Comments on John Barrett and Krystalli Damilati’s Essay (2004) "Some Light on the Early Origins of Them All"

€ 1,86

Colin Renfrew attempts to explain the emergence of the earliest Aegean civilization in 1972, with the publication of “The Emergence of Civilization”. Around thirty years later, researchers gather in Britain to discuss Renfrew’s attempt, in light of what happened next. The result is a compilation, titled “The Emergence of Civilization Revisited”, published in 2004, by Oxford Books, as a contribution to Sheffield Studies in Aegean Archaeology.
John C. Barrett and Krystalli Damilati contribute chapter 8 (pages 146-169), presenting a theoretical discussion centered on the distinction between processual and post-processual explanations. The latter arises as a criticism of the former, after Renfrew’s book was published.
These comments examine this contribution through three lenses.
The first is a model built in “Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy”. Positivist and empirio-schematic judgments exhibit a particular triadic structure. This is a model for the Age of Ideas.
The second is the two level interscope, consisting of category-based nested forms on the content and situation levels. This model captures the relational structure of sensible construction. Naturally, the goal of the modern social sciences is to describe our world in sensible (that is, not religious) terms.
The third lens is the first singularity. The first singularity is a hypothesis concerning the potentiation of civilization. The hypothesis is presented plainly in “The First Singularity and its Fairy Tale Trace” and evocatively in “An Archaeology of the Fall”. Neither Renfrew, nor his commentators thirty years later, Barrett and Damilati, have knowledge of this proposal. If they did, then their works would have taken on a very different tone.
What would that tone have been?
If processual archaeology looks for material causation within the paradigm of modern scientific inquiry, and if post-processual archaeology criticizes processual archaeologists for not including human motivations, then the first singularity stands in contrast to both, by proposing an immaterial causation, a change in semiotic practices, that potentiates unconstrained social complexity, that is, changes in human incentives.