Tim Murray’s book is a review of ideas from his PhD thesis, underpinned by his 37-year-long academic career, and it is written more for practising archaeologists or academics than undergraduates. It discusses how historiographical reflection on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of (mainly prehistoric) archaeology highlights their relevance to post-1960 ongoing angst about the ontological nature and epistemological structure of archaeology in its relation to history, science and social studies. His aim within those temporal limits is successful, but it would be easier for those archaeologists who have yet to reach retirement age to follow the argument if he provided more information about developments in archaeological methodology and theory during 1900–1960.
The book is organised in 14 chapters, which have abstracts, keywords and texts with numbered sections (some have introductions and conclusions), notes and references, but author and general indices are lacking. There are a few quibbles with the text such as that references clutter convoluted sentences—endnotes would have made reading it easier; the proofreading is slipshod and sometimes the date of a reference stands mysteriously alone without its author, and spelling mistakes are common—for example, ‘antimony’ appears 11 times instead of ‘antinomy’. In short, style matters.
Murray declares in his Introduction that, notwithstanding overlap between archaeology and other disciplines, “elements of archaeological data … comprise unique kinds of data about human action” (p.7). This uniqueness stimulates his intellectual concern. He asks whether archaeologists should redefine our “discipline in terms of an increasing perception of the distinctiveness of archaeological records as records of human action?” (p.262). He argues with conviction for the possibility of “a different view about the distinctiveness of archaeological epistemology and … of disciplinary data sets from those routinely made sense of by anthropologists or historians using contemporary social theory” (p.260), whose engagement with archaeologists who conduct excavations and laboratory investigations is often a dialogue of the deaf in which one side talks past the other because we lack commonly agreed frames of reference regarding human action and cognition. Acknowledging the distinctive nature of archaeological records requires, I suspect, interdisciplinary conversations using a hyperdimensional, mathematically functional-based, meta-discourse on a level playing-field, and a dynamically labile common language. This should be equally unfamiliar and uncommon to all players, which would likely be a transcendent challenge to the quotidian static scholarly vernacular of the humanities. Such conversations could produce a reciprocally shared understanding between archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, thereby resolving current fragile agreements to disagree.
It would have been useful to read how a coherent outcome could be achieved. I think it requires an atemporal conversation, based on the transmissibility of information in different circumstances. It might point towards developing a meta-discourse (instead of high-level theories that mask preconceptions), thereby enabling partial resolution of epistemological and ontological differences among archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists and historians.
I warmed to Murray’s demand for a better “understanding of the relationship between the measurement of time in archaeological contexts and the constitution of archaeological phenomena as sources of information about the human past” (p.255). He insists that the matter is fundamental to the ontology and epistemology of archaeology. In 1981, reflecting on archaeological palimpsests, Geoff Bailey coined the concept of ‘time-perspectivism’ (Bailey Reference Bailey, Sheridan and Bailey1981). Murray laments that, being “peripheral to contemporary archaeological theory” (p.261), “it continues to fail to animate archaeologists—notwithstanding the absolute centrality of time for archaeologists” (p.300) who generally dislike time-perspectivism’s counter-intuitive basis in the hard-nosed scientific scepticism of critical realist inquiry, thwarting inherent longings to reconstruct the past. Nonetheless, time-perspectivism offers archaeology, especially prehistoric archaeology, a deflationary view of human evolution that is sceptical of notions of ‘cumulative cultural evolution’ conjectured from functionalist, structuralist, processual or contextualist visions of hunter-gatherers (cf. Manrique, Friston & Walker Reference Manrique, Friston and Walker2024; Walker Reference Walker2025). In that context, Murray thinks archaeology can redirect our “understanding of humanity … by describing a new constellation of phenomena that have the capacity to inform us about human history and human nature”, and thereby enable “social theory [to] be transformed by its encounter with archaeology” (p.259). His worthy aim is not accompanied by practical advice about how to achieve it. Instead, he turns his attention (in Chapter 13 on ‘Archaeological epistemology, middle range theory, and the prospect of intractable problems?’) to the plausibility of archaeological knowledge claims. He explores methodological and theoretical aspects of these in an account of some post-1960 developments in archaeological reasoning, dwelling particularly on alternative views underlying a wrangle, mainly in the USA, about how to interpret Palaeolithic deposits. Murray’s attention to that tired wrangle gets in the way of considering how working archaeologists continually reassess knowledge claims—a matter treated lucidly by Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie in Evidential reasoning in archaeology (Reference Chapman and Wylie2016) which Murray cites in his Introduction without discussion.
