Key Pages:

Home

---

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

---

 

 

---

Posted at Oct 11/2007 01:31AM:
aviad: Hawke's Ladder refers to the difficulty with which inferences about societies and cultures can be made from archaeological evidence. From easiest to most difficult are inferences about production techniques, subsistence of economies, social/political institutions, and religious institutions. In other words, it is fairly easy to infer the production techniques of material goods from archaeological data, whereas it is incredibly difficult to infer the nature of religious institutions and spiritual life from the same data.

Hawke's Ladder is significant because it brings out archaeology's (possible) limitations, and is an example of how and why archaeology has been subservient to history. According to Moreland, Hawke's Ladder places archaeological findings at the bottom end of importance, so that they they serve mainly to fill in gaps for the history of the written word.

---

Posted at Oct 15/2007 09:41AM:
Ian: How has this been critiqued? In what ways have archaeologist sought to ascend the rungs of the ladder?

---

Posted at Oct 18/2007 02:13AM:
Sebastian Gallese: The Hawkesian ladder forces archeology to focus on "technology, economy, and social social conditions" while deeming archeology incapable of understanding the "thoughts" of the past.

Binford claimed "methodological naivety" of archeology at the time placed made the discipline have a "static" look at the past (versus an understanding "dynamics of past human behavior"). Thus, a more thorough/scientific approach through the middle-range theory would allow archeology to supersede the ladder through dramatic conclusions from correlative material evidence.

Moreland's approach to overcoming the ladder is through an archeology where one looks at all material objects as direct products of human conscious that we must understand as a "reproduction of structures of power in the past itself."

Archeology and Text by Moreland pp 13-32