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De Indiana Jones a la arqueología como ciencia · El futuro fue ayer con Juan Guillermo Martín

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The future was yesterday? It' s an archaeology podcast where ghosts, conspiracy
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theories and aliens have no place. I am Juan Guillermo Martín, archaeologist and
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university professor and with different specialists. It would be scientifically addressing our fascinating past,
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a past that offers us answers to face the future. Welcome to the
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podcast The future was yesterday? I' m Jua Guillermo Martin, an archaeologist
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who premiered the last film of the Indiana Jones saga, perhaps the most famous
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archaeologist in the world. For some of us who were engaged in archaeology,
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it became a motivation. However, the way in which Dr. Jones approachology
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does not necessarily correspond to the work of current discipline. To talk about the
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past, present and future of archaeology. We have a very special guest.
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This is Rafael Gasón. Rafael welcomes very good afternoon for all users and users
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of the future. It was yesterday. It' s a pleasure to be
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with you Jun Guillermo in Gracia Rafa. For those of you who don'
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t know Rafael Gasón, I present him. He is an anthropologist at the
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Central University of Venezuela and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh.
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He has more than thirty- five years of experience in archaeology in the Lower
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Lands of North America. He was professor, researcher and dean of the Venezuelan
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Institute of Scientific Research and VIC. He has been a scholar of the history
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of the thought of archaeological theory. He is currently professor and coordinator of archaeology
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specialization at the Universidad del Norte Embarran and Rafael. For the number one question
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to be asked in this matter is what are the origins of archaeology. It
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must be said that archaeology as a science is basically an undertaking that is the
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product of modernity. I explain, all societies of the past have had ideas
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about what the past is, what history is, but these ideas are anchored
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in traditional knowledge, in religious knowledge, in what is called tradition. So,
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traditional thinking meditates on the past, thinks about the past, but does
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not contrast it with hypothesis, does not contrast it by digging, by that
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kind of thing. On the other hand, archaeology as a modern science,
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as a science that is basically born in the West. What he has done,
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what he has traditionally done for a long time, is reflect on the
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past, think about the past, using materials from excavations, materials from different
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sources to contrast those ideas about the past. So the differences the traditional societies
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basically illustrate ideas about the past with materials that we could call an archaeological day.
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On the other hand, modern thought, modern archaeological thought, tests ideas
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about the past using archaeological materials. That would be the, that would be
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the bottom line idea about Indiana Jones. Returning Indiana Jones, He in his
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youth and in the films let' s say traditional in the first three we
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saw. Those adventures that he, who lives in, are the decade of
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one thousand nine hundred and thirty, roughly prior to World War II. What
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archaeology was like. That is really the archaeology that was done in the West.
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You have to think it' s funny. Even if we say this
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archaeology thing. There was no clear strateggarafy about different stages of archaeological thought.
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Yes, before nineteen thirty there were different styles, if you want to call
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it archaeology. There was an evolutionary archaeology that was very popular after the publication
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of the origin of Darwing species in one thousand eight hundred and fifty- nine.
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There was a romantic archaeology, the great archaeology brought out one associates with
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characters like Indiana Jones, which had been a reaction to the ideals of the
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French Revolution. The French Revolution sought to expand an idea of ors uvilization from
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certain general notions of what it was, what society should be, the change
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of society based on population. The romantic reaction became more interested in the national
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spirit, in the history of each nation and so different nations, especially in
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Germany, people returned to their interest in the classical past, towards the ruins,
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towards the idea of different national cultures and so they looked at certain very
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particular aspects of the past, the great monuments, the great treasures, the
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great cultural achievements of the past. I am speaking in romantic terms, which
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were for a long time the goal of archaeologists. So one has to think
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that, around the 1930s, there are different styles of archaeology, classical romantic
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pology interested in great monuments, a more positivist, more evolutionary scientific archaeology.
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And all this continues to coexist with the old antiquated recovery of objects, people
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who continue to recover things from the past simply for the aesthetic pleasure that they,
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which they had. Then, the thirty are a very particular stage because
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it marks the transition from an antiquarian archaeology, from a romantic archaeology, to
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an archaeology that will definitely orient itself towards a much more positivist archaeology, an
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archaeology that contrasts ideas. Just like I told you the beginning, that'
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s gonna happen. I think just after World War II, let' s
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say. That' s when we would understand that we already have a truly
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scientific archaeolo. See, truly scientific archaeology was born in the early 19th century.
