Disciplining Archaeology: The Invention of South African Prehistory, 1923-1953

Abstract

Foucault's defining insight, that new knowledge does not come unbidden to the alert seeker but is produced, as he puts it, under certain conditions and relations, is the starting point for this investigation. Briefly put, my interest is in running together a reading of Foucault's major synthetic work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, with an account of the establishment of the discipline of archaeology in South Africa in the three decades beginning in the 1920s. There are a number of factors which make this a promising exercise, besides the suggestive doubling of archaeology'Varchaeology, metaphor and discipline, and I shall mention two at the outset. The first is that the discipline of archaeology remains generally committed to a form of scholarship in which knowledge is discovered rather than produced. On the one hand, this is in contradistinction to the discipline of social anthropology, which advertised its reflexive turn as early as the mid-1980s.2 On the other hand, this is despite the best efforts of post-processual archaeologies, whose efforts, in any case, I would understand to be otherwise directed.3 Put differently, for archaeologists, in the most literal of

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