C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4105-0002$3.00
Emotion in
Archaeology 1 and Wellenkamp 1989, White 1993), philosophy (re-
by Sarah Tarlow
Despite the establishment of significant traditions of emotion re-
search in many disciplines, there has been little discussion of the
state and potential of the archaeological study of emotion. This
paper aims to review archaeological approaches to emotion—to
assess the significance of existing studies and outline the poten-
tial for the incorporation of emotion into archaeological research.
It argues that the study of emotion in the past is both necessary
and possible; it considers which understandings of emotion we
might find most useful, how the archaeology of emotion might
be carried out, and what are the most promising avenues to ex-
plore. In archaeology, both the sociobiological approach and one
based on empathy have serious problems. After reviewing and re-
jecting the dichotomy between emotions as entirely biological,
universal, and hard-wired, on one hand, and entirely social and
constructed, on the other, a view of emotions as historically spe-
cific and experientially embodied is advanced. Finally it is argued
that it is vitally important for us to incorporate a consideration
of emotional values and understandings into our archaeologies
but that emotion cannot be separated from other aspects of so-
cial and cultural meaning and experience.
s a r a h t a r l o w is Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the
University of Leicester (Leicester, U.K.). Born in 1967, she was
educated at Sheffield University (B.A., 1989) and at Cambridge
University (M.Phil., 1990; Ph.D., 1995). She has taught at the
University of Wales, Lampeter (1995–2000). Her publications in-
clude Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of
Mortality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), The Familiar Past? Archae-
ologies of Later Historical Britain (London: Routledge, 1999), and
“Landscapes of Memory: The Nineteenth-Century Garden Ceme-
tery” (European Journal of Archaeology 3[2]). The present paper
was submitted 7 vii 99 and accepted 11 xi 99.
1. The ideas expressed in this paper have benefited from discussions
with my students and colleagues at the University of Wales, Lam-
peter, and from the detailed comments of Ian Hodder, Mark Plu-
ciennik, and Julian Thomas, who kindly read an earlier draft. Two
CA referees provided extremely helpful criticism and suggestions.
The field of emotion research has been deeply ploughed
in many disciplines. There are vibrant traditions of emo-
tion research in sociology (reviewed by Kemper 1993),
anthropology (reviewed by Lutz and White 1986, Levy
viewed by Solomon 1993), history (recent reviews in
Stearns 1993, Pinch 1995) and, especially, psychology2
(analysed in Averill 1992). Notwithstanding the diversity
of approaches explored, much emotion research is no-
tably interdisciplinary. Apart from some psychological
approaches to emotion, in which even the divide be-
tween experimental and clinical branches of study is not
often breached, referencing is wide and disciplinary
boundaries are regularly and confidently transgressed.
However, archaeology has rarely become involved in
scholarly debates on the topic and has, as yet, made little
impact. This paper argues that it is important for ar-
chaeologists to engage with some of the ideas being pro-
duced in interdisciplinary studies of emotion, that our
own work should be informed by them, and that ar-
chaeology has a potential contribution to make to this
area.
The first half of this article is a review of the main
lines of approach to the study of emotion which have
been taken over the past couple of decades and an outline
of the critique they have attracted. The second part is
focused on emotion in archaeology: why archaeologists
should study emotion, how they have attempted to do
so, and what might be the most productive directions
for future research.
What Is an Emotion?
Much of the literature on emotion is characterized by a
vagueness—probably intentional—about what exactly
an emotion is. Scholars, particularly in the more con-
structivist traditions, prefer to talk specifically about the
contextual use of words such as “anger” or “shame”
rather than to define what we mean by an emotion. Eva-
siveness about definition, in the case of emotion, also
represents an anxiety about thinning, oversimplifying,
or reducing the complex and rich associations of a term
in quotidian use. In this case, the colloquial uses of the
term are broad, and the academic drive towards close
definition and refined, specific meanings risks losing
some of the richness of what emotion language means
in everyday life. Parrott and Harré make the point that
“academic usage of terms borrowed from natural lan-
guages may strive for more precision, but only at the
cost of neglecting some of the richness of the natural
category. Precision is good, but omission can be bad”
(1996:4). Leavitt would therefore prefer “not to say what
an emotion is, but rather what ‘we’—defined roughly
. . . as Western and Western-trained social scientists
—ordinarily mean when we talk and think about emo-
2. Psychological literature on emotions includes numerous sub-
fields such as evolutionary psychology, experimental and neuro-
psychology, social psychology, and psychotherapy.
713
714 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
tions, and so what categories of other cultures we tend
to ‘recognize’ as emotions rather than as something else”
(1996:516).
Leavitt’s formulation acknowledges that there is not,
in all conceptual schemas, a box designated “emotion”
into which the same things are universally deemed to
fall. Other people may understand experiences which we
would bracket as “emotions” as any number of other
things, including, for example, physical conditions (Hee-
las 1983; 1986:244–46).3 Modern Western thought gen-
erally places emotion within the individual. This is, un-
surprisingly, the basic assumption behind the dominant
research traditions in psychology, neurology, and psy-
chotherapy, but it is not the only way in which emotions
can be understood. Barfield has described the process dur-
ing the late medieval and early modern period in Europe
by which attributes such as malice, happiness, or fear
ceased being properties of external things, people, or sit-
uations and came to inhere in the apprehension and ex-
perience of the subject (Barfield 1933:157–59). In large
measure our understanding of emotions comes from an
Enlightenment (and earlier) distinction between emo-
tions as primal, bodily, precultural, and universal and
cognition/interpretation, which is constructed, cultural,
and variable. This understanding is considered and cri-
tiqued below; here it is important to note only that
“emotion” is not a concept which is universally
recognized.
Definitions of emotion which try to draw lines be-
tween emotion and other kinds of “feeling” experience
have been largely unsuccessful. Even within Western
concepts of emotion (themselves much more heteroge-
neous and problematic than is sometimes suggested),
bounding “emotion” is hard. What is the difference be-
tween emotions and feelings? Or between emotions and
moods or even characters? Is happiness an emotion, for
example? In colloquial use that would certainly be our
understanding of it, but we could also describe a mood,
a character type, a colour, or an event as “happy.” There
is no uncontestable or unambiguous answer.
It is thus easy to see why so many commentators have
avoided defining “emotion.” In fact the struggle to define
a bounded thing representatively labeled as an “emo-
tion” is itself productive of limited and inadequate emo-
tion research. Defining a “thing” necessarily limits it in
ways which may be inappropriate (Harré 1986:4):
Psychologists have always had to struggle against a
persistent illusion that in such studies as those of
the emotions there is something there, the emo-
tion, of which the emotion word is a mere repre-
sentation. . . . [There is an illusion that] there is an
abstract and detachable “it” upon which research
can be directed. In many cases the only “it” is
3. These anthropological approaches contrast with the chauvinistic
and Eurocentric views of, for example, Elster (1999:250–62), who
explains the non-recognition of depression among the Tahitians and
the cultural elaboration of “accedia” in medieval Europe as “mis-
taken” interpretations of universal “proto-emotions.”
some physiological state which is the basis of some
felt perturbation.
The abstraction and reification of a thing called anger or
love or grief sets artificial limits on an experience which
is both variable and complex. Attempts at close defini-
tion of emotion or its distinction from associated con-
cepts have only really proliferated in biologically based
and functional studies (e.g., Batson, Shaw, and Oleson’s
[1992] attempt to differentiate between affect, mood, and
emotion) and are ultimately unconvincing.
If the definition of emotion is doomed to inadequacy,
one might ask, why address it at all? The reason is that
many of the differences, misunderstandings, and frustra-
tions that arise when scholars try to talk to each other
come about because, explicitly or otherwise, scholars
have used the term to mean different things. Many ap-
parently conflicting views of emotion are merely due to
the use of incompatible definitions. This becomes ob-
vious, for example, when reading Ekman’s (1994) list of
what constitutes an emotional experience. For instance,
one of his criteria is that it should be of short duration
(about 3–5 seconds). This is obviously not compatible
with a definition of emotion that a historian or anthro-
pologist might use in any social sense, such as romantic
love, jealousy, anger, or shame, and appears to limit the
term “emotion” to physiological agitation associated
with hormone rushes (which is actually quite in keeping
with Ekman’s use of the term).
There is clearly a big difference—and perhaps an un-
bridgeable one—between the definition of emotion as
bounded, universal, and physiological and the construc-
tivist view of emotion as unbounded, existing only
through cultural meaning, culturally specific, and sub-
ject to transformation or disappearance through time.
Recent critique depends on the observation that both a
restricted biological definition of emotion and a radical
constructivist one are inadequate to an understanding of
emotion as fully embodied and culturally rich. New def-
initions which do not impoverish our understanding
have been sought, of which Lutz and White’s “embodied
thoughts” (1986) has been one of the most widely quoted,
but the meaning of “emotion” remains problematic and
the source of much confusion.
Approaches to emotion can frequently be assigned to
either a biological essentialist or a social constructivist
point of view—as Leavitt (1996) puts it, “bodily feeling”
or “cultural meaning.” This basic dichotomy in critical
traditions has served to structure a number of recent
reviews (e.g., Leavitt 1996, Lutz and White 1986) and to
organize at least one conference (Shore 1993).4 More re-
cent reviews have criticized the widespread bipolarity in
the research community, rejecting the apparent choice
between a biological and a cultural reductionism (Hinton
1993), and much scholarship of emotion is now moving
4. James Averill (1992) has posited a threefold division of ap-
proaches—the social, the biological, and the psychological—and
then subdivided the field yet further, but he is unusual in using a
triple rather than a dualistic structure.

towards approaches which synthesize elements of the
two schools.
biological approaches
Much of the study of emotion in psychology has pro-
ceeded from the assumption that there are certain “ba-
sic” emotions which are in some way “hard-wired” phys-
iologically into the human brain and nervous system
(e.g., Izard 1991; Panksepp 1993; Plutchik 1962, 1980;
LeDoux 1993; Shaver, Wu, and Schwartz 1992). This
group of scholars sees emotions as part of human phys-
iology, properties of a precultural social human body and
existing separate from and prior to cultural encrusta-
tions. Emotions are understood as primarily genetic,
based on evolutionary adaptation, and functional in the
production of “behavioural homeostasis” (Plutchik
1980). These “basic emotions” may be culturally glossed
and combined to form other, complex emotions. Shaver,
Wu, and Schwarz (1992), for example, argue that cross-
culturally basic emotions may be combined in numerous
ways to produce culturally specific emotions, but cul-
tural difference, for them, arises from the variable ad-
mixture of a limited range of emotional ingredients.
Basic emotions are thus understood to be common to
all humanity, often corresponding to a set of human fa-
cial expressions which are argued to be universally rec-
ognized in human society (Ekman 1984). Emotions in
this school of thought are understood to be primarily
bodily and only secondarily culturally interpreted. In this
way it may be possible to distinguish unproblematic
“emotions,” free from any cultural or cognitive input
(Panksepp 1994), which are the same for humans as for
any other animal (Plutchik 1980). Culture may then
overlie, distort, or disguise these basic emotions. For Ek-
man (1980, 1984), culture can interfere with universal
emotions in three ways. First, because of cultural “dis-
play rules,” emotions expressed are not always those ex-
perienced, and emotions that are experienced are not al-
ways transparently expressed. Secondly, cultural rules
will vary the “elicitors,” the stimuli which provoke a
particular emotion, so that, for example, owls do not
universally evoke fear, though they do for some people.
Finally, culture may also enable people to override their
natural emotions (cf. Zajonc and McIntosh 1992). As in
many psychological and psychiatric perspectives (e.g.,
Leventhal 1980), there is a “two-layer” model of the per-
son, with basic “psychic unity” (Lutz and White 1986:
412) overlain by culture. Leavitt (1996:518) has suggested
that such a position leaves one with two possible lines
of thought. The first is that emotions are biological and
invariable and therefore outside the purview of the hu-
man sciences. The other is that, since emotions are
shared at a level beyond (or, to be metaphorically con-
sistent, below) culture, emotional experience constitutes
a basis for empathetic understanding of others across
cultures.