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It is born as a result of two very particular intellectual developments. One
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occurs in Scandinavian countries, with Tomsen' s work. Tom Sang is the
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first to develop a system of relative archaeology and he did it very, very,
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very early. He did it in the second decade of the 19th century.
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The other tradition, the other school of archaeology that we can call scientific,
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is the French archaeology and English archaeology of the sixties and seventies and eighties
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of the nineteenth century, because that archaeology was interested in the deepest past of
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humanity, what we call paleolithic archaeology. In fact, the word paleolithic was
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coined by John lobock En, as in the eight hundred and seventy and that
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archaeology was the one that brings together, which combines the thought of evolutionary thought,
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not that of Darwing, but rather social Darwinism with the exploration of the
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past through artifacts. But that scientific archaeology remained a minority until about the 1930s.
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The 1930s are very particular because the period between wars marks for archaeology a
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series of very important phenomena. For example, in the 1930s, the United
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States went beyond spot excavations, site excavations to those huge state projects that were
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run under the New Deal of Franking, Larno Rousealt began to do excavations,
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huge excavations in the south- west of the United States, for example,
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and systems such as the Mid- West taxonomic system appeared. Archaeologists appear,
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characters like Sylvanus Morley. Characters such as Alfred Keader, who set up the
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first artefact classification systems that responded to the problem of systematically trying to organize the
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different societies of the past, the different cultures, appear. It was the
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word used at that time, in terms of say space and time. So,
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when we talk about new archaeology, it doesn' t mean there'
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s such a profound change in the way discipline develops. But finally, if
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there is a break with what came before, I mention it because for me
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the scientific archaeology that I was taught started with Luis Binford. So, of
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course, when I was taught my archaeology, that new archaeology was no longer
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so new and much less so. Now it must be thought that in American
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society, in American culture, there is boundless passion. So new, if
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you want to sell something to one, you present it as new. Yes,
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you must say so. Some ideas were very novel others not so much.
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Many of the criticisms of the new archaeology had already been made by Walter
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Taylor, by the end of the 1940s, by Walter Taylor, an outstanding
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American archaeologist. He had complained that most colleagues basically saw in the past as
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composed of standards, frozen standards in some way, fossilized standards in ceramic artifacts,
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and that had a consequence. People basically paid attention only to ceramic objects,
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plant remains, animal remains, architecture, all of these things occupied a
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background and were not treated quantitatively. Walter Taylor makes a devastating criticism of the
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way archaeology was done at the time. In a classic text called stage of
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archaeology, a study of archaeology, where he proposes that archaeology should examine together,
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using quantitative methods all kinds of data that came from the past. That
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is a very important extension of the ideas of the new archaeology. The new
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archaeology, of course, makes a number of very important contributions. The new
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archaeology uses the theory of systems that in the sixties a relatively novel thing,
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the ideas of fomber Thalaffie. The new archaeology explicitly proposes that archaeology should be
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part of anthropology and not of history. What was the most traditional archaeology,
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the oldest archaeology, if you like, and also the new archaeology proposes a
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series of current studies. One thing Binford isn' t just him one.
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He always mentions Louis Winforth and doesn' t mention his wife, Sally,
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who was an archeologist as important as him. They carry out a series of
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studies aimed at trying to understand not only cultures, the cultural norms that were
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somehow reflected in the artifacts. They question that, but how the artifacts might
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have been useful in the past, that is, how cultural systems worked.
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For that, especially, Louis Wingforth did a series of interesting archaeological ethno studies
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among the Inuits of the North Pole, among groups of African hunters and gatherers,
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etcetera, etcetera. He also studied how animals leave and discard bones and
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what difference there is between how animals discard the results of their food and how
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humans do it. In this way we developed what is called mid- range
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theories, that is, theories that serve us as bridges between anthropological theory,
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which is a contemporary theory that belongs to this moment and what may have happened
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in the past. That' s the novelty of the new archaeology. But
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this new archaeology is not born nigilo, but the product of the whole series
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of criticisms that had occurred as in the previous thirty years does not appear out
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of the blue. Of course and from then on let' s say so,
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in the second half of the 20th century. I think there' s
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a pretty broad discussion going to the theoretical level. Let' s say archaeology
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and we began to see a series of thought trends related to the approach of
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the archaeological record, the way we say it right and perhaps also a self
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- criticism of how discipline was being done or developed up to that point.
