What is Archaeology's “Mitigated Objectivism” Mitigated by? Comments on Wylie

Abstract

In her recent work, Alison Wylie has sometimes claimed an important role for present politics in the constitution of archaeological facts, yet she has not fully documented such claims. Using the same materials as Wylie, namely the research on gender presented at the conference “Women and Production in Prehistory,” held in South Carolina in 1988, I attempt to provide such documentation, arguing that its absence may undermine Wylie's (indeed, archaeology's) “mitigated objectivism” as well as the facts emerging about prehistoric gender. I dispute neither the scientific integrity of those facts nor the rigor of Wylie's analysis. Like many before me, I puzzle about the relationship between truth and politics, and I regard the disjunction of the two notions, so obdurate in archaeology, as counterproductive, the source of contradictions and disabling ambivalences. I make at the end two suggestions about overcoming the notional disjunction of truth and politics, one adopted from Brumfiel and from Conkey (archaeological facts as allegories), the other from Foucault (archaeological evidence as a network of sites of power).