Opinion

Emplacing Senake Bandaranayake’s archaeology in an intellectual tradition

Published

on

by Prof Jagath Weerasinghe

Former Director of Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology, University of Kelaniya

(Following is the text of speech delivered by Prof Jagath Weerasinghe the seventh commemoration of eminent archaeologist Professor emeritus Senake Bandaranayake at the auditorium of Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Kelaniya. On March 08)

(Continued from yesterday)

Bandaranayake’s thinking in archaeology and art history

As an intellectual, Bandaranayake played many roles; many guises: archaeologist, art historian, academic administrator, institution builder, modern art writer or art critic, poet and social critic. In this talk I would only attempt at emplacing his archaeology and art history within a school of thought, an intellectual tradition, in a “gurukulaya”.

 Like many of his generation, he did not study archaeology as an undergraduate, but only as a postgraduate; his academic training is in English Language, Anthropology, and History of Architecture. His PhD research on the viharas of Anuradhapura, published in his monumental book, “Sinhalese Monastic Architecture’ of 1974, is quintessential archaeological research. An archaeologist must rely on the martial record from the past for his explanations and interpretations and is required to acquire a high degree of acumen in seeing and reading visual attributes that constitute material culture and its material and spatial setting, and to discern similarities, patterns, and specificities to formulate conceptualizing frameworks capable of incorporating both the old and new material towards newer or adjusted interpretations. This is exactly what Bandaranayake has achieved in this research; he is a master synthesizer of similarities and differences into cohesive frameworks, theoretical arguments, and explanatory models.

Sigiriya project

In his ‘Sigiriya Project: First Archaeological Excavation and Research Report’ of 1984, and the two publications that ensued from the Sigiriya-Dambulla Settlement Archaeology programme, published in 1990 and 1994 we come across a more mature form of Bandaranayake the archaeologist. Here is an archaeologist determined to exploit the full potential of archaeological methods and theories that were current in the last decades of the 20th century to discover archaeological realities that can account for the life of the people in the margins of ancient kingdoms. In these three publications, especially with the ones that came from the Sigiriya-Dambulla research program, we see an archaeologist consciously constructing a research design that moves away from monuments that extol the royalty and the powerful of bygone days. As recorded in the Sigiriya Project report mentioned above, there is a marked change in his approach and handling of the idea of archaeology. At Sigiriya, he considers archaeological sites as an integral part of a large environmental-ecological entity and sees this complex entity with its entire gamut of complex archaeological realities. He insists on taking Sigiriya in its wider archaeological context. He sees the importance of archaeological deciphering of its hinterland in making archaeological sense of Sigiriya itself. Said differently, he is moving away from focusing on monuments and towards a different kind of archaeological data to make archaeological sense of the monument itself.

 Here, at the very outset of the report, he expresses his concerns and his main beef with Sri Lankan archaeology, saying, “One of the traditional preoccupations of Sri Lankan archaeology, the discovery of “museum pieces,” is merely incidental to the Sigiriya programme.” (SPR, p. 3). This is remarkable. Here, with this line, Bandaranayake appropriately declares the need to put an end to the antiquarian impulse, a scourge in Sri Lankan archaeology. This movement away from an archaeology enamored with “museum pieces” and monuments—an archaeology motivated by antiquarian impulses and urges—is carried out further, and emphatically mentioned in his introductory chapter of the “Approaches to the Settlement Archaeology of the Sigiriya-Dambulla” book. He says, “the present study is an exception in the “archaeology of the village” or “the archaeology of the “small people” …”. Instead of focusing on monuments or unique archeological structures or royal and official inscriptions, Bandaranayake directs his research team to looking at the larger archaeological system that he thinks to constitute the archaeological realities of the Early and Middle Historical Period village life in the study region. He saw the research programme at Sigiriya-Dambulla region as “the first attempt expressly directed at studying in some detail the archaeology of ancient village system in Sri Lanka.”