Leff’s (1977) discussion of how “emotions” can be
“read” across cultures exemplifies the kind of assump-
tions which often characterize the two-layer, universal-
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 715
ist approach. Leff accepts that culture will affect emotion
but states that the value of cross-cultural emotion re-
search is that it enables psychologists “to dissect out the
psychophysiological, the cognitive, and the social com-
ponents of emotion” and to define the “pure, irreduci-
ble” emotions which combine to produce “the whole
range” of human emotion (p. 318). Here emotions are
seen as “things” (Harré 1986:4) which retain some kind
of integrity underneath the influence and variability of
cultural practice. This is evident in the way Leff ad-
dresses the problem of linguistic translation. He criti-
cizes some psychological studies for not appreciating
that language is deeply involved in emotion and points
out that “adequate translation” may not always be pos-
sible, but then he goes on to suggest that the distorting
effects of language are essentially a methodological prob-
lem of cross-cultural experimental research which might
be circumvented by the use of non-verbal means of com-
munication. For example, he suggests that one could
show subjects photographs of mourners at a funeral and
ask them “to choose the appropriate expression from a
selection of context-free faces. It would then be possible
to determine whether the ability to differentiate emo-
tions is greater or lesser with non-verbal compared to
verbal information” (p. 346). Leff here assumes that there
will be a state of “sorrow” or “grief” which characterizes
all cultures and exists in humans before and separate
from their language. He also assumes that the same cues
will evoke the same responses across cultures—that a
funeral will always have the same emotional connota-
tions. But we know that this is not the case (there are
numerous anthropological and ethnographic sources one
might cite here; Barley [1995] is one of the most enter-
taining). Leff takes a positivistic approach to the study
of emotion, assuming that emotions are there to be dis-
covered and truths about them will be revealed through
careful observation and appropriate methodology. Lutz
and White (1986) contrast this approach with what they
call “interpretivist” trends in anthropology, which build
on the assumptions that emotions are fluid and variable
and that emotional meanings are negotiated between
people, including the anthropologist, in and through so-
cial situations.
Criticisms of “intellectually anorexic” (Harré 1986:9)
bio-psychological accounts of emotion have been around
since at least the early 1970s and have come not only
from anthropologists but also from within psychology.
In particular, James Averill has examined and exploded
the implicit assumption that emotion is involuntary, ir-
rational, and somehow related to the lower, animal fac-
ulties which characterized much early physiological and
psychological work on the subject. He contends instead
that physiological emotion is inseparable from its cul-
tural meaning. He emphasizes the possibility of tran-
scending “biological imperatives,” the recursive rela-
tionship between individuals and their culture, and the
performative dimension of emotions (Averill 1974, 1980).
In doing so he contributes to a school of thought which,
Parrott and Harré (1996) contend, builds on the crucial
insight of Luria (1966) that cultural learning actually re-
716 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
shapes the human brain and nervous system (Parrott and
Harré 1996:2). Averill has also criticized the asocial and
acultural scope of much emotion research in psychology
and the primacy accorded to biological principles: “One
of the most striking things about most social-psycho-
logical theories of emotion is that they are basically non-
social” (1992:15). He goes on to say that the level of
analysis favoured by most social psychologists is that of
individuals as biological units, dissociated from their
cultural situations, their experiential histories, and so
forth. These individuals are standard units with the same
set of operating specifications in all contexts (his ex-
amples are Schachter [1964] and Zajonc [1985]). Averill’s
individuals, by contrast, are profoundly social; their
“emotions”—understood as complex and meaning-
ful—cannot pre-exist their cultural experience.
Averill (1980) has articulately critiqued the basic-emo-
tions approach, rejecting the assumption that biological
systems provide an exclusive and universal basis for
emotional experience and that emotions can be “hier-
archized.” While he acknowledges that emotions do “in-
corporate elements from one or more biological systems”
(p. 329), he considers this an inadequate basis for an en-
tirely or primarily biological theory of emotion: “A grain
of truth is not sufficient to make a theoretical loaf” (p.
329).
Other psychological research has somewhat unseated
the idea of basic emotions by demonstrating that the
same physiological state may be experienced as fear or
anger or even joy, depending on the context (e.g., Ortony
and Turner 1990).
Finally, what has made the biological approach so dif-
ficult to maintain as a way of eliciting cross-cultural
truths is the encounter with ethnographic and historical
work which makes abundantly clear that emotion is
hugely variable—that the “cultural” parts of emotion are
not superficial (see, e.g., the ethnographic work of Schief-
felin [1976], Geertz [1980], M. Rosaldo [1980], Heelas
[1983], Howell [1984], R. Rosaldo [1986], Abu-Lughod
[1988], Lutz [1988], Battaglia [1990], and Grima [1992]
and the historical work of Jackson [1985] and Harré and
Finlay-Jones [1986]). Emotions are constituted in com-
plex ways, involving bodily experiences, cultural mean-
ings, social values, and personal idiosyncrasies. If any-
thing is universal it is the capacity for what we call
“emotional” experience. Emotions are cultural, rich, and
variable; assumptions that certain physiological feelings
constitute emotion for all people do not help us to ad-
dress questions about the range of emotional experiences
and understandings.
Another significant line of critique has been that bi-
ological approaches have failed to consider the generative
role of language. A lack of engagement with recent the-
oretical and philosophical debates has resulted in a naı̈ve
understanding of language as merely the encryption of a
prior “thing.” Biologically based studies of emotion have
assumed that words are purely representational in func-
tion and serve as interchangeable labels for a basic ex-
perience that is the same for an Inuit, a Spaniard, or an
Ilongot (Harré 1986:4). In fact, variations in “emotion
talk” do not simply encode differently a set of shared
experiences but indicate and construct different emo-
tional experiences, values, and understandings. Emotion
words will not necessarily have translation into other
languages (Heelas 1986). When we think we recognize
what we call “jealousy” or “frustration” in the expres-
sion or the behaviour of a cultural Other, it is a “leap of
faith” to assume that “because we both have (are) human
bodies, ethnographers experience the same emotions as
those among whom they live” (Leavitt 1996:519). The
empathetic basis for cross-cultural understanding is in-
accurate, and previous attempts to “translate” the emo-
tions of other societies into our own terms have been
interpreted as a Eurocentric and even imperialistic ap-
propriation of the experience of the non-Western Other
(Geertz 1984, Lynch 1990). Rather than taking a view of
language as simply labeling pre-existing essential states,
much recent work has argued that “emotion talk” is
absolutely central to the constitution and cultural ex-
perience of emotion (e.g., Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990,
Harré 1986, Heelas 1986).
Many physiological researchers into emotion have
taken extremely seriously the critiques of cultural schol-
ars. Nevertheless, there remains a core of researchers
who, by exclusive and mutual referencing traditions,
have managed to avoid addressing serious problems in
their methodologies and inferences. Zajonc and McIn-
tosh (1992:70), for example, continue to treat emotions
as clearly observable and unambiguous phenomena and
congratulate themselves that “the field [of emotion re-
search in psychology has] moved ahead systematically,
gradually reducing the equations to ever fewer un-
knowns.” This plainly ignores the proliferation of un-
knowns made evident in ethnographic and sociological
study and the deep problems of trying to talk about emo-
tions in terms of “equations” at all.
social constructivist approaches
Arising from the critique of the biological understanding
of emotional experiences is a body of work which argues
that, rather than being universal and biological, human
emotions are culturally specific and differently consti-
tuted in different cultures through myth, social practice,
and language (e.g., Rosaldo 1984, Harré 1986, Heelas
1986, Lutz 1988, Grima 1992, Harré and Parrott 1996).
Most constructivists do not view emotions as having no
biological aspect at all, but they argue that systems of
cultural meaning are primary in any attempt to under-
stand emotion and not merely overlays on a hard-wired
biological basis. The bodily aspects of emotion may be
denied or considered scarcely relevant. The bodily agi-
tations discussed by Ekman (1984) and others are not
themselves emotions, it is argued, but component pro-
cesses which are inextricably combined with other, so-
cial and cultural, processes to organize and enable emo-
tion (Kitayama and Markus 1994:1–2). “Emotion talk”
(Heelas 1986) is accorded great significance by construc-
tivist scholars. Rather than language’s being a layer on

top of a central and universally shared set of bodily ex-
periences, it constitutes the emotion (Harré 1986:5):
This is not to deny that there are “leakages” into
consciousness from raised heartbeat, increased
sweating, swollen tear ducts and so on. But these ef-
fects are incidental to what it is to be in this or that
emotional state. It turns out that the dominant con-
tribution to the way that aspect of our lives unfolds
comes from the local social world by way of its lin-
guistic practices and the moral judgements in the
course of which the emotional quality of encounters
is defined.
Accordingly, Harré argues (pp. 4–5), we should proceed
not by asking “What is anger?” but by asking “How is
the word ‘anger’, and other expressions that cluster
around it, actually used in that cultural milieu and type
of episode?”
The constructivist approach to emotion has the virtue
of respecting and examining what is locally and cultur-
ally distinctive but the disadvantage of sometimes ne-
glecting the bodily and felt dimensions of emotion. In
particular, the constructivist focus on language literally
glosses over the evident bodiliness of emotional expe-
rience. Yet the very language of emotion is itself often
deeply biological—emotions are said to be experienced
in particular parts of the body; emotions are “felt”—in
both senses of the word—as physical sensations and
manifest in physical symptoms. At the extreme, some
constructivist theorists can seem to deny any bodiliness
to emotions at all. At times the work of Michelle Ros-
aldo, Catherine Lutz, or Benedicte Grima might exem-
plify this tendency. For example, Grima (1992), in her
study of emotion among Paxtun women in Pakistan,
claims that emotion is entirely performative, a social
construct serving to mediate social relationships. Emo-
tion is learned and culturally coded, and people employ
and perform emotion in accordance with their social
strategies. Harré’s early work on emotion treats the bod-
ily aspects of emotion as epiphenomenal and uninter-
esting (see the quotation about “leakages” above). Strath-
ern (1975) has been criticized by, for example, Lutz and
White (1986:407) for treating bodily experiences such as
blushing as merely metaphors with secondary ramifi-
cations in corporeal experience.
Much of the most eloquent critique of social construc-
tivism in the study of emotion has come out of medical
psychology, particularly in the recognition that emo-
tional experiences, though culturally and even individ-
ually variable, are bodily in nature (e.g., Csordas 1990,
Jenkins 1991, Kleinman and Kleinman 1991, Jenkins and
Karno 1992, Low 1994). Several scholars in this field have
criticized constructivism for its inadequate treatment of
the person as active and communicative. Lyon and Bar-
balet (1994) argue that popular constructivist concepts
of the body as a consumer or as the object of medicali-
zation represent the body as a thing or space that actions
are performed on. By contrast, they argue that embodied
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 717
emotion is the basis of social agency: “The body cannot
be seen merely as subject to external forces: the emotions
which move the person through bodily processes must
be understood as a source of agency: social actors are
embodied” (1994:50).
Reddy (1997), in a sustained attack on constructivist
approaches to emotion, points out that neither the con-
cept of “discourse” nor that of “practice” is adequate to
capture the active power of emotion. His admiration for
Grima’s (1992) ethnography seems to me a little mis-
placed in that context. Although Grima’s work, with its
rhetoric of performance and strategy, cannot be said to
ignore agency, its neglect of the bodily experience of
emotion makes it less real, less felt. Emotion for her is
more cognitive than linguistic but equally abstracted
from embodied experience. Moreover, Grima’s work car-
ries the suggestion that people have absolute control over
their emotions, choosing and enacting them for strategic
reasons. This in its own way is an injustice to the depth
and complexity of human social and personal life.
the grounds for a new synthesis
Much of the review literature on this subject perpetuates
a binary understanding of emotion—the argument is
whether emotion is physical, neurological, “primitive,”
universal, and deep in the individual or constructed, cog-
nitive, unstable, and highly cultural. Several of those
who have reviewed the literature of emotion have iden-
tified poles of extreme biological universalism and of
cultural constructivism/relativism and then presented
their own work as uniquely balanced and synthetic (e.g.,
Leavitt 1996, Harré and Parrott 1996). The work of Cath-
erine Lutz (1988), Michelle Rosaldo (1984), and Rom
Harré (e.g., 1986) has exemplified the constructivist ex-
treme; Plutchik (e.g., 1962, 1980, 1990), Izard (e.g., 1977,
1991, 1992), and Zajonc (e.g., 1985; Zajonc, Murphy, and
Inglehart 1989) have frequently represented the biolog-
ical pole. Yet even those works identified as extreme
have themselves often incorporated a recognition that,
put crudely, both body and culture matter. Few would
now argue either that emotions have no bodily dimen-
sion or conversely that emotions are purely animal phe-
nomena and have no cultural meaning. The widespread
recognition on “both” sides (to oversimplify a complex
range of positions) that emotions are both biological and
social is significant. The more productive recent work
has taken an interdisciplinary and synthetic approach
and moved debate towards the consideration of issues
such as (1) the relative importance of “biological” and
“cultural” factors (are cultural differences, as Lutz and
White [1986:408] ask, “crucial or merely interesting”?),
(2) the relationship between body and culture (is one
“primary” and the other “secondary”? is emotional ex-
perience a “layering” of the cultural over a biological
basis? how far may one aspect be affected by the
other?—i.e., is society organized to manage people’s
emotions, or do emotions arise from social/cultural ex-
pectations?), and (3) whether the separation of “biolog-
ical” and “cultural” elements of emotion for analytical
718 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
purposes is desirable or even possible (“as long as you
try to take a middle position between biology and cul-
ture, you still leave the opposition between the two in
place” [Julian Thomas, personal communication]).