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What' s going on there, what' s that explosion like? Let
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' s say theoretical approaches that enrich this discipline so much. That' s
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right, we usually think of the additive definition. They say archaeology is the
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study of the societies of the past from their material remains. Today, that
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definition falls short. Today, that definition is not enough to define what archaeologists
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are doing. Today, it is more appropriate to say that archaeology is a
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set of research programmes that share only an interest in the past. Yes,
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what that means is that today we have so many problems and so many different
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orientations towards what the past is. Who owns the past, how the past
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is studied that we can no longer speak in a unified way, how we
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did it until the sixties, until the seventies. Yes, today there are
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people who argue that we cannot directly access the past and that, therefore,
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the whole reading of the past is one is a reading that is done from
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the present. There are other people who think that we, through scientific methods.
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Yes, we can really access the past. And there are others who
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think that this access is a partial access that depends on the position of the
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researcher, who he is, what his origins are, what his theoretical position
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is, etcetera, etcetera. So, what' s happened is that archaeology
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has diversified. One important thing to tell listeners is that everyone thinks archaeology is
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a relatively simple thing to do and that you what that requires a shovel and
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requires and luck. It' s not like that. Today, archaeology is
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much more informed by critical theory, by feminist theory, by transhumanist theory than
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it was until the 1960s. In the 1960s one could say that archaeology was
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basically the study of the societies of the past through material culture. Today,
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that would be a relatively innocent prospect of seeing things clear and, moreover,
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in recent decades, archaeology as a discipline is worth transdisciplinary redundancy, because it
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ultimately feeds on other sciences. It incorporates various techniques precisely to try to extract
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the maximum of information from this archaeological record, since it has also had an
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important change. In other words, it is not limited to understanding a context
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alone, but rather to studying the environment, studying the landscape and the environment
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can be accessed through microbotanical remains, it is possible to make studies of faunatic
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reconstruction from leisures that you mentioned that a few decades ago they simply were not
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contemplated, those elements were discarded, they were not even confined to the earth,
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because it was not necessary to recover that information. Now now, the
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matter has gone away from the other side, with a lot of technique,
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a lot of scientific progress, but sometimes it kind of got a little boring,
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in my view, discipline, that is, when you read and confront
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these articles of isotopia or things like that extremely sophisticated that tell you that in
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America they ate corn. It' s like discovering warm water and it'
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s all that for what we already knew. I don' t know what
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you think of this whole boom. Let' s say the technological, the
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novel thing that' s been applied. Let' s say day- to
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- day archaeological work. Kend Flaneriy, who is one of the great archaeologists
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of the second half of the 20th century and a very ironic character, said
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archaeology is a slow and costly way of knowing what we already knew. Yes,
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definitely, Kent Flanety is someone who somehow has an eye on tradition and
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another on modernity, who in Flanetiy, is someone who regrets that archaeologists are
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no longer interested in the concept of culture and great problems. Thus, what
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is the origin of the process of humanization, from where, how food production
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arises, how social hierarchies arise and how the Flaneriy State appears. As many
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people of that time thought that that was the big problems, because those big
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problems have to do with our own way of life, that is, how
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we come to do today. There' s a lot, a lot of
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technical archaeology, a lot of quality, but, as you say, sometimes
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they seem to touch trivial problems. And that results from the fact that now
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simply archaeologists, like the rest of humans, like the rest of the professions,
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are many and we are all involved in that problem of publishing or perishing,
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and that has somehow made us forget what those big problems are. I
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still, with all the criticism that has been made of evolutionary archaeology, think
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that there are many problems that no longer interest us, not because they would
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have been solved, but because they simply went out of fashion. The origin
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of agriculture in different parts of the world, the origin of social hierarchy.
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These are things that remain of tremendous interest to us, because we live in
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large societies, in food- producing societies, in hierarchical societies, and that
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transit of living in small societies that do not produce food to very large societies
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that produce food and that are not homogeneous, that are hierarchical, is perhaps
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the most important transition of humanity and occurred very recently. It happened about eleven
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zero years ago. We still don' t quite understand how it happened and
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we' ve put that a little bit aside. There are other problems that
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are of interest to us right now. Of course, now the most recent
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archaeology. It' s an evolutionary archaeology. It is an archaeology that is
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interested, for example, in the origin of human cognition. We have come
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a long way in recent years about how the modern human mind emerged. Thus,
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we are interested in that problem because if we understand how the human mind
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works, by the way, we can dominate it. A traditional desire of
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social sciences has been to try to understand how people and societies function. Today,
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We have a much greater interest in material culture than we had in the
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past. Interestingly, because we now have a great distrust for the future.
