There are some interesting new articles on John Hooker's "Past Times and Present Tensions" blog which I mentioned here a few months ago. He has been very productive, with much there to think over. In one of his latest texts, the author returns to his (as yet I believe unpublished) purchase of what he said was a "British Plastic Style finial, " and refers (without a link) to the comments of "one archaeology blogger who was of the opinion that I should not have purchased it at all". Guess who.
This blogger quite rightly said that: "a piece of datable metalwork as part of a specific site assemblage may have yielded information if that findspot was noted" and in self-justification (and nothing else I would venture) Hooker sets about attempting to trash that statement. He devotes a whole post to that with typical name-dropping and citing "authorities" ("Losing it: the myth of archaeological context in British early Celtic art" Monday, 14 October 2013). He suggests that such views are " part of a modern created myth".
It gave me a laugh, but I suppose that a beginner to the subject of early Celtic art might have taken it seriously [...] Contextual archaeology has gained mythic status in recent years - far beyond its practical usefulness, but that might be a subject for some future post. For now, though, I want to focus on the real nature of context in British early Celtic art.The problem is that what we are talking about is not something which is a separate category. What Hooker is discussing are artefacts. Some artefacts are artefacts and some have decoration on them which collectors then call "art". There is no functional differentiation between a sword which has a big lump of metal as its pommel and one which has a pommel which is a big lump of metal with squiggly lines in relief on it. The failure to grasp this fundamental point leads Hooker off on a tangent.After some out-of-context quoting of his fave "authorities", Hooker then engages in sleight of hand:
A particular definition of contextual archaeology comes from the Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology: "An approach to archaeological interpretation proposed by Ian Hodder in the mid 1980s in which ...I am not a great fan of Hodder these days. His "contextual archaeology" of two decades ago was (is) an interesting idea, and it involves looking at archaeological evidence (or rather the interpreted evidence) in a context, yes. But is this the same as the taphonomic study of the context of deposition of artefacts in discrete stratigraphical units with an investigated site which is what I was discussing in the quote above and which Hooker attempts to dissect? No. This is chalk and cheese. Either Mr Hooker does not have the foggiest what we are talking about here, or he is deliberately being misleading, neither of which brings him much credit. Basically this is a very muddled and discursive (read: unfocussed) wander through the writer's thinking which basically leads nowhere, and certaainly not to discounting what was said:
"a piece of datable metalwork as part of a specific site assemblage may have yielded information if that findspot was noted"
I really do not see that Hooker has in any way disproven that. Do you? It is the rationale behind the PAS too.
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