In recent years, anthropological and sociological in-
terest in the body has produced a ground for critical con-
sideration of emotion which potentially gets beyond the
problems of dualistic thought. Lutz and White’s (1986:
430) suggestion that emotions be regarded as “embodied
thoughts” uses the theorized body as a way of linking
the biological and constructivist “sides” of the tradi-
tional dichotomy. Whilst a view of emotion as discourse
plays down its personally experienced, embodied nature
(Reddy 1997), to consider the “embodiedness” of emo-
tion—and other lived experiences—without conceding
that the body is either natural or somehow prior to social
and cultural forces (Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990:12) still
leaves room for subjective individuality in emotional ex-
perience. In this way, postures, faces, and gestures need
not be excluded from our consideration: bodies are not
“made of discourse” (a phrase used ironically by Thomas
1998) but can be considered as part of the way in which
emotion is culturally enacted, experienced, and repre-
sented. Whether the body is a useful focus for the ar-
chaeological study of emotion is considered below.
Emotion and Archaeology
Time has scarcely been considered a significant dimen-
sion in emotion research in psychology, sociology, or an-
thropology. This widespread failure to consider historical
trajectory has been critiqued by Reddy (1997), for ex-
ample, who has claimed that work such as Geertz’s
(1983) does not take sufficient account of the historical
forces which brought a specific Western concept of the
feeling individual into existence (1997:339–40).
The undifferentiated “traditional” (ethnographically
and historically) is sometimes invoked uncritically by
sociologists as a foil for the “modern” (a usage critiqued
by Walter 1995), but serious consideration of change over
time has been substantially the preserve of historians.
Questions of the history of emotion—and the implica-
tions of the historical mutability of mentalities and emo-
tions—have been most extensively addressed by French
historians. The insights of Lucien Febvre were very sig-
nificant in shaping a tradition of historical psychology
in France which considered critically the mental and
emotional experiences of people in the past and thus
responded to Febvre’s call to “give up psychological
anachronism” (1973:9). This historical psychology was
informed by and contributed to a new or revived interest
in mentalités, represented by historians such as Duby
and LeGoff. By contrast, the literature on historical
change in emotion in the Anglo-American tradition is
thinner than one might expect.
This is not, however, because Anglophone historians
perceive emotions in the past as unproblematic (Pinch
1995:100). Harré points out that as the local moral order
changes, so emotions themselves appear and disappear,
grow or diminish in intensity and elaboration, as is ex-
emplified in his own review of the literature relating to
the emotion of accidie, a medieval state of spiritual bore-
dom and dejection for which no real equivalent exists
today (Harré and Finlay-Jones 1986:220). Perhaps it is the
difficulty of finding or recognizing relevant sources
which has impeded the development of emotional
histories.
Such history of emotion as exists has mostly concen-
trated on the changes in emotional experience in the
early modern period in the West, particularly the devel-
opment of modern emotional patterns (e.g., Stone 1977,
Demos 1996). These changes include the growth of af-
fective individualism and the significance of guilt.
Stearns (1989:8–9) draws attention to the paucity of re-
search on the later history of emotion; we might also
lament the lack of attention in the historical literature
to emotion in earlier history and in non-Western con-
texts. The Stearnses’ view that emotional experiences
remain constant through time and across cultures and
only their expression changes (Stearns and Stearns 1985:
828) would, however, be hard to maintain in the face of
the anthropological literature on the subject. We might
also argue that social expectations actually shape the
experience and its likely occurrence, so that emotions
are constituted and not simply enriched by cultural
meanings.
Stearns (1993) suggests that the historical study of
emotion offers opportunities to look at the causation of
change—how shifts in emotional values and expressions
articulate with changes in other beliefs such as the Prot-
estant Reformation, increased commercialization (e.g.,
Campbell 1989), and industrialization. In archaeology we
are very far from arriving at a consensus about the pos-
sibility or value of studying emotion. Yet there are a
number of compelling reasons that the archaeological
consideration of emotion could or should be important
to us:5
1. Emotion is not natural or precultural. Given that
the attribution of emotional states to past people is wide-
spread and, I would argue, inevitable in archaeology, a
critical awareness of our assumptions about emotion in
the past is necessary.
2. Emotion is absolutely central to human experience
and the way society works.
3. Our understanding of volition and motivation re-
quires the incorporation of emotion. Doing justice to
people in the past means recognizing that they were com-
plex, feeling, thinking humans and not automata re-
sponding to situations in predetermined ways.
4. Critical awareness of the variability of emotion de-
naturalizes some of our present emotional values; this
has important political implications.
Assumptions about emotion in the past already per-
meate archaeological discourse. “Commonsense” un-
5. These propositions apply not only to archaeology, of course, but
to the humanities more broadly. The case I argue here is that the
positive consequences of an understanding of cultural emotion
should be extended to include archaeology.

derstandings of emotional experiences and emotional
motivations are common in archaeology, and such ap-
proaches implicitly employ a biological and universal
understanding of emotions which takes the fact of a
shared humanity as the basis for an empathetic inter-
pretation. Burials, for example, may be “respectful” or
“contemptuous” (Spindler 1995:253) or give the societies
responsible for them “a reassuring feeling of permanence
and perpetuity” (Parker Pearson 1993:92). Common el-
ements of archaeological explanation involve emotional
concepts such as attachment to land, respect or awe be-
fore the ancestors, social control through shame, guilt,
or fear, and so on. Yet given the variability of emotional
experience, it will not suffice to assume that certain
emotions were relevant in the past. We must be critical
about attributing emotional states, motivations, or con-
cerns to people of the past. We must make cases that
certain emotional responses or values were likely to have
occurred in particular contexts. Foregrounding the study
of emotions forces us to consider our assumptions—to
reject sameness and question what we “know” about
people in the past. If emotion varies across cultures in
the present, emotions have certainly not remained stable
through time.
Imputing certain familiar emotions to past people is
especially prevalent in popular pasts—books, films, tel-
evision programmes, etc. Yet placing romantic love or
late-20th-century styles of anger, jealousy, or pride in the
early 14th century (as in the film Braveheart) or deep
prehistory (in the novels of Jean Auel) is hopelessly
anachronistic. This kind of emotional connection, which
affects almost every popular film, television programme,
or novel about the past, has the effect of making what
was possibly very different appear safe and familiar and
legitimating our own emotional and social values. This
is a pity. A popular history or archaeology which pre-
sented people in the past in really unfamiliar ways could
be much more exciting than the normalized schlock we
are generally offered.
In representing the people of the past we will always
need to negotiate between the Scylla of making them so
utterly incomprehensible that we cannot even begin to
say anything meaningful about them and the Charybdis
of rendering them as late-20th-century Europeans wear-
ing wimples or furry bikinis. There are political impli-
cations to both positions which are beyond the scope of
this article. Here the point is that theorized, critical un-
derstandings of the emotions of people in the past are
better than unexamined, implicit ones.
A second compelling reason for studying emotion is
its enormous importance in shaping human experiences
both “behind” and “in front of” any event, to use Bar-
rett’s useful terms (1994:5). The actions and motivations
of human beings are shaped by their emotional experi-
ences—their desires, fears, and values. And human ex-
periences are meaningful through their emotional power.
Schieffelin’s (1976) ethnography of the Papuan Kaluli de-
scribes how emotions which he translates as “grief,”
“nostalgia,” and “anger” shape and animate most aspects
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 719
of Kaluli social and cultural life as well as individuals’
personal and introspective experiences.
Anthropologists studying things such as attitudes to
marriage, locality, and kin consider emotion to be central
(Lutz and White 1986:421); if we have pretensions to
making meaningful interpretations of these things in the
past, must we not also consider the significance of emo-
tional values in constructing them? Concepts such as
“resistance,” “control,” “the household,” “child rear-
ing,” and “power,” for example, are given cultural force
through emotional experience. Of course there are prob-
lems in that the nature of those emotional experiences
is not everywhere the same. We cannot assume that “the
household,” for example, always means the same thing
in terms of the emotional bonds among its members or
between the household and its land. However, to con-
sider the household without considering the way in
which the people in it might experience their relation-
ships, hope for the future, and remember the past would
be to impoverish our understanding and could result in
archaeologies which are strangely inhuman, partial, or
dull (merely descriptive). In this way, the attribution of
emotional states to people in the past is part of the pro-
ject of imagining “households with faces” (Tringham
1991). As Tringham points out, depersonalized accounts
of the human past cannot capture the “richness and com-
plexity” (p. 120) of social life.
Emotions are involved in the way a society structures
itself. Changing understandings of the nature and sig-
nificance of grief, for example, affect and are affected by
changing economic, social, and familial relationships
(Stearns and Knapp 1996, Tarlow 1998). John Demos has
looked at changes in the emotions of social control such
as shame and guilt in an early modern context. He relates
a change in emphasis from shame to guilt during the
later 17th and early 18th centuries in New England to
changing social structures and the transformation in at-
titudes to the self and religious belief (1996). This set of
emotional values was evident in changing notions of
crime and punishment and in the popular “moral econ-
omy.” In the past few decades many archaeologists have
explored questions of social control and the operation of
power. Emotional ideologies play key roles in the repro-
duction and transformation of relationships of power,
and therefore to neglect consideration of the emotional
is to impoverish our social archaeologies generally. He-
gemony and authority in social contexts are constituted
through such emotional experiences as awe, respect, fear,
shame, and guilt as well as familiarity and security.
Large-scale processes such as state formation, subsis-
tence change, and population movements need to be un-
derstood in locally meaningful contexts of feeling and
understanding. For example, Kus (1989) reviews the pro-
cesses of state formation and the maintenance of royal
authority in Madagascar through an examination of the
metaphorical and emotional meanings of state, king, and
society to the mass of the people. She argues that “social
actors operate not only in a world of physical and social
‘laws’, but also in a ‘meaningful’ world” (p. 153). In order
to understand how a kingdom was created and repro-
720 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
duced, it is necessary to think about what—materially,
ideologically, and emotionally—its subjects derived from
such a form of social organization. Without “bread and
circuses,” revolution or simple non-cooperation can en-
sure that unpopular regimes fail.
Similarly, the meaning of architecture, artifacts, or
landscapes in the past is animated by the emotional un-
derstandings which inform their apprehension. A land-
scape may be a place of dread or of joy; an artefact may
be a token of love or a mnemonic of oppression. Emotion,
in short, is everywhere. Emotion is part of what makes
human experience meaningful (just as meanings make
experience emotional). Emotionless archaeologies are
limited, partial, and sometimes hardly human at all.
Rosaldo (1989) has eloquently argued that in ethnog-
raphy, failure to consider the emotions and the meaning
content of events experienced by the subjects of study
does them a profound injustice. Archaeologists have
scarcely considered the question of what, if anything,
they owe to people in the past, but certainly a case could
be made that we owe them a duty to represent them
fairly in the present. It is, of course, impossible for us to
produce “The Truth” about the experiences of people in
the past, but to write about a society of mechanistic units
responding to stimuli as their biological programming
instructs them is certainly not a fair representation. As
Lutz and White (1986:431) have argued in the case of
ethnography,
One of the promises of the new interest in emotion
is that it can reanimate the sometimes robotic im-
age of humans which social science has purveyed.
The agricultural decision-maker is rarely seen as suf-
fering through a choice between sometimes terrible
alternatives; the health system of a society is often
presented as if it were peopled by actors rather than
family members confronting each other’s possible
death. Incorporating emotion into ethnography will
entail presenting a fuller view of what is at stake for
people in everyday life.
Lutz and White are not arguing here for a universal hu-
man emotionality, to be understood empathetically, but
they are saying that emotional experience—variable and
unpredictable—is a central part of human experience and
to ignore it is to dehumanize the ethnographic (and, we
might add, archaeological) Other.
