The Science of What Was Kept

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-MDN.SYN · The Midden · The Approximate Mind

In 1973 the journal Antiquity published a paper by David Clarke called “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” and the title did most of the arguing before the first paragraph. Clarke was the enfant terrible of Cambridge archaeology, a Fenland brewer’s son who had written his doctorate on beaker pottery, thousands of prehistoric drinking vessels sorted and re-sorted until sorting itself became his subject, and who had then produced, at thirty, a book called Analytical Archaeology so dense with systems theory and statistics that reviewers complained they needed a second education to read it. The 1973 paper was the book’s argument in miniature and in public. A discipline, Clarke said, grows through three states. First consciousness: it digs, sorts, and describes, innocently, taking its own procedures as given. Then self-consciousness: it notices that it has procedures, and begins to examine them. Then critical self-consciousness: it understands that its procedures produce its facts, that the discipline is an instrument and the instrument is in every reading, and after that there is no way back to the innocent trowel. Archaeology, he announced, had just crossed into the third state, and the crossing was permanent, and the mourning in his title was at most half sincere.

The Midden on The Approximate Mind

The Science of What Was Kept