Team work

The achievements of the research project are several, and Bandaranayake underlines, in his own words, “smooth formation of an effective and multi-functional field team.’ as one of the 3 achievements. The main value that saw to the success of this project, Bandaranayake indicates, is the teamwork. Bandaranayake claims that “An archaeological project of this nature is only possible through teamwork.”. It is necessary to dwell on this idea of teamwork in archaeology here. Teamwork in archaeology, especially in fieldwork, in excavations is not just good politics of giving everyone an opportunity to participate in an archaeological excavation but is a scientific requirement. Any archaeological excavation done by a single archaeologist with two or three students is not ‘scientific archaeology’, its wrong and bad archaeology, because excavation displaces archaeological data, and if the excavation is done by a single archaeologist, then the findings of such excavations have not been processed through scientific verification protocols at the dig. Such single-archaeologist-excavations yield no scientific data. Scientific archaeology can only happen in a discursive environment in the excavation pit.

Faith in archaeology

In doing archaeology, Bandaranayake was motivated by the belief that archaeology alone can provide us with “substantive and quantitative data regarding the nature, the complexity, and the patterning of rural settlements and settlement networks during the pre-modern period.” To actualize this faith in archaeology he looked at not monuments, single sites or museum pieces, but on a system of sites spread on a landscape. He also emphasized the need for teamwork; multifunctional-field teams; In short, Bandaranayake looked at archaeological past, not as events, but as network of social relations that produced an archaeological landscape and he saw doing archaeology as a discursive performance of many voices of many archaeologists and specialists. He was not interested in the cultural history of one site as an event from the past, as Christopher Tilly and Michel Shanks has noted in 1987, in general on the archeology of the l970s in Europe and North America, but in ways of linking objects and their relationships to the social conditions of their creation in the past.

So, what is this archaeology that Bandaranayake promoted? What is this approach to archaeology? What are the precedents for this kind of approach to archaeology? This is an archaeology that rebuts signs of antiquarianism in an organised manner. This is an archaeology that demands a research design as a prerequisite for any field work programme. This is an archeology that necessitates a certain level of critical self-consciousness and self-reflexivity on the part of the archaeologist. What kind of intellectual tradition is he tapping for his mode/s of thought production in archaeology? What is he NOT looking at?

Intellectual cues

The history of archaeological thought, as written by Bruce Trigger, Tilly and Shanks, and many others, would show us that Bandaranayake had taken inspirational and intellectual cues from two schools of thought. One is Cambridge, and the other is the New Archaeology (of Lewis R. Binford) of North America. Bandaranayake’s archaeological thinking fits well with that of David Clarke and Colin Renfrew, both of whom are from Cambridge University and Binford. Clarke, Renfrew, and Binford believed that archaeology could be a scientific and objective study of the past (a proposition that has been seriously challenged by many in the late 20th and 21st century). However, it must also be noted here that it was through Renfrew that Bandaranayake found links between Cambridge and New Archaeology. Renfrew probably provided Bandaranayake with the confidence to take archaeology as a strong scientific discipline, in the sense that “objective explanations” are not only discernible, but also a necessary commitment in archaeology. As such, Bandaranayake, like Renfrew, would opt for an explanation of archaeological phenomena rather than interpret them. Bandaranayake did not venture into the interpretive archeology that ensued from Cambridge in the late 1970s and 1980s. He remained faithful to scientific archaeology, so to speak.

