Abstract
Almost since its emergence as a distinct sub-discipline, alongside New Archaeology in the 1970s, the practitioners of environmental archaeology have been criticised for their undue focus on the development of methodology, and an all-too-rare interest in cultural and social issues. Nowhere has this attack been more virulent than amongst post-processualists in the 1990s. However, this paper will seek to suggest that the failure of recent perspectives to make an impact on much environmental work is not due to closed minds on either side, but because post-processualism itself offers little to anyone wishing to come to terms with detailed trajectories of past social development. Using examples from environmental analyses in York, we will show how Marxism allows the study of the processes of production and distribution of food to be linked effectively to an analysis of the patterns of consumption and disposal, thus avoiding the polarisation between traditional empiricism and the idealism of post-processual theory.
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Roskams, S., Saunders, T. (2001). The Poverty of Empiricism and the Tyranny of Theory. In: Albarella, U. (eds) Environmental Archaeology: Meaning and Purpose. Environmental Science and Technology Library, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9652-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9652-7_8
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