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The future ceased to be a project like when I was a child, and
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now the future is a threat. That' s why we' re turning
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towards the past. How an era that we can somehow control and that is
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why we are patrimonizing the different societies of the world And we are patrimonizing the
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past. That' s why you now see such a large class of studies
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that they have to do with material culture. So we' re interested in
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how the mind came up. We are interested in the different societies of the
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past and their material culture. We are interested in adapting humans to climate change
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in the past, because that is the biggest problem we have right now and
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the only laboratory we have to know how people adapted to environmental changes is the
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past and the only science that is able to study that is archaeology. Archaeology
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is the science that studies long- term social change. That' s the
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definition of archaeology I' m still working with. Despite all the changes,
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I think it fits very well what it should be. Let' s say
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it like that, discipline. I don' t know if you know a
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book by Jeremy Sablov. The public does something a few years ago, when
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Archaeology Mitters retired and that what matters archaeology matters and just after I do not
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know forty almost fifty years of engaging in archaeological research and working in many places.
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And that' s what I' m saying. What did I do
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this sheath for, that is, what was it for? For what purpose
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archaeology served, it begins to investigate some projects and then finds that, indeed,
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archaeology can offer answers to face current problems and ensure, say, a
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better future. And that I mention to the extent that many people ask us
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when one shows up and asks him what he does to you, when you
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say you want an archaeologist, they immediately think of the dear Doctor Jones and
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second, they don' t tell you what this is for, what it
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' s for. I, many years ago I had to develop a series
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of talks that were called and that sheath for what. Because it was the
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question that a man asked me that was fixing a truck in the plains,
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while I explained to him that I was doing a project and blah blah blah,
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that I was doing a tour. What to locate archaeological sites. What
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do I know, the man pulled his head under the truck. He asked
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me frankly and that sheath for what. What' s the point of what
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you' re doing and what' s the point of a lot of things.
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I insist it serves a lot of things. First of all, we
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are experiencing a gigantic change in sight, which we call anthroponism, which we
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call generalized global change. It is perhaps not the most important challenge facing the
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human race, our gender. First of all, it has to be said
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that the only laboratory we have I repeat to contemplate what people have done in
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the past. That historical and archaeological record. The historical record is about five
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thousand years old, no more than that. Instead, the historical record can
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look back. The archaeological record, forgiveness, can look back millions of years,
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at least the two million or three million years that our own genus has,
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in genus homo. Secondly, at this time, in the epoch of
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anthropoc we no longer consider ourselves or the only social agents. Now we think
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that nature, we think that animals, plants, things, are beings that
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have agency capacity, that is, that they intervene in some way in the
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affairs of society. We humans, as we are, are pedantes, we
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reserve the capacity of will, but the agency, the ability to act on
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reality, is no longer a unique effective property of us. So, today,
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we give rights to rivers, we read right to the Amazon rainforest.
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Or anyone who has a cat dog knows that there are other kinds of sentient
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beings and that we have obligations towards them. That transhumanist perspective has changed a
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sample relationship between human beings and the other kinds of entities of reality and science.
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The discipline he' s studying. One of the first disciplines that studied
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the relationship of human beings with other kinds of entities of reality, with things
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is theology. It is what we call symmetrical archaeology, which is a very
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recent branch of archaeology that has appeared quite recently and finally we have the issue
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of heritage management. Today, archaeology is not something that is only of interest
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to archaeologists, indigenous communities, political groups, feminist groups or LBTA plus groups.
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Many people are interested in different ways, different ways in the past,
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and I think archaeologists and archeologists have an important role to play in serving as
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mediators among these different kinds of interests. Apart from all that, archaeology still
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seems to me to be something tremendously exciting. I have continued to have as
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much fun as when I took my first archaeology course a long time ago,
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just like I did, too, a long time ago. Probably me.
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One of the things I' m usually told when I introduce myself and say
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that I' m an archaeologist is that the person I' m talking to
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says I always wanted to study archaeology, but I needed to live, so
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I studied engineering, right something. So, finally we can live from archaeology.
