completely new social and ideological context. She introduces the thoughts of Ludwik Fleck (e.g. ‘thought collective’) as a way to describe and understand the way researchers form ideas and knowledge (Fleck Reference Fleck1979 [1935]: 39). Building on the work of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1988), Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (Reference Latour and Woolgar1979), among others, she puts emphasis on knowledge production as the work of a community—a collective. The discussion continues with the inherent social construction of archaeological knowledge and the relevance of the researcher's position in society and vis-à-vis their research subject.
Apart from the thinkers and ideas discussed by Babić in this chapter, one must also mention the debate on human nature between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault from 1971 (Chomsky & Foucault, Reference Chomsky and Foucault2006), in which Foucault suggested a different way of approaching the history of science. He argued that within traditional history of science importance was given to the creativity of individuals, at the expense of analysis of how great scientific revolutions not only remove the obstacles, prejudices, and preconceived ideas on the way of gaining knowledge, but also eliminate and mask a certain amount of existing knowledge. This would act as if a new grid is applied that allows the appearance of previously masked phenomena while, at the same time, masking existing ones (Chomsky & Foucault, Reference Chomsky and Foucault2006: 15–19). Foucault opted for analysing these grids. His approach is indeed one possible way to understand the functioning of knowledge production in archaeology too, as it is far from the paradigm shifts and breaks implied by Kuhn. Although the chapter summarizes most of the ideas of critical thinkers on knowledge production, it is still far from a comprehensive summary of ongoing discussions on the same topic present for example in philosophy of science (cf. Naujoks & Stelling, Reference Naujoks, Stelling, Naujoks, Stelling and Scholz2018).
The second chapter, ‘Knowledge about the Past’, opens with a discussion on time and how it operates within archaeology. Among other crucial moments in the history of the humanities, Babić sees the moment when ‘Others in space became equated with Others in time’ as decisive (p. 57). She refers to the colonial background of both archaeology and anthropology and how time was constructed on the lines of European ideas of progress and unilineal socio-cultural evolution. Lacking is discussion of how ‘time goes into things’, a turn in the history of archaeology recognized by Undine Stabrey (Reference Stabrey2017) as crucial for later developments in archaeological method and theory. This chapter continues with discussion on naturalist and hermeneutic models in the humanities, formed in the nineteenth century and still echoing through the discipline of archaeology. Babić stresses that the difference between hard sciences and the humanities is that the latter do not only have the goal to make statements on things but also to make value judgements, and to propose goals and rules of social life (p. 60). However, one does not have to do a lot of research to understand that hard science more often than not finds itself in the same position where responsibility to the public is concerned. Considering the fact that some paths and possibilities in exploring the past are not taken, the knowledge of the past becomes the knowledge of ourselves (p. 62).
Babić continues with discussion on how archaeological knowledge is produced through processes of selection, summarizing, generalizing, stressing, or neglecting, and how these are also dependant on authorities that decide what enters the record and in which way (p. 64). Further reflections in this chapter are on the ideas of postprocessual archaeology and material culture as a text. Babić points out that although postprocessual archaeologists radically rethought the ways in which knowledge is socially constructed, they nevertheless did not really even give a hint as to what the quantification and generalizing models of processual archaeology might be replaced with (p. 74). She also states that even if one gives up on the notion of material culture as a text, archaeological knowledge is inevitably transformed into text or comes forth in a textual form (p. 77). Missing from the chapter are discussions on archaeology that postdate the postprocessual turn, such as the microarchaeological approach advocated by a group of mostly Scandinavian archaeologists (Fahlander, Reference Fahlander2009–2018). Nor does Babić discuss object agency and the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology (Harris & Cipolla, Reference Harris and Cipolla2017). This can possibly be explained by the lack of interest in these questions within Balkan archaeology.
The third chapter, ‘Archaeological Knowledge’ (pp. 85–123), discusses the relation between textual sources and material culture in the formation of knowledge of the past. Babić points out that disciplinary borders as we know them were formed in specific places and times (p. 116) and that these borders are slowly but surely dissolving. Even when textual sources are available, the potential of material culture is not diminished. Material culture is also not a direct reflection of the social norms of the group in which it was created and used but a subject of different and often contradictory transformations (p. 100). Babić stresses that the total archaeological record will never be achieved no matter the development of the techniques of recording. This opens the question: how representative actually is the archaeological record? Babić rightfully warns that collecting archaeological data in order to leave the interpretations to experts from the hard sciences is not so much different than collecting data for the narratives already constructed by historians (p. 112). Archaeology should not be the handmaid of hard sciences any more than the bridesmaid of history. Our task is not to illustrate the works of historians with pots, jewellery, weapons, houses, temples, etc. Indeed, with the so called ‘third science revolution’ we are witnessing this more and more. One example for this is the fitting of the results of DNA analysis of the mummies from the site of Abusir el Meleq in Egypt into problematic historical narratives. Schuenemann et al. (Reference Schuenemann, Peltzer, Welte, van Pelt, Molak and Wang2017) explain the genetic affinity of some of the mummies to Levantine groups as a consequence of large-scale immigration of the Hyksos. This interpretation neglects that ‘the Hyksos’ is the name of the ruling class of the fifteenth dynasty in Egypt and not of an ethnic group originating from the Levant and living in the eastern Delta of Egypt (Candelora, Reference Candelora2018: 65).
The fourth chapter, ‘Knowledge and Practice’ (pp. 123–47), is a more self-reflective discussion on the ideas from the previous chapters. It follows different contexts in which the professional career of the author was formed, in Yugoslavia and later in Serbia. A short history of her student life and later on professional academic career, can be read as a sketch of the development of archaeology in the region, but also of the development of thought within a small circle of archaeologists who were increasingly unsatisfied with the situation of the field in Serbia. Babić stresses that narratives about the past produced by archaeologists are necessarily regional (p. 141). Thus, the book ends with a description of the state of Serbian archaeology and the work of a small collective of archaeologists in the Balkans. This collective adopted a reflective approach to archaeology and knowledge production. Quoted are selected works of a small number of Serbian archaeologists of the younger generation who based their thinking in the criticism of Panhellenic narrative and Romanization, as a stepping stone for further work in the field.
The bibliography spans twenty-three pages (p. 149–71) and numbers 297 references, an impressive count considering that the main text of the book has 140 pages. Among the quoted sources one can notice exclusively works written in English and Serbian, but this is not surprising considering that most of the discussions covered in the book took place in scholarly contexts of the United Kingdom and the USA, and that the author comes from Serbia. Babić summarizes her work in English over twelve pages (pp. 173–84), after which follows an index of terms and an index of names (pp. 185–88).
To conclude, Staša Babić’s book is nicely written, easy to follow, and rich in discussions on the work of archaeology and archaeologists. It is to be welcomed by the archaeological community in the Balkans but deserves equal attention by other archaeological communities. It tackles issues important to all of those who produce and disseminate knowledge about the past, no matter their theoretical stand.
