The Loss of Typological Innocence: An Archaeology of Archaeological Typo-Praxis

The problem of types – what types are, how to discover and justify them – continues to ignite profound debate in contemporary archaeology. Types and typologies have in fact re-surfaced as cardinal coordinates of knowledge production in the context of the discipline’s self-proclaimed computational and digital turns. I here take a critical look at the various type concepts anchoring archaeological research as such an overview has never really been attempted. I first offer a selective review of major strands of archaeological type-thinking showing that typo-praxis has oscillated between Spauldingian and Fordian as well as representationalist and instrumentalist apprehensions of types, evoking key questions as to the relative importance of type discovery vs. justification. I then systematically explore the epistemology of typo-praxis in archaeology by drawing on Stephen C. Pepper’s world hypotheses framework. By illustrating the discussion with examples from lithic studies, I demonstrate that archaeological type-thinking is strongly pluralist in nature and structured along formalist, mechanist, contextualist and organicist knowledge vectors. These ways of devising and mobilizing archaeological types are irreducible, they vary on a fundamental level and have vastly different consequences for knowledge production. I argue that because of this plurality, archaeological attempts to naturalize types or to call for singular, truly objective types of near-universal validity are deeply misguided. Instead, more serious work needs to be done on the conceptual underpinnings of typo-praxis. Most importantly, archaeologists require a better understanding of what different type concepts enable and close off, and thus what they are good and not-so-good for. This can also provide new impetus for decolonization efforts in archaeology as typo-praxis has traditionally ranked among the prime colonial technologies to deny otherness and diversity. I close my wide-ranging discussion of archaeological typo-praxis with briefly reflecting on the implications of adding ontological diversity to the problem as recently suggested by proponents of the ontological turn. An ontological perspective can clarify what is truly at stake in the debate and why type-thinking cannot be divorced from crucial questions of knowledge authority and power and who can ultimately claim, arrange and re-dress the past.