What we see then is that Bandaranayake was attracted to a certain trend in global archaeology that had begun to take shape in late 1960s and early 1970s. It seems necessary to trace this history of archaeology that changed the course of archaeology, the publications that challenged the lack of self-criticality in archaeology by way of four important publications. This will help us to emplace Bandaranayake’s archaeology within a broad historical development that first swept through Britain and North America. There are four publications, that came between 1962 and 1973, that precipitated this change. In a decade, it seems, that everything in archaeology changed forever. They also have a distant precursor in 1948 in Walter Taylor’s publication, ‘A Study of Archaeology’. The three publications that concern us here are, Lewis R. Binford’s famous 1962 article, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” that signaled the birth of ‘New Archaeology’ or Processual Archaeology in the USA. Then in 1968, David Clark published his much-discussed book, Analytical Archaeology, in which he argued that archaeology is not history and archaeological data are not historical data. It is necessary to note that this claim was also made by Walter Taylor in 1948. Clarke proposed this claim by describing and defining the nature of archaeology. Renfrew’s 1972 publication, The Emergence of Civilization. emphasized the idea that the past is not just events, past for archaeology is social relations that produced certain kind of objects. And, finally in 1973 Clarke publishes an article in Antiquity journal, with an insightful title, “Archaeology: the loss of innocence”, where he argued for the necessity of research design for archaeological research.

Change

What we can notice then is that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, something radical was happening in archaeology. A new archaeology was struggling to be born and to claim its hegemonic position in the world of archaeology. This change demands archaeologists to move away from the popular characteristic of archaeology as “an undisciplined empirical discipline. A discipline lacking a scheme of systematic and ordered study based upon declared and clearly defined models and rules of procedure. It further lacks a body of central theory capable of synthesising the general regularities within its data in such a way that the unique residuals distinguishing each particular case might be quickly isolated and easily assessed.”. This is the opening line of Clarke’s 1968 book. Clarke is attacking the antiquarian motivations in archaeology and the absence of theoretical discussions in archaeology. In the same paragraph, Clarke also condemns the habitual practice of making taxonomies based on undefined concepts, and he ends the paragraph by claiming, “Lacking an explicit theory defining these entities and their relationships and transformations in a viable form, archaeology has remained an intuitive skill – an inexplicit manipulative dexterity learned by rote.” From the very beginning, Bandaranayake’s archaeology decided not to do this, making simple taxonomies based on attributes and naming them and passing such naming off as explanations or interpretations.

Clarke also makes another important claim in this book, that Bandaranayake adhered to in his archaeology, which some of his students seem to have intentionally forgotten. Clarke argued, “An archaeological culture is not a racial group, nor a historical tribe, nor a linguistic unit, it is simply an archaeological culture. Given great care, a large quantity of first-class archaeological data, precise definition and rigorous use of terms, and a good archaeological model, then we may with a margin of error be able to identify an archaeological entity in approximate social and historical terms. But this is the best we can do, and it is in any case only one of the aims of archaeological activity.” Bandaranayake never attempted to convert his archaeological data to historical with simple historical rhetoric.

New Archaeology

If one doesn’t look closely enough, Bandaranayake’s relationship with the New Archaeology of North America is somewhat unclear. Bandaranayake seems not to have appreciated the hypothetico-deductive approach of New Archaeology. He relied on inductive reasoning; he was an empiricist. However, one needs to examine more to propose a concrete idea in his hypothesis building process. But he was rather attracted to the potential of well-examined common sense in archaeological explanations, and he also recognized the importance of explicit statements of how explanations are made from data.

To end this essay on Bandaranayake, I would summarise his archeology as a project built on four convictions. He was a firm believer in the multidisciplinary nature of archaeological research. Then he emphasised the importance of teamwork in archaeology. He shunned the antiquarian impulse in archaeology, and he opted for an explanation of the archaeological record rather than interpretation. These four convictions emplace his archaeology in the school of archeological thought that emerged in the works of David Clarke and Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University. He would also have a glance fixed on New Archaeology to a considerable extent. This brief essay does not do whatsoever justice to the immense contribution that Bandaranayake made to Sri Lanakan archaeology. But I believe that this essay will demonstrate to the reader the epistemological gravity of his contribution and its importance to establish archaeology as critical and scientific practice. Currently, it’s my opinion, that Sri Lankan archaeology is caught in a doldrum, and the field is in need of a “Bandaranayake wind’ to move the discipline further.

Click to comment

Trending

Exit mobile version