The fourth reason we should bring emotion into ar-
chaeology relates the history of emotion to present social
and political concerns. Stearns (1989) suggests that the
historical study of emotion can challenge modern beliefs
which inform areas such as social policy; he gives the
example of jealousy considered as a cause of crime (p.
5). Beliefs about the legitimacy of emotional feel-
ings—their naturalness—inform expectations about ap-
propriate social behaviour, criminal culpability, “natu-
ral” human relationships such as “the family,” and so
forth. More generally, Averill (1992) notes that the emo-
tions considered most natural or fundamental tend to be
those which accord best with the researcher’s own cul-
tural values. Thus in a collectivistic society, emotions
which express group solidarity will be considered more
fundamental than those which express differentiated in-
dividualism; in an individualistic society the reverse will
be true (p. 16). In either case, valorized emotions are
given the status of deep, natural, human characteristics,
which is why, he argues, “social theorists of diverse per-
suasion, conservative or radical, secular or religious, of-
ten urge people to ‘get in touch with their true feelings.’”
By demonstrating the variety of human emotional ex-
perience through time, archaeological and historical
work on emotion can undercut claims to the “natural-
ness” of any single social system.6 This depends upon
the important point that emotions change. Emotional
values of societies can and do shift through time; emo-
tions may cease to be recognized (as has happened in the
West to the emotion of accidie [Harré and Finlay-Jones
1986]) or their significance may develop and change (as
I have argued is the case for romantic love in the 18th
century [Tarlow 1999]). Stearns (1993) has argued that,
because the historicization of emotion is an important
political project, history should be added to the list of
disciplines with something to add to the study of emo-
tion, and we might add that archaeology can make a
similar contribution.
This all might appear to demand something quite im-
possible from archaeologists. On the one hand we should
consider emotion, but on the other we cannot assume
that we understand the specific emotions experienced by
people in the past; we should write three-dimensionally
about their understandings and motivations, but we need
at the same time to be reflexive and critical about what
we say. We owe it to the people of the past to represent
them as fully and as roundedly as possible, but, if we
cannot assume that their emotional states were ones that
we would recognize or that they considered the same
sorts of situations to be emotional, how can we know
what to represent?
For all these reasons and others, there is some legiti-
mate debate about whether emotion is a useful, mean-
ingful, or possible area of archaeological study. There are
a number of grounds upon which the study of emotion
might be resisted. First, there are major and serious con-
cerns about the usefulness of such an amorphous term
as “emotion,” an anxiety that I share and to which I will
return. There are also methodological concerns: how
might we go about introducing emotions into our ar-
chaeology, especially in prehistoric contexts and those
with poor data resolution? Associated with this is an
underexplored anxiety that writing emotion into the past
necessarily involves empathy, which may only reproduce
sameness in our archaeologies.
I see the archaeology of emotion as inextricably tied
up with the enquiry into meaning in the past, and there-
fore those archaeologists who have argued that there is
little or no point in attempting to study meaning in the
6. This comment is not intended to support a morally relativistic
stance (see Salmon 1997).

past would probably reject emotion research for similar
reasons. Their reasons for resisting “meaning” in the past
range from being essentially pessimistic about any un-
derstanding of past social experience (e.g., Daniel 1962:
127–28) to rejecting meaning content in favour of social
experience as a relevant goal for archaeological discourse
(Barrett 1988, 1994).7 Others have argued that the past
could be so different, so other, that the interpretation of
past meanings is a doomed and misleading exercise (e.g.,
Fowler 2000). I think that any position which denies the
possibility of getting at meanings in the past necessarily
precludes an archaeology of emotion. Emotions are con-
stituted, and are evident, through social meanings. The
only alternative, one that we must surely reject in the
light of its enormous problems, is that the specific emo-
tional nature of experience can be assumed on a universal
basis. I do not think, for the reasons addressed above,
that an emotion-free social archaeology is an option.
Emotional experiences give meaning and force to social
contexts.
What follows is a brief review of the main ways in
which the study of emotion in archaeology has been at-
tempted and an example of one situation in which emo-
tion is frequently and uncritically invoked in archae-
ology: the treatment of physical disability. I will then
consider how archaeologists might proceed in the study
of emotion in the past.
Archaeological Approaches to Emotion
as a biological universal
As discussed above, the implicit assumption that emo-
tions can be considered as biological universals is wide-
spread in archaeology. Most of the time this is only be-
cause the nature of emotion in general or of specific
emotions has not been problematized. In some cases,
however, archaeologists have explicitly adopted the view
that emotions are universal, physiological characteris-
tics. These scholars have then addressed themselves to
questions such as the evolution of emotion in humans
and its difference (or not) from emotion in other animals
(e.g., Steele 1995:82–83). Steven Mithen, in particular,
has been explicit about his view of the nature of emotion
in archaeology, which is that emotion is functional and
adaptive.
Mithen, defending his work on decision making in
Mesolithic foragers against the criticism that he presents
humans as acting robotically, argues that his “rational
decision-makers” experienced emotion and were there-
fore not “cybernetic.” Their emotions were, he claims,
functional in making decisions. In constructing this ar-
gument, Mithen employs a restricted definition of the
term “emotion” whereby “we can assert with confidence
that each individual (except those with cognitive pa-
7. In response to Barrett’s position, Hodder has argued that all ar-
chaeological work of social interpretation necessarily involves
making claims about past meanings (1992a, 1999).
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 721
thologies) during the Mesolithic experienced the full
range of human emotions simply by virtue of being
Homo sapiens sapiens” (1991:10). By “the full range”
here he means all of a limited number of “basic emo-
tions” (in this case, five) which he believes to be shared
by all humans and a number of non-human animals. In
addition to the “basic emotions,” Mithen, following Oat-
ley and Johnson-Laird (1987), enumerates various “social
emotions” which are formed by the overlaying of cul-
tural meaning onto one or another of the basic five.
Clearly, this is not a sociological or anthropological view
of emotion, as discussed above, in which the full range
of human emotions would be infinite, culturally varied,
and not within the experience of any single human being.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Mithen refers to the
work of evolutionary psychologists rather than of soci-
ologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.
For Mithen the nature of “emotion” is not proble-
matized, nor is it assumed to be culturally variable. Cer-
tain situations universally cue certain discrete and de-
fined emotions; thus evidence of death in childbirth
reveals grief and sorrow, while violent death speaks “of
the emotions concerning anger and fear” (1991:11). In
accordance with his functionalist position, Mithen sees
the importance of archaeological research into emotion
as being in the identification of “the nature and role of
emotions in everyday lives and activities of prehistoric
men and women” (1991:13, my italics). However, it is
unclear, given that in his view emotions are already
known and universally associated with the same situa-
tions, why research should be necessary. Mithen has
been criticized by Thomas (1991a) for reducing emo-
tional complexity and variability to the universal and
instrumental. Thomas rejects the idea that there is any
single and timeless rationality and criticizes Mithen’s
work for its individualism. Thomas himself avoids any
attempt to grapple with the admittedly problematic no-
tion of emotion but emphasizes the importance of his-
toricity and human intentionality.
The functional/adaptive view of emotion in evolu-
tionary archaeology,8 as exemplified by Mithen, sees
emotions as things which are either there or not
there—they are indicators of “humanity” in an evolu-
tionary sense (cf. Walker and Shipman 1996) and the
product of selective pressures. In itself, the experience
of “fear,” for example, is assumed to be universal; its
constitution and recognition are not problematized. Be-
cause emotions are assumed to be already known and
understood, the questions addressed in evolutionary psy-
chology are when, how, and why emotions came to exist.
Answers to the first question are related to the achieve-
ment of “humanity.” In the extreme, the pursuit of an-
swers to the how and why questions leads to the socio-
biological interpretations of romantic love, friendship,
8. Kitayama and Markus refer to those psychologists who view
emotion as socially constructed and adaptive at the level of the
individual to variable sociocultural environments as “functional-
adaptive.” I am referring here not to them but to the evolutionary
psychologists who see emotion as genetically advantageous in a
Darwinian sense.
722 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
anxiety, or guilt with which we are familiar from endless
media coverage (and, in a more academic context, in the
work of, for example, Dawkins [1976], Trivers [1985], and
Weinrich [1980]).
More subtle and developed consideration of emotion
in archaeology is given by Cowgill (1993), who shares
with Mithen the general view that some basic human
emotions are biologically based and universal. Rejecting
both the unpeopled archaeological worlds of some cul-
ture histories and the pasts populated entirely by “ra-
tional actors” proposed by some economic archaeolo-
gists, Cowgill argues that we need to develop ways of
looking at the ideational and emotional aspects of the
human past. He outlines a number of universal “non-
rational propensities” (1993:557), including a number of
basic emotions apparently derived from Ekman (1985)
and, more controversial, “susceptibility to romantic
love” (1993:558), among other things, although he con-
cedes that their expression will relate to variable “local
rules.” If we accept that emotions and understandings
need to be incorporated into archaeological explanation,
even though such a project will be very difficult, he goes
on to say, we are left with three possible courses of the-
oretical action (which are not exclusive). We can accept
that a reduced level of understanding is all that will be
possible, become bolder though not less critical in our
use of direct historical approaches, or work towards the
development of “middle-range theory of the mind”
(p.562).
Cowgill’s recognition of the significance of local rules,
local meanings, and even “local nonrational propensi-
ties” distinguishes his approach from that of Mithen. He
suggests first that we should not worry too much about
getting all the details right and aim instead at the delin-
eation of a general picture (his artistic metaphor is ac-
companied by some illustrations of the kind of “cartoon”
detail we could draw instead of the “Mona Lisa” which
he suggests Hodder requires us to produce). Middle-range
theory of the mind will, he claims, help us to create those
caricatures. Cowgill’s concern for methodology is clearly
one which will resonate for many archaeologists who
accept in principle the need to produce more subtle, hu-
manized, and three-dimensional pasts but are unsure
how to go about this while still producing archaeologies
that are “true.” He sees middle-range theory of the mind
as the discovery of rules that relate artistic expression
or measuring systems to universal psychological traits.
Cowgill’s examples deal more with the kinds of issues
which are associated with “cognitive archaeology” or
“archaeology of the mind” as developed by Renfrew
(1982, 1994), but it is unclear that the general, all-purpose
methodologies he suggests will be of much assistance in
telling us any but the most banal truths about the human
past. In dealing with varied archaeological situations, as
his belief in the potential of properly critical historical
interpretation seems to acknowledge, it is surely nec-
essary to develop different, contextual approaches.
Similarly, Cowgill’s argument for an adjustment of our
expectations away from the finely nuanced towards the
general is not appropriate to a study of the past which
acknowledges that psychology, meaning, and emotion
are essential to the way societies are structured and en-
acted. Matters of psychological detail are not add-on ex-
tras but fundamentals. Moreover, archaeologists usually
find the detail—small bits of background in the Mona
Lisa—rather than the broad brush strokes. It is unclear
that cutting back on detail, even if it were possible,
would make our task any easier.
by introspection
There is little controversy now in proposing that ar-
chaeologists in the present are individuals who them-
selves respond differently and sometimes idiosyncrati-
cally to the archaeology they encounter and inevitably
bring their own cultural understandings, subjectivity,
and experience to their work. This self-awareness is part
of general critical theory now widely embraced within
the discipline. For some, reflexive awareness of one’s
own subjectivity is not only an essential component of
politically and socially aware archaeological practice but
also a source of celebration and study in its own right.
The emotional responses of the archaeologist have been
the subject of critical consideration in recent years (e.g.,
Bapty 1990, Meredith 1990, Pollard 1992, Kus 1992). Car-
man and Meredith (1990:187), for example, seek to ex-
amine the impact of past material culture on the modern
archaeologist and to engage the reader’s emotions. Mer-
edith argues that all archaeologists, situated in terms of
their cultural context and personal and social histories,
respond emotionally to their encounter with material
culture (Meredith 1990:208). In his call for the recogni-
tion of sensuality in the apprehension of archaeological
material, he laments the sanitized and intellectualized
presentation of the past (cf. Kus 1992). He is explicitly
concerned with foregrounding the archaeologist’s emo-
tional experience and aesthetic responses, which he
holds to be closely related to each other and linked to
something “deeper” than the intellectual. He is not con-
cerned here with how one might approach past emotions,
though he does believe that the emotional self-awareness
he calls for is a prerequisite to such archaeological study
(cf. Rosaldo 1989). Meredith also points out that the mu-
seum-going or heritage-consuming public also has an
emotional response to archaeological artefacts and ex-
hibits (Kevin Walsh [1995] makes a similar point with
regard to archaeological sites).