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Fortunately, that' s right and I don' t know if that
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phrase is true, the one I' ve seen her say they' re
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assigned to Ken Flaneer and just that she said archaeology was the funniest thing you
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could do with clothes. But he did say it. Doing archaeology Flaneri is
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a very very funny and politically incorrect guy that phrase. Doing archaeology is the
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most fun thing to do with pants on appears in a very famous article called
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the Golden Palustre in Spanish. It is available on the Internet. Anyone can
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come down and read it, but that phrase is authentic. Archaeology is the
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most fun thing you can do with your pants on, a phrase that no
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longer belongs to this time, can no longer be said by politically incorrect class.
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We' d be bathed immediately, totally censored already. In conclusion,
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the last question and good the same and I think we have been talking about
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it. Archaeology is a science that fundamentally focuses on the past. This discipline
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has a future, no doubt, as long as humans are on the planet.
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I hope we' re a lot longer than people are sometimes doing around
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there. We' re going to be part of society, we' re
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going to interact with each other, we' re going to interact with things,
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we' re going to interact with the environment. The definition of the
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past is much more open now than it was already. Theology does not refer
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only to prehistoric societies or ancient societies. Today we have industrial archaeology. Today
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we have urban archaeology. Today we have an aneutic archaeology that refers to all
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periods of the act of navigation. Today, we have a much greater interest
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than before in the different societies of the world, of the present and of
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the past. It' s about modernity. This moment in which we are
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living is characterized by the fact that we have access as never before to all
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societies, to all the historical experience of the past. And that means that
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we now have a much greater interest than before in the other, not simply
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to administer it, as the anthropology, colonial archaeology, put forward, but
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to have elements that allow us to know how other societies adapted to the problems
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that are now facing Western modernity. Then, without a doubt, we will
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continue to have archaeology for a long time, perhaps no longer the innocent archaeology
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of Dr jones that great archaeology of the thirties, of the forties and fifties.
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I don' t think it will exist anymore, because the world has
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become much smaller and much better known. I have to say add a little
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footer. Many people say that there was a real Indiana Jones Robert Brewood,
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Robert Brabood, an archaeologist from the University of Chicago, in charge of the
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Department of Oriental Studies, worked in the 1950s in Syria, Iraq and Turkey,
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at a time when it was dangerous to work in those regions and brable
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worked like a gun in the waist. So, many people think that the
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character in Diana Jones was inspired by a true person, Dr Robert Brabo Robert
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Brabood, the tutor viewer of Kent Flanety and kend Flanety, tutor of an
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entire generation of well- known American archaeologists, very important today, including Robert
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d Reynand, which is a very important change in Colombian arteriology in the 1990s.
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Then, notice that in some way, all colleagues in the world have
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influenced the changes that have occurred in the modernization of the profession from a time
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as far away as the 1930s until the present that I believe I had told
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you about Samuel the other for another famous American archaeologist, who is known years,
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many years later, he tubed his boom in the 1950s and worked for
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the CIA. He was a CIA spy and was working mainly in Central America,
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when he was starting the Cold War, and he was reporting on all
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the social movements that were going around and funded and financed his archaeological research.
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I made it no discipline is innocent. No knowledge is obtained by the simple
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process, by the simple pleasure of doing so. It must be thought that
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much of the American archaeology that was done at that time came from the interest
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of the Cold War, from trying to predict that one could think of the
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different countries of Latin America in terms of their revolutionary potential. This is why
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many anthropological and also historical studies were carried out, including archaeology. At that
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time they were given money, because what they wanted to know in the end
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was what to expect in those societies, their peoples, those countries as to
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what could happen in the Cold War. So sometimes you don' t feel
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a little disappointed in reading those stories, but it' s hopefully that that
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happened. Yes, yes absolutely and you have to understand, of course,
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the moment these things were given. In that context, Yes, yes,
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Rafael, thank you very much for the time, for the generosity. Let
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' s say we share your knowledge with everyone in the pleasure of having you
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in this space. I' m also grateful for an inorte fem stereo you
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' ve lent me. He lent us this recording booth. We will continue
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to produce scientific content on the podcast. The future fails. Thank you very
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much. Thank you very much to everyone and all the listeners on the show.
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Thank you very much to Tí Juan Guillermo for this special invitation that you
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are all very well