Chapters 4 to 8 enlighten readers about prehistoric archaeology’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots, though awareness is dulled by over-abundant historical detail. It contrasts with his frugality regarding 1900–1960 developments. Between Chapters 8 and 9, there should have been a chapter about those decades, with few historiographical details because many online twentieth-century publications provide them. Younger readers need reminding that many archaeologists and anthropologists discussed in Chapters 9 to 14 were formed when working in different evolving disciplines and schools of thought during 1900–1960. These underlie the diverse orientations of post-1960 research and range from the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, Marxian analyses and Functionalism and Structuralism to the New Archaeology, Processualism, Post-Processual Constructionism and Contextualism.
Murray considers (in Chapter 10 ‘Expanding the Theoretical: Processual and Post-Processual Archaeologies 1960–1990’) the consequent “ontological, tension existing in … theoretical archaeology” during 1900–1960. He identifies “two kinds of ontological debate … the ontology of human action … couched as an opposition between materialism and idealism, and the ontology of the archaeological record itself—the degree to which … it is essentially dissimilar to other empirical sources of knowing about human beings” (p.216). An explanation should have been given (preceding Chapter 9) about how sociopolitical considerations throughout 1900–1960 fostered a growing rift between prehistorians. On one side of the rift were supporters (e.g. V. Gordon Childe) of quasi-historical notions of migratory prehistoric crop-growing and animal-breeding villagers, and diffusion of artisanship such as pottery, metalwork, mining and building boats, carts, earthworks, canals, stone masonry and tombs. On the other side were supporters (e.g. Boris Andrianov, Kent Flannery) of indigenous/autochthonous independent local developments. To complicate matters further, some on either side invoked, in support, notions generated by evolutionary biologists or human geneticists (e.g. racist Carleton Coon, anti-racist Julian Huxley and geneticist Luigi-Luca Cavalli-Sforza). Murray’s grasp of the complicated 1900–1960 sociopolitical and intellectual landscape was shown in his 1978 BA (Hons) Anthropology dissertation, from Sydney University, about Childe. Appreciation of the complexity is prerequisite to understanding Murray’s post-1960 evolution of ‘opposed’ archaeological ontologies. For decades, a positivist-cum-progressivist ghost of social Darwinism haunted the ‘onwards’ and either ‘upwards’ (indigenist) or ‘outwards’ (diffusionist) propensities, imbuing their epistemological and ontological referents. It underlay the wrangle mentioned above and the matter of middle-versus-high level theorising that Murray elucidates. It was laid to rest thanks to critical reflection by biologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers. A bold alternative, requiring compromise all round, could involve exploring what information can be represented usefully, accurately and precisely, by our various disciplinary inquiries, and how, when, where and to whom it is or was ever transmissible. The complexity underlies what Murray declares is a “conceptual and epistemological disputation” provoked by the separation between an ever-growing perception of archaeological records as “fundamentally different kinds of records of human action” (p.199) from those described, interpreted and authorised by anthropology, history and the social sciences. In Chapter 10, he finds it “ironic, given the belief that … the new archaeology would unify the discipline on a more solid scientific foundation, that some 50 years later we should be confronting … extreme disciplinary divergence” (p.207). He offers a gloomy view of the post-1960 split between ‘old and new archaeologies’ followed by a split between ‘processual and post-processual archaeologies’, concluding “these hard-fought debates remain largely unresolved … practitioners seem to have coped … by simply moving theoretical focus to other concerns. What we have instead is a theoretical impasse about issues that go right to the heart of understanding of the nature and purpose of the discipline” (p.208). Quite so.