Yet in his work on the emotional response of the mod-
ern subject encountering the past, Meredith replicates
the dichotomous view that emotion is inner, sensual,
and spontaneous and opposed to the rational and intel-
lectual. For him the visual is visceral; by contrast, the
cerebral is neither emotional nor bodily. Yet for some, a
well-constructed intellectual argument gives at least as
much aesthetic pleasure as a pretty vase. A broad accep-
tance of different kinds of experience would seem to pro-
duce a richer archaeology than the celebration of “the
sensual” at the expense of “the academic.”
The emotional responses of the modern archaeologist
have also been considered by Michael Shanks, particu-

larly in Experiencing the Past (1992; see also Shanks and
McGuire 1996), and have arguably been the academic
excuse for much self-absorbed or even narcissistic rev-
erie. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the late-20th-century
passion for self-knowledge and self-analysis manifest in
the psychotherapeutic culture should make itself felt in
archaeology. The Freudian and post-Freudian “intro-
spective revolution” (Weinstein 1990:296), which has in
part been responsible for the development of emotion as
a research area in the first place, has also produced what
Hodder has called “the past as self-discovery” (1999:14).
Emotional analysis, if limited to the self, is likely to
be of little interest except to biographers, psychological
historians, and the authors themselves. But if emotion
is something which we value highly in ourselves, it
should also be important and worthy of attention in
those whom we study (for a similar argument made with
reference to self-consciousness, see Cohen 1994). Intro-
spection is surely of greater importance to the archae-
ologist if it nudges us towards something interesting
about the past.
as a psychological universal
It is contentious, however, to suggest that one’s own
subjective, emotional response could be a legitimate
foundation for an understanding of emotions in the past.
At issue here is the question of how far the perceptions,
experiences, and emotions of modern individuals can be
considered the same as the perceptions, experiences, and
emotions of people in the past and, more broadly, to what
extent subjective emotional experience may be gener-
alized as a basis for intersubjective understanding.
The meaning, nature, and limits of empathy are not
often addressed explicitly by archaeological theorists.
Even those scholars whose interests in phenomenolog-
ical approaches would seem to impel them towards a
9. Schutz (1967) asks how one might ever “know” other people’s
subjective experience. His primary answer to this question depends
on corporeal synchronicity—aligning one’s own time of experienc-
ing with others’ and observing their bodily responses, facial ex-
pressions, and so forth. This, as a method of intersubjective un-
derstanding, has obvious limitations, however, particularly for
students of the past. From an anthropological point of view, “read-
ing” the body is itself problematic, as discussed above. Moreover,
as Schutz himself acknowledges, when one is not sharing “the
world of everyday life” with another and such corporeal alignment
is therefore impossible, there is no easy way to proceed. Schutz
does acknowledge that there are significant relationships between
modern subjects and the world of predecessors (Vorwelt), which he
sees as different from the present because it is “already completely
fixed” (1967:208). This world can be known only through
signs—evidences left by its inhabitants (although consideration of
the nature of the communicative technologies by which the past
is known is absent from Schutz’s work [Crossley 1996:9]). The in-
terpretation of these signs is achievable only through an imagina-
tive projection of the self through time but is problematic because
the social environment of the world of predecessors is so different
from the modern world that there is no common kernel of expe-
rience or knowledge which may be drawn on. We therefore rely on
the limited commonality of a general, shared, transcendent hu-
manity. Even so, our intersubjective knowledge of the world of
predecessors can only be vague and tentative (Schutz 1967:207–14).
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 723
consideration of such matters have rarely detailed and
justified their views. Yet empathy is a central issue for
archaeologists; our attitude about what may be ap-
proached empathetically, the limits of empathy, and so
forth, structures our interpretive strategies. There is the-
oretical work to be done, and this work needs to be un-
dertaken within the discipline; the particular problems
of understanding an Other who is far distant in time from
the modern self have not been much addressed by think-
ers outside archaeology. Schutz’s philosophical writings
on the nature of “intersubjective” understanding are in-
teresting here,9 but in the end his work only brings us
back round to the question we have already arrived at:
what, if anything, constitutes general, shared, transcen-
dent humanity? What, if anything, can we empathize
about?
“Empathy” is often decried but rarely defined in ar-
chaeology. Differences of definition appear to be at the
root of much of the confusion over whether we as ar-
chaeologists are or should be empathetic. Ian Hodder has
been widely pilloried for taking an “empathetic” ap-
proach, though it is clear that for him “empathy” often
means the recognition of any commonality of apprehen-
sion between one’s own experience of the world and an-
other’s, rather than any grander claim fully to “know”
the experience of another. Hodder’s interest in the his-
torical idealism of Collingwood has led him to argue that
all archaeological interpretation involves the assump-
tion of some kind of commonality with the people of
the past (1991c:95–104; 1992b:16–19). In a long discus-
sion of the relevance of Collingwood’s work to archae-
ology, Hodder suggests that, while we cannot re-create
past minds through “sit[ting] and ‘empathis[ing] with’ or
‘commun[ing] with’ the past” (1991c:98), the attempt to
think oneself into past subjectivities is inevitable and
should be carried out through active engagement with
archaeological data. Hodder’s argument that some degree
of commonality of apprehension must be assumed in
order to say anything about human cultural and social
experience in the past other than fantastical fiction de-
mands recognition and serious consideration in archae-
ology. Nevertheless, some critique of Hodder’s empathy
is certainly appropriate, given that his position is not
always internally consistent.10
While most archaeologists would be happy to reject a
naı̈ve methodological empathy which assumes that past
emotions are knowable because we can imaginatively
experience them, an important question about the degree
and nature of commonality between past and present
people remains largely unaddressed. In practice, few ar-
chaeologists believe that the subjective experience of
past people cannot be meaningfully understood by us in
any way whatsoever. Those who reject the possibility
10. As Johnsen and Olsen point out (1992:433–34), Hodder has
shifted his ground here: “Having declared himself as a ‘child of
Collingwood’ in 1987 [Hodder 1987:353], Hodder (1991a:7) now dis-
misses Collingwood’s view as ‘outdated’ in that it ‘fails sufficiently
to examine the relationship between past and present’ (Hodder
1991b:34). He also finds this to be a weakness of his own account
(Hodder 1991b:34).”
724 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
that past meanings or emotions are knowable with much
precision might still accept that our shared experience
of being human provides us with a basis for the inter-
pretation of, for example, sensory perception. Therefore
an all-out rejection of empathy is not appropriate for
those who study the social past. Instead we should be
asking, “Empathetic about what?” In practice, most ar-
chaeologists continue to suppose that something of what
they experience does in fact constitute a transcendent
similarity. They may anchor their interpretations in bod-
iliness (Tilley), human rationality (Mithen), social power
(Thomas), or symbolic thought (Hodder). The question
of what we empathize about depends on the questions
we ask and what we are examining. Of course it is not
necessary to be empathetic in order to study the
past—we can make meaningful and useful statements
about humans in the past such as those concerning de-
mography or palaeopathology, for example, without
thinking ourselves into their experiences in any way, just
as we feel able to make meaningful statements about
elephants and field mice in the past without claiming to
know what their experiences felt like. But in order to
make social or cultural claims about the past it is surely
necessary, at however general a level, to assume some
“common humanity.”
Christopher Tilley, for example, asks questions about
the ways that monuments acted in worlds of the past
and, in order to address those questions from his place
in the modern world, accepts that his perception of phys-
ical, positional relationships between places in the land-
scape has something in common with the perceptions
of people in the past (Tilley 1993, 1994, 1996a, b). Thus
concepts like “above” and “below,” “visible” and “not
visible,” can be assumed to have been recognized and
meaningful in the past. Tilley states that his experiences
of being bodily in the landscape, “these most basic of
personal spatial experiences, are shared with prehistoric
populations in our common biological humanity” and
thus provide “tools” with which to work (1994:74). How-
ever, he would not wish to elaborate specific meanings
or emotions from this limited commonality alone. He
claims that his walks through archaeological landscapes
were not intended to facilitate “an empathetic under-
standing of their significance.” Elsewhere he says that
one of the purposes of visiting monuments is “to inform
and sediment in the mind a sense of awe and wonder”
(1996b:173) but not whether such an emotional sense
has any bearing on past experiences of the same mon-
ument. His writings remain ambiguous about where the
limits of empathy lie.
Julian Thomas takes a similar position, explicitly dis-
tancing himself from any attempt at “empathy with past
people” (1993:29). His position is that the minds of peo-
ple in the past are now lost to us, though it is important
to acknowledge that past people did inhabit meaningful,
social worlds. For Thomas, it is the significance of social
power that is universally human and that underpins his
archaeological analyses (1991b, 1993, 1996). As has Til-
ley, he has critiqued the limitations of the omniscient
distribution map and site plan as a way of understanding
the human experience of landscape (cf. Barrett 1994). The
alternative to such totalizing perceptions arises from re-
flexive personal experience. Yet for such phenomenolog-
ical approaches to illuminate in any way our understand-
ing of the past, it must be necessary to assume that in
some way modern human experience does align with
past human experience. I suspect that what Tilley, Tho-
mas, and others mean to reject in their disclaimers about
empathy is the view that past emotional states are ac-
cessible to us by imagination alone—what one might
term a naı̈ve methodological empathy.
To sum up, then: empathy is a problematic term not
only because we must ask what we might empathize
about but also because emotional empathy might be con-
sidered either as a methodology or as an end result of
interpretation. Whilst some degree of alignment is nec-
essary to make all but the most empirical claims about
the past, many people would wish to limit assumptions
about the similarities of human experience in some
ways. Methodologically, emotional empathy (Hodder’s
“sitting and empathising”) is clearly inadequate as a way
of examining past emotions because of the potentially
great and unknown differences between past experiences
and our own. Few archaeologists now would espouse a
position which allows an empathetic understanding of
emotion to precede the interpretive process in some tran-
scendent and panhuman way. On the one hand, meth-
odological empathy may result in the culturally under-
theorized approaches to emotion exemplified in the work
of Steven Mithen. Alternatively, it could result in the
kind of mystical communion with the past popularized
in New Age and ecofeminist archaeologies. But because
we cannot sustain a view of emotions as transcendent
and universal in the light of the research discussed ear-
lier, naı̈ve empathy cannot be a viable approach to in-
terpretation of emotion in the past.
An alternative to a naı̈ve empathy based on shared
humanity is a positional empathy based on social ex-
perience (Lutz and White 1986:415). The observer may
draw on shared life experiences or on commonalities of
gender, age, status, or practice to claim special under-
standing of another. This is the position of, for example,
the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who argues that his
own experience of bereavement enabled his emotional
understanding of Ilongot men whose angry response to
the death of others had previously been incomprehen-
sible to him (1986, 1989). In archaeology the social po-
sitioning argument would hold that, for example, women
archaeologists would have a unique understanding of
women in the past because of their shared experience of
femininity. Such arguments are essentialist in their as-
sumption that there is some core and universal experi-
ence of, in this case, “being woman” which privileges
the female interpreter (Damm 1986). From such a posi-
tion, femininity, like masculinity, is ahistorical; all
women are joined in a universal sisterhood of wombs,
childbirth, acorn processing, and cooking pots.
Issues of intersubjective understanding continue to be
major philosophical problems for all social scientists. Ar-
chaeologists encounter additional, specific difficulties,

some of which are discussed below. Methodologically we
must reject naı̈ve or positional empathy but accept that
some commonality does unite past and present peoples.
That commonality might be in areas such as physical
perception or the capacity and proclivity for experienc-
ing emotion, though not necessarily the experience of
specific emotions. It is important to emphasize the dif-
ference between emotion as a subject of study and emo-
tion (empathy) as a methodology. Those scholars who
take empathy to mean an “inside” understanding of
emotional states would argue that it is not necessary to
be empathetic in order to study emotion. There is no
reason that emotion need be approached empathetically;
one can be just as rigorous and scholarly in the study of
emotion as in that of any other aspect of past lives. Naı̈ve
and positional empathies cannot be secure ways to
proceed.
However, to say that an engagement with archaeolog-
ical material, the research process, might result in an
increased understanding of the emotions of past peoples
is a different matter. Our understanding of emotional
experience should proceed from the encounter with the
material archaeological world rather than preceding such
an encounter. Empathy may, in short, be a valid goal, if
not an appropriate methodology, of archaeological
research.
