eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

ways of looking at the past to looking though the many sides of a crystal. This view is not at
odds with Bintliff’s proposal, nor that of other scholars (e.g. Chippendale 1993, p.30).
However, Bintliff, with his feet planted firmly in a positivist camp, seems to dismiss use of
imagination or poetics as useful ways of describing the past. For him things that can be
measured and drawn are most valid; ‘things’ he sees as unaffected by micro-politics or bigger
politics of the present, thus dismissing Kuhnian notions on the social construction of scientific
facts. Through using the example of an aeroplane, Bintliff argues that the fact it was invented
by white western males is irrelevant to a statement about its technology in the ‘thing-
language’ of science (in Wittgenstein’s terminology). This may be a valid way of looking at
the world, but implies that all the ‘thing-language’ of science or rather science itself can do is
to describe measurable things, devoid of meaning. Thomas (2004, p.224) sees this approach
as leaving archaeology “impoverished and etiolated”. But even more fundamentally, although
an attempt at objectivity may for some seem to be the only way, it can never be realised, as
‘things’ are embedded with meaning, for us today and for those in the past (Thomas 2001b).
Measuring and describing has its place, allows standards to be set and enables others to
understand that which is being described, but this is not done devoid of meaning. Fletcher
(1992, p.35) regarding the dissemination of generalisations and explanations about the past
that result from scientific method states, “one thing is clear no one will want to know” except
perhaps other like-minded individuals (i.e. academics of the same leaning). Ask any member
of the public or child what they want to know about the past and it is likely that they will ask
about the people, the everyday and their experiences. This is not to say that academic
research should be set by the general public, only that it may serve us well to remember what
it was that interested us about the past in the first place (e.g. Spector 1993). As Bowkett et al.
(2001, p.1) state of Classical archaeology “Almost everyone who has explored the Classical
World feels an increasing wonder and excitement about the lives of our distant ancestors….”
287