In recent years a number of archaeologists, particularly
those influenced by feminist and gender theory, have
attempted to incorporate a more experiential and emo-
tional dimension into their archaeologies by experi-
menting with new ways of archaeological writing. Spec-
tor (1991, 1993), for example, has constructed fictional
narratives exploring the possible emotional meanings
which might have coalesced around a particular artefact
during its period of use. Similarly, Tringham (1991:124)
constructs an imaginative narrative around a single ar-
chaeological event, and Edmonds (1999) punctuates his
account of the cultural landscapes of the British Neo-
lithic with fictional descriptions of activities and events.
All of these are empathetically emotional narratives, al-
though none of the authors claims any privileged status
for the truth of her/his story. Rather, they are provocative
narratives aimed at exposing the partialness of more or-
thodox archaeological writing and encouraging us to
think of past people as thinking, feeling, experiencing
beings. Do these new kinds of narratives have academic
value beyond critique? Might they approximate “actual”
thoughts and feelings of the people to whom they are
fictionally attributed? Undoubtedly, given the richer so-
cial contexts of historical and ethnographic sources, this
is easier in historical archaeology. Schrire’s (1995) at-
tempts to enrich her archaeological narrative with the
voices of imaginary Europeans and Africans in the 17th
century are effective and contextually plausible. How-
ever, even she does not explicitly or implicitly consider
that the emotional experience of those she describes
might be very different from what we, culturally situated
in the modern, Anglophone West, might expect.
The work of the Egyptologist Lynn Meskell has at-
tracted some attention recently for its examination of
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 725
emotion as a part of individual experience in the past.
Building on a critique of Foucauldian power-centred ap-
proaches to social archaeology, Meskell has argued that
archaeology must incorporate a study of individuated
and variable selves rather than looking at people in the
past as representative categories or entirely as the cre-
ation of either the universal body, on the one hand, or
the interplay of cultural forces, on the other (Meskell
1996, 1998; Knapp and Meskell 1997). This reconcep-
tualization of the individual must involve, she says,
some consideration of intentionality and of personal,
emotional, embodied experiences (1998:156). She explic-
itly rejects radical constructivism as inadequate to the
evaluation of agency and the self, which she argues has
some material force and experience beyond being merely
a cipher through which other social and cultural forces
are inscribed. Meskell has tried to produce archaeologies
which consider emotion, particularly through the con-
sideration of Egyptian mortuary contexts. In particular,
she has challenged the widespread assertion that the
death of a child, especially in periods of high infant mor-
tality, will provoke little ritual or emotion because child
death is common and children are not full members of
society in material terms or in terms of their social roles;
society, therefore, is not greatly troubled by their loss
(e.g., Ariès 1962:38–40; De Mause 1974; Woodburn 1982:
206). Meskell claims that the evidence of the careful
burials of “ordinary” (i.e., non-royal) children at Deir el
Medina, an Egyptian workers’ village of the late 2d mil-
lennium b.c., and other historical sources from that pe-
riod suggest that children were cherished and their loss
was painfully felt (Meskell 1994, 1999; cf. MacFarlane
1981, Pollock 1983).
Meskell accepts that her approach involves some em-
pathy but does not consider this essentialist (1998:156).
Her work does not pretend to any universal validity; it
addresses a particular historical context. In her discus-
sion of mortality and burial she draws heavily upon dis-
cursive texts produced by the Egyptians themselves and
allows her analyses of death and bereavement, as well
as the Egyptian concepts of person, to be informed by
these textual sources. Perhaps it is unfortunate that emo-
tional responses to death in the 18th to 20th dynasties
in Egypt, the focus of Meskell’s work, are so familiar in
a 20th-century context. It would be interesting to apply
the same emphasis on emotion to very different cultural
practices—human sacrifice, for example. In the case of
cultural practices which do not accord with our emo-
tional standards and values, we will be forced to confront
the possibly very different emotional values of other and
past societies.
as historically created
A fourth direction of archaeological emotion research
treats societal emotional values as products and gener-
ators of particular historical contexts. This work consid-
ers shifts in emotional values through their material ex-
pression. Paul Treherne’s work, for example, looks at the
development of a particular body aesthetic based on male
726 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
beauty in Bronze Age Europe and relates this to a “dread”
or angst evoked by the encounter with mortality (Tre-
herne 1995). This was intimately related to an idea of
personhood in the Bronze Age which was different from
the Neolithic idea of a person and was reworked again
with the spread of Christian eschatology in the first mil-
lennium a.d. From the late Bronze Age, “warrior graves”
appeared across Europe, characteristically consisting of
male interments equipped with some or all of the fol-
lowing categories of goods: drinking equipment, toilet
articles, items of bodily ornamentation, and sometimes
equestrian equipment and/or wheeled vehicles. Al-
though there are local differences and some changes over
time, this general tradition is geographically widespread
and seems to persist for two millennia or more. Whereas
previous scholars have intepreted this in terms of a “pres-
tige-goods economy,” Treherne builds a complex argu-
ment linking personal beautification to an individualized
masculine self, centred on the body. In this context he
argues that the responses to physical death are likely to
have involved anxiety and disgust and to have been mit-
igated through elaborate paraphernalia of remembrance
and attention to the body at death. For Treherne, ideo-
logical and social explanation necessarily includes emo-
tional meanings. He believes that ideologies such as the
prestige-goods model which have been invoked to ex-
plain the same phenomenon are deficient in that they
fail to consider the ways in which people understand
their own practices and relationships.
My own work considers the development of the mod-
ern grief response to death in early modern and modern
periods in Britain through the examination of commem-
orative monuments and contextual historical sources.
This response depends on a highly individualized un-
derstanding of the self which took shape in the period
from the Protestant Reformation to the 20th century
(Tarlow 1995, 1998, 1999). What is notable about these
approaches is that the production, transformation, and
consequences of certain emotional values are inextri-
cably linked with wider social and cultural meanings,
such as the understanding of the self (cf. Meskell 1996,
1998, 1999). Emotion arises from contexts that are mean-
ingful; meanings acquire cultural force through emotion
(amongst other things).
Overall, remarkably little archaeology has addressed
the question of emotion directly. This does not mean,
however, that archaeologists do not consider emotion in
the past; instead, the nature of emotion is rarely fore-
grounded or discussed. The nature and meanings of emo-
tions are assumed to be self-evident. Archaeological ev-
idence is then interpreted as the result of normalized
emotional practices. An illustration of this is the ar-
chaeological literature on disability and compassion.
One widespread theme in any discussion of three-di-
mensional people in the past is the notion of loving care
as an emotional characteristic of “humanity.” Typically
the argument goes something like this: evidence that a
person in the past had a “disabling” condition for some
time before death indicates that he/she must have been
cared for by members of the group. This burden of care
was accepted despite the fact that the “disabled individ-
ual” was “non-productive” and therefore a drain on re-
sources (food and energy) and perhaps an impediment to
mobility. Care was therefore altruistic and evidence of
a universal “humanity.” Don Brothwell’s interpretation
of the bones of an individual suffering from Down’s syn-
drome is typical of this argument. Brothwell (1960, 1987)
interprets those remains as “clear archaeological evi-
dence that an earlier community could be compassionate
and protective of their mental defectives” (1987:177).
Similarly, Mithen cites graves 2, 6, and 10 at Vedbaek
(Albrethsen and Petersen 1976), which contained the re-
mains of individuals who had suffered severe arthritis,
as probable evidence for “care and affection given to the
poorly members of society and, no doubt, gratitude given
in return” (1991:11). The same argument has been made
by Manchester (1987:168) with reference to a skeleton
exhibiting osteomyelitis of the tibia. In the case of the
skeleton Romito 2, a teenage boy from Late Upper Pa-
laeolithic Italy with acromesomelic dysplasia (a condi-
tion that results in dwarfism and some restricted exten-
sion of the elbow), the excavators believed that his
condition would have made it hard for him to contribute
to group subsistence activities or to keep up with the
rest of the group. Therefore, they argue, his survival to
around 17 years indicates “tolerance and care for a se-
verely deformed individual” (Frayer et al. 1987:60, cited
in Dettwyler 1991:378).
Because of the standard interpretation of this kind of
skeletal material as evidence of human compassion, such
arguments have particular resonances in the investiga-
tion of non-modern hominids and in the debate about
the nature and origins of humanity. When discussing
premodern hominids, the identification of social traits
such as non-maternal compassion is of significance.
Walker and Shipman (1996) interpret the evidence of a
Homo erectus skeleton found in Kenya in the mid-1970s.
The bones of this individual (called 1808 by the exca-
vators) showed evidence of severe vitamin A poisoning,
which must have continued for some weeks or even
months before her death (long enough for the blood clots
to ossify). Vitamin A poisoning is a very painful condi-
tion and, Walker and Shipman argue, probably resulted
in 1808’s effective immobilization. The only way she
could have survived for so long, the authors claim, would
be if somebody else took care of her (1996:134): “So use-
less as 1808 was for telling us much about normal Homo
erectus morphology, she told us something quite unex-
pected . . . strong ties among individuals that came to
exceed the bonding and friendship we see among baboons
or chimps or other nonhuman primates.”
In another well-known example relating to early hom-
inids, Trinkaus and Zimmerman (1982) recount evidence
of “compassion” among Neanderthals. They note the
high incidence of trauma amongst the adult burials from
Shanidar Cave, Iraq, and more generally among Nean-
derthals, which they take to imply that life for these
hominids was difficult and dangerous but also that they
“had achieved a level of societal development in which
disabled individuals were well cared for by other mem-

bers of the social group” (p. 75). They are, however, care-
ful to specify that physical trauma would have impeded
the ability of some adults to contribute to group subsis-
tence activities but that their contribution to the group
might have been of another nature—the very fact of their
burial suggesting that these often elderly individuals
were held in high regard.
Plainly the impact and implications of their encoun-
ters with the remains of disabled individuals were pro-
foundly important for some individual archaeologists,
but their assessment of what these remains mean is prob-
lematic for a number of reasons. First, it depends on the
assumption that the meaning of “ability” and “disabil-
ity” are at all times and places the same. However, “dis-
ability” is a cultural understanding, and what counts as
a “disability” in one context would not necessarily be
recognized as such in another. Therefore the fact that
“disabled” individuals apparently lived long lives and
had normal burials does mean that economically or so-
cially “useless” individuals were “allowed to live,” tol-
erated, or charitably supported but could equally (or more
probably) mean that they possessed abilities—practical,
intellectual, spiritual, or whatever—which were of value
to their group or that their disabilities were simply not
relevant. In societies which would have contained people
of a range of different ages and states of physical and
mental health, pregnant and postparturient women, and
temporarily injured and diseased people, being a dwarf
or having a spinal deformation would not necessarily
have represented a particular handicap to most activities.
As Dettwyler (1991) points out, there is nothing in his
condition which would have made Romito 2 unable to
participate in most subsistence activities. Although he
might have found walking tiring because of his stature,
there is no reason he should have been unable to travel
with the rest of the group without special assistance.
After all, children, who are also short, would not nec-
essarily expect to be carried after the age of 4 or 5. People
manage.
The other side of this coin, of course, is that conditions
which we do not regard as disabling might have been
regarded as such in other contexts. Thus infertility, for
example, could have been regarded as a far more serious
“disability” than spina bifida.
The next problem relates to an inappropriately narrow
idea of what constitutes “productive” activity. In the
accounts mentioned above, individuals’ value is related
to their ability to participate in food production. Yet
other activities—craft production, child care, food prep-
aration, possession of knowledge, communication with
the supernatural, political strategy, and so forth—are all
valuable skills requiring different kinds of physical, men-
tal, and spiritual ability.
Even in cases where a physical handicap was serious
enough to make an individual incapable of any kind of
“productive” contribution to the group, problems remain
in the interpretation of “allowing” or assisting to live as
“compassion.” Dettwyler (1991) has critiqued the inter-
pretation of paleopathological evidence for compassion
with reference to the Shanidar burials, the Romito 2
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 727
dwarf, and a boy with spina bifida at the archaic Win-
dover site in Florida. She has enumerated five unsus-
tainable assumptions which inform the compassion ar-
gument, including the taken-for-granted notion that the
survival of disabled people in the past indicates “com-
passion.” Disabled people might have been abused in all
kinds of ways, she says, for “there is a wide gap between
‘survival’ and being treated nicely” (1991:382).
Moreover, facilitating the survival of a disabled person
is not always considered the compassionate thing to do
(Dettwyler 1991:382–83). In some societies, individuals
who are born with or develop certain physical conditions
are killed or selectively neglected. Dettwyler suggests
that “this dichotomy between survival/compassion and
nonsurvival/noncompassion is not at all clear-cut” (p.
382). In our own society ongoing debates over euthanasia
and abortion are testimony to this ambiguity. Indeed, if
the preservation of life is regarded as a panhuman emo-
tional value, indicative of a basic compassionate hu-
manity, what are we to make of practices such as child
sacrifice in the past? Plainly it would be naı̈ve to consider
child sacrifice as evidence that parents did not love or
care for their children or that some groups of people in
the past were not human. Instead, situations may have
had very different cultural and emotional meanings from
the ones we would bring to them. In the case of child
sacrifice, for example, our assumption that life is always
to be preferred to death (to many of us a state of noth-
ingness but in other cultures understood very differently)
makes the practice appear inhumane and perhaps in-
human. But where death has a different meaning, the
attendant emotions will themselves be different. While
an assumption that humans are universally “emotional”
creatures may be appropriate, assumptions about the
universality of emotional meanings in specific contexts
almost certainly are not. This means that when consid-
ering emotion in the past we cannot simply read off past
situations as constituting unproblematic evidence of
love or fear or compassion as Mithen (1991:11) does.
What View of Emotion Should Archaeologists
Take?
The romantic distinction between the inner and the
outer self has led to a number of problems in the study
of emotion, particularly our anxiety about distinguishing
“real” emotions: what is an authentic emotion and what
is merely the performance of a socially expected re-
sponse, expressed because of cultural knowledge rather
than intimate and personal experience (see Bloch and
Parry 1982:4–5)? As Pinch (1995:100) notes, “Claims to
know feelings often founder on the relationship of feel-
ings to discourse.” However, the dichotomy between
public and private, between “authenticity” and perform-
ance, is not always recognized or relevant to the expres-
sion of emotion. The “problem” of knowing whether
emotions are really felt is itself the product of a particular
view of human nature which distinguishes between an
728 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
inner self as the locus of unmediated, spontaneous feel-
ing and the social self, in which performance of affect
may or may not accurately represent the primary core
of sentiment. Both rationalist and romantic trends in
Western thought are informed by a separation of inner
nature and cultural constraint/control/performance, al-
though they value that inner nature differently. In the
enquiry into emotion in the past, it may be a red her-
ring—the quality of subjective experience may not ul-
timately matter to a delineation of social emotional
values.
It is nevertheless true that emotional experiences are
complex and contradictory. Even within one’s own so-
ciety it is notoriously difficult to understand or antici-
pate the emotional responses of another or even of one-
self. Given this, it is legitimate to ask how, given their
“fourfold hermeneutic” (the number of removes at
which archaeologists stand from the things they are try-
ing to understand [Shanks and Tilley 1992:107–8]), ar-
chaeologists could try to address emotion in the past.
This paper is very much a preliminary exploration of
emotion in archaeology and does not aim to provide de-
finitive answers or exhaustive assessments, but I think
the following general principles might inform and direct
further work in this area:
1. Emotions should be regarded as cultural as well as
biological. They are not universal, and the nature of hu-
man emotion cannot be assumed a priori in any context.
Therefore emotion needs to be problematized and
theorized.
2. Emotion cannot be divorced from cultural meaning
and social understandings, which are contextually
variable.
3. Social emotional values rather than individual, sub-
jective emotional experience may be of greater interest
to archaeologists and will also be more accessible to ar-
chaeological study.
The first point has, I hope, been adequately covered
already, and I will return to the second point later. To
take the last point first, then, archaeological attention
may be more profitably directed at emotion on a societal
than on an individual level. The subjective experience
of emotion varies from person to person or even within
a person. Responses are not predictable or even consis-
tent. Emotional responses are often difficult to articulate
verbally even for those experiencing them. Yet at a social
level, members of social groups can agree broadly on how
different emotions are valued and what they might
mean. Societies are characterized by emotional values.
Thus, Heelas (1986) offers a review of ethnographies of
emotion, emphasizing the different social values attrib-
uted to certain emotions, at least some of which seem
to be culturally unique to particular groups. He compares
Howell’s (1984) description of Chewong emotional val-
ues with Hallpike’s (1979) characterization of the Papuan
Tauade: “The Chewong, for example, encourage ‘fear’
and ‘shyness’ but regard all other emotions as dangerous.
‘Wanting’, ‘liking’ and so forth are treated as morally
reprehensible. . . . The Tauade of Papua . . . treat ‘pride’,
‘self-assertion’, ‘envy’, ‘rage’, and so on as ‘the normal
basis of all behaviour” (1986:242).
The study of emotional standards rather than subjec-
tive emotional experiences accords with what Stearns
and Stearns (1985, 1986; Stearns 1989) have rather clum-
sily called “emotionology.” “Emotionology” seems to
correspond with the concept of “ethos” as described, for
example, by Jenkins (1991:389), meaning a culturally
shared emotional atmosphere but one which is imma-
nent in small-scale, local, personal interactions. Thus a
cultural ethos is not separable from but comprised of
numerous daily personal communications and experi-
ences. Shared, cultural understandings of emotion in-
form our material practices as well as the language we
use. Our use of metaphor, for example, informs and is
informed by emotional values and meanings at a cultural
level. It has been noted, for instance, that in English one
of the most prevalent metaphors for emotion is that emo-
tion is hot liquid contained in the body which may boil
over if not carefully controlled. We may “simmer,”
“seethe,” or “burn” with emotion. We may therefore
need to “let off steam” or “cool down” so that we do
not “explode,” “burn up,” or “blow our top.” This need
to “let out” or “vent” our emotions contrasts with
“cool” reason. This metaphor is more than a quirk or a
linguistic curiosity—it structures our folk knowledge of
emotion and even our approaches to psychiatric therapy
and criminal law (anger should be “let out”; criminals
who act in the “heat” of passion are less controlled and
therefore less culpable than those who commit “cold,”
reasoned crimes). Other metaphors are also used in dis-
course about particular emotional states (Kövecses [1990]
provides a thorough review of emotion metaphors in
English). It is notable that the English metaphors de-
scribed here are grounded in and contribute to an ex-
periential understanding (phenomenology) of the body.
Emotional values are often created and understood
through metaphor. In trying to write more complex ar-
chaeologies which recognize that humans are thinking,
conceptualizing, experiencing beings, the development
of our understanding of how metaphor operates in ma-
terial culture is important (Tilley 1999, Tarlow 1999). If
emotions are meaningful, meanings are also emotional
and archaeological understandings of meanings and emo-
tions in the past must go hand in hand.
I have argued that the problems of studying emotions
have been widely addressed in other disciplines, and
there is much that is relevant to us in their work. Nev-
ertheless, the study of emotion in archaeology presents
certain specific problems, namely, time depth, materi-
ality, and meagre contextual information. The issue of
time depth and change has been discussed above as an
aspect of the social construction of emotion and so is
not further developed here. The crucial question of ma-
teriality deserves more consideration. Psychologists and
ethnographers base their research on direct observation,
in more or less controlled conditions, of people and have
access to people’s own discursive interpretations of their
emotional responses, while historians and archaeologists
do not have access to such resources. As archaeologists

we are focused, and often entirely dependent, upon ma-
terial evidence. It is therefore important for us to theorize
the materiality of emotional practices. What are the re-
lationships between spaces, architectures, artefacts, and
emotions? How do things become emotionally mean-
ingful? How do they structure and represent people’s
emotional experience? This work remains to be done and
will proceed alongside developing understandings of
metaphor and meaning in material culture.
In certain historical contexts we can see clearly that
objects and spaces do become emotionally meaningful.
Barker-Benfield (1992, reviewed by Pinch 1995), for ex-
ample, describes the way that domestic goods became
the objects of emotional attachment in late-18th-century
Britain and the way the cambric handkerchief came to
function metonymically to signify sentimental woe. In
a prehistoric context, Paul Treherne has analysed the
meaning of a commonly recurring assemblage of arte-
facts associated with a particular conception of mascu-
linity, focused on the appearance and actions of the male
body (Treherne 1995, discussed above). He works from
the material evidence, constructing an archaeology of
emotional meanings in the past from apparent associa-
tions of material objects—in this case the link between
elite masculinity, bodily beauty, warfare, drinking, and
riding/driving. In neither Barker-Benfield’s nor Tre-
herne’s work does emotion inhere in objects as such,
though their traditions of use do affect the ways in which
they are used. Rather, artefacts and material practices
are involved in the structuring and reproduction of im-
portant social emotions through the construction and
deployment of meaning.
How can one study emotion with so little information,
especially where one lacks the discursive (historical or
ethnohistorical) sources which historians depend on
(e.g., Stone 1977, Reddy 1997)? Stearns (1989:9) regrets
that “the materials available for emotions history are
never as good as one would wish, even for relatively
articulate groups, and some best-guessing, clearly la-
beled, becomes essential. But widely shared emotional
standards do have more than theoretical impact.” If the
materials are inadequate for a study of articulate groups
in the 19th and 20th centuries, the focus of Stearns’s
research, they are very much more so for the study of
prehistory. Yet Stearns’s second point is also profoundly
important. If we accept that emotional value does have
an impact on social ways of doing, perhaps, rather than
throwing up our hands because prehistoric people didn’t
leave us discursive texts about emotion, we can think
differently about how emotion might have influenced
social practices. In his outline of a methodology and
framework for emotion research, Harré lists a number
of areas for investigation. They include the language of
emotion, narratives about emotion, the moral order
within which emotions are understood, the social func-
tions of emotional performance and emotion talk, and
“the system of rules by which these complicated forms
of social action within which the emotional qualifica-
tions of actions and actors are maintained, changed, crit-
ically accounted and taught” (Harré 1986:13). While the
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 729
first two goals may well be beyond the reach of most
archaeological enquiry, recent social and contextual ar-
chaeology has addressed itself precisely to questions of
social context, meaning, and consequences, cultural
value, and forms of social reproduction and transfor-
mation. The incorporation of emotion into this work is
not beyond possibility.
The problem of meagre contextual information may
be due, in part, to our failure to recognize what is relevant
or to define “context” imaginatively or broadly. In the
past, lack of relevant data was often cited as the main
obstacle to the archaeological study of gender. Yet our
recognition that gender might be an important principle
in contexts other than securely sexed human burials has
resulted in a florescence of imaginative approaches to
this difficult area of study. In a similar way, the reali-
zation of the pervasiveness of emotional values and un-
derstandings will enable more imaginative construals of
archaeological data.
There are specific issues relating to emotion in ar-
chaeology which need to be addressed. By the same to-
ken, there are some issues which have been extensively
discussed in other disciplines but are probably beyond
the scope of archaeology; the relationship between cul-
tural emotions, language, and personal experience is an
obvious example. Nevertheless, important insights and
sophisticated discussion of emotion in other disciplines
can offer us considerable guidance should we take up the
challenge of writing emotion into our archaeologies.
Archaeology can contribute to, as well as benefit from,
interdisciplinarity. Archaeology offers to scholars in
emotion research its traditional expertise in studying the
long-term and the broad trend.11 We can examine the
developments and shifts in emotional meanings and con-
tribute to an understanding of emotion as cultural and
meaningful. Moreover, we can and should challenge
emotional anachronism in both scholarly and popular
accounts of the past.
Conclusions
The creation of a new subdiscipline of “emotion ar-
chaeology” would not be a productive development;
emotion cannot be studied apart from other aspects of
cultural human experience. As Weinstein (1990) says,
emotions are no more worthy of study than other mental
attributes—perception, cognition, fantasy, for example.
He criticizes the Stearnses’ idea of “emotionology”
(1985) for the suggestion that emotions in themselves
provide adequate scope for a historical project. Any such
endeavour should be grounded in a wider context (Wein-
stein 1990:301). Emotion—in the full, rich sense of mod-
ern colloquial use—is intimately related to meaning, to
symbolic and abstract thought and to language use. But
emotion in this sense is not a “present-or-absent” pre-
11. That these ends are not inimical to examination of the small-
scale and the personal is an important insight of modern archae-
ological theory and practice.
730 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
cultural, genetic characteristic but a dimension of com-
plex understandings that develop culturally. The human
experience is underdetermined by genetics (Gellner
1989).
However, although “emotion history” may not in it-
self be a useful focus for archaeological research, the
study of emotions is a necessary part of any endeavour
to look at social and cultural aspects of the past. If one
cannot write a past which consists entirely of changing
emotional states, neither should one write a past in
which deeply meaningful aspects of human experience
are either assumed or ignored. Emotion is a profoundly
difficult area to theorize—and this paper is no more than
an attempt to explore some of the territory we have yet
to map—but it is also a centrally important area of hu-
man understanding, meaning, and experience. As ar-
chaeologists we need to become critically aware of how
we represent emotion in the past, to recognize the sig-
nificance of emotion in writing three-dimensional and
humanized pasts, and to open our minds and imagina-
tions to the challenge of emotional archaeologies.
Comments
james r. averill
Department of Psychology, University of Massachu-
setts, Amherst, Mass. 01003-7710, U.S.A. 23 iii 00
Tarlow has provided an excellent review of current the-
ories of emotion and their potential contribution to ar-
cheology. But what about the reverse? What can arche-
ology contribute to theories of emotion? Before reading
Tarlow’s article, I would have said that archeology had
little to offer in this respect, and when I posed the ques-
tion to graduate students in a course on affect and cog-
nition, the response was mostly one of bewilderment. I
now consider my original impression not only overhasty
but also embarrassingly parochial. I will comment briefly
on two observations by Tarlow that helped change my
mind.
Three books that have influenced my thinking about
emotions and about personhood in general are Snell’s
(1953) The Discovery of the Mind, Adkins’s (1970) From
the Many to the One, and Onions’s (1951) The Origins
of European Thought. Each calls into question widely
held assumptions about the unity of the self and the
universality of emotions. The problem is that these
works and others that attempt to trace the origins of
contemporary ideas about the mind and body rely heav-
ily on written texts. What about prehistory, where only
material artifacts remain?
With the exception of the aesthetics of the built and
natural environments, not to mention art, emotion the-
orists have devoted scant attention to material culture.
This is in part because of the importance of language in
fashioning emotional syndromes. Archeologists do not
have the luxury of drawing on language as a source of
information; out of necessity, therefore, they must deal
with material culture. But necessity can be made a
virtue.
Emotional meanings are often conveyed through met-
aphor, as Tarlow notes. Indeed, the major traditions in
theories of emotion (psychodynamic, psychophysiolog-
ical, ethological, behaviorist, phenomenological, and so-
cial constructivist) can be viewed as extensions of met-
aphors found in everyday speech (Averill 1990). But
language is not the only source of metaphor. Art, archi-
tecture, ornamentation, utensils, environmental objects,
open spaces, and even—or perhaps especially—body
parts can also accrue metaphorical significance. It is
therefore important, as Tarlow emphasizes, to under-
stand how metaphor operates in material culture to help
shape the emotional lives of a people. Archeologists are
in a unique position, both methodologically and sub-
stantively, to point the way to such understanding. That
is one important contribution they can make to theories
of emotion.
Another potential contribution concerns the use of
empathy (literally, “feeling into”). Empathy is a multi-
faceted concept: for example, it can be treated as an emo-
tional experience in its own right (e.g., Zahn-Waxler and
Robinson 1995); it can help explain other kinds of emo-
tional experiences, such as the aesthetic (e.g., Crozier
and Greenhalgh 1992); and it can be used as a tool for
research (about which I will have more to say shortly).
Tarlow discusses a fourth potential use of empathy,
namely, as evidence for emotions in other times and
cultures—and she is appropriately critical.
Feelings are not an infallible guide to a person’s own
emotions even at the time of occurrence (Averill 1993);
they surely cannot be taken as evidence for the emotions
of another person, especially if that person is from a dif-
ferent time or culture. But before we dismiss empathy
too quickly, we should keep in mind the hoary (and ad-
mittedly fuzzy) distinction between the context of dis-
covery and the context of verification. Empathy can play
an important role in the context of discovery; however,
as Tarlow emphasizes, the verification of any insights
gained must rely on a detailed knowledge of the ideology,
social organization, and environmental circumstances of
the persons involved.
My own concern with the use of empathy as a tool
stems primarily from research on the ability of people
to be emotionally creative, that is, to develop idiosyn-
cratic emotional syndromes that are both novel and
adaptive (e.g., Averill 1999). (By “emotional syndromes”
I mean folk-theoretical constructs—implicit assump-
tions—that help guide the way a person responds when
in an emotional state.) One way to explore individual
differences in this ability is to have people imagine how
they might respond in situations that are highly unusual
or even fantastic. Similar considerations apply mutatis
mutandis to our scientific theories of emotion. That is,
by confronting us with new and unusual situations (e.g.,
the reactions of a parent whose child has been chosen
for sacrifice to the gods), archaeological research can

force us to be creative in how we think about emo-
tions—theoretically as well as personally.
Referring to the view of emotions as inherent in a
precultural, unchanging human nature, Tarlow speaks of
archeology’s “denaturalizing” the emotions. However, to
denaturalize the emotions in this respect is to naturalize
them in another respect, namely, as inherent in a human
nature steeped in culture but not totally constrained by
it—a human nature open to innovation in the emotional
as in the intellectual domain.
I am confident that other readers will find in Tarlow’s
stimulating article additional ways that archeology can
contribute to theories of emotion. It is a welcome and
exciting prospect.
fiona campbell and joanna hansson
Department of Archaeology, University of Goteborg,
405 30 Goteborg, Sweden (fiona.campbell@
archaeology.gu.se). 12 iv 00
Embedded in the traces of material remains is a mixture
of material and immaterial phenomena. It is through
them that stories are constructed. It is through our con-
tact with them that we become intrigued. Our curiosities
are perhaps born from the idea that there is something
more substantial hidden beneath the surface, that this
surface holds something-more-in-itself, something that
we long to touch and be touched by (Laban and Ullman
1960:8; Phelan 1997:2–7).
One aspect of reaching beyond the material is to con-
front aspects of the emotional. But, as Tarlow has shown,
these issues are not without their dilemmas. Emotions
inherent in the archaeological have been approached in
a number of ways, and the choices we make have an
endless array of consequences. The question is what we
want to achieve when acknowledging the emotional in
the world of archaeology. Are we seeking to move back-
ward through time, to a distant place or material rem-
nant? Or do we want to explore the intimate, complex
relation between the past and the present, moving to a
space which is erratic, displaced, dislocated?
Implicit in the notion of emotion is the concept of
movement. In order to perceive, sense, experience and
relate to an e-motion we need to position ourselves. Emo-
tion is perspective-dependent: near yet far, side by side,
into/onto. The archaeologist is constantly confronting
states of hybridity and needs to recognize emotions as
located in fragmented states of multicentricity.
We propose that emotion embodies dis-appearance. We
will never be able to translate or recollect emotions of
the past, because emotions change the minute we re-
examine, reinterpret them. Even when we experience a
specific emotion, time and time again the only thing we
discover is that it is never really the same experience
(Gilpin 1996).
We propose that emotion embodies dis-placement.
Emotions fascinate us not only because they are inef-
fable, because they vanish the moment we acknowledge
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 731
them, but also because they force us to question our
notions of what the emotional in archaeology might be.
We propose that emotion embodies dis-engagement.
There is a difference between experiencing and thinking
about an experience. Understanding emotions is not the
same as feeling emotions (Pugmire 1998:55–57).
We propose that emotion embodies interpenetration.
The paradox of the subject-object divide is situated in
our position in relation to both. Confronting the as-
sumption that subjectivity is separate from objectivity
entails repositioning ourselves, reconsidering the idea
that sensual experience is separate from logical reason-
ing, that emotions are separate from the material culture
we research, the events we attempt to recollect (Tschumi
1994:27–51). If we choose to work from a position of
intimacy, we incorporate the idea of the subject-true-real
into our relationship with the object-true-real.
We propose that emotion embodies negotiation. Ex-
ploring emotions from the perspective of the present al-
lows us to explore our relation with the past. Narcissistic
focus questions our understanding of reality.
We propose that emotion embodies de-stabilization. It
is not contentious to suggest that “one’s own subjective,
emotional response could be a legitimate foundation”
for exploring emotions in relation to archaeological sub-
jects. What is contentious is the idea that anyone can
understand emotional experiences of the past, whether
belonging to the Neolithic or one’s own most recent out-
burst of rage. Rather, it is through reexamination of this
outburst that one may come to terms with the com-
plexities of time, materiality, distance, empathy, etc. It
is through everyday-life confrontations that we can crit-
ically analyze the difficulties we are up against as well
as explore the potentials found in alternative approaches
in our relation with the present past.
We propose that emotion embodies simulation. When
trying to locate emotions in an event that has happened
one is dealing with an other whose senses and experi-
ences are identifiable only from the perspective of same-
ness. To humanize the past is to see oneself in the look-
ing glass as an image of an image.
To write the emotional into archaeology, we must fa-
vor ambivalence over clarity, upset conventional wis-
dom, and find the weaknesses in our discourse.
george l. cowgill
Department of Anthropology, Arizona State Uni-
versity, Tempe, Ariz. 85287-2402, U.S.A. 12 iv 00
I disagree with a few things, but overall I am very en-
thusiastic about this paper. It is largely in accord with
views I have briefly expressed (Cowgill 1993, 2000). Tar-
low discusses the former of these papers at some length,
thoughtfully and most accurately. I urged that archae-
ologists should pay more attention to emotions, but
these articles emphasize other issues and I did not de-
velop this topic much. In carrying the matter consider-
ably farther Tarlow does just the sort of thing I think is
needed. Of course, there is still a very long way to go.
732 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
Perhaps my most significant reservation concerns the
importance of “innate” panhuman aspects of emotions
relative to socioculturally constructed and historically
“local” aspects. I strongly agree that this is not an either/
or dichotomy and also that it is not a matter of there
being identifiable parts of emotions that are panhuman
and other parts that are locally constructed. Rather,
whatever is innate constitutes material out of which
(rather than on which) local constructions are formu-
lated. Where I differ is that I have a hunch (and at present
it is only a hunch) that panhuman emotional propensi-
ties are somewhat less variable and somewhat more im-
portant than Tarlow thinks. This, however, is an issue
about which a great deal more can be learned through
empirical investigations with living people, so I try to
remain open to having my mind changed about it.
A few other details call for comment. I never meant
to imply that I consider romantic love a universal. On
the contrary, I strongly agree with Tarlow that it is a
prime example of a phenomenon that is largely cultur-
ally constructed, locally variable, and often not recog-
nized. I have read much less of Ekman than she has, and
I did not pick up the idea that he considers all emotions
fleeting—just that he argues that it is very difficult to
conceal fleeting panhuman expressions of emotions. I
don’t recall that I discussed measuring systems in rela-
tion to universal physiological traits—perhaps Tarlow is
confusing what I said with the considerable emphasis on
measuring systems in the articles by Renfrew that she
cites. It happens that I am interested in measuring sys-
tems at Teotihuacan because of their evident importance
there (cf. Sugiyama 1993), but I have thought of these in
connection with belief systems, cosmologies, and engi-
neering knowledge rather than emotions.
Tarlow feels that the general, all-purpose methods I
proposed (Cowgill 1993) will not be very useful. Perhaps
not, but in any case I just wanted to stimulate readers
to think about the matter and see if they could come up
with better ideas.
In her discussion of “nuance”—whether we should try
for something like the Mona Lisa—I think Tarlow in-
correctly equates nuance with detail. I readily agree that
archaeologists find details accessible. All too often we
have an overabundance of discrete bits of de-
tail—potsherds and other artifacts and evidence of highly
concrete events, such as a broken pot with burned food
remains inside, evidence that on some particular day in
the past some household’s meal was spoiled. It is a tru-
ism that it is a problem to construct a good general pic-
ture out of these scraps of rather disconnected detail. But
nuance often rests globally in the big picture rather than
in specific details, so if we have trouble with the big
picture we will also have trouble with nuances.
Because I suspect that panhuman mental propensities
are more important than Tarlow thinks, I am less skep-
tical about the limits of “empathy” approaches, although
they must always be used cautiously and with as much
conscious self-knowledge as possible. Nevertheless, I
like Tarlow’s suggestions that we should try less for em-
pathy with individuals and put more emphasis on con-
necting emotions with cultural meanings and social
emotional values (rather than individual subjective emo-
tional experiences). Using this framework to think back
on my efforts to understand varieties of thought and ex-
perience in ancient Teotihuacan, it now seems to me
that, in addition to “empathy,” I have used this approach
but without having formulated it clearly. I think I have
been driven into such an approach because, as Tarlow
would suggest, it uses the most accessible aspects of Teo-
tihuacan data that seem to bear on emotions.
Tarlow rightly criticizes the tendency to formulate is-
sues as “either A or B” dichotomies and the tendency to
have trouble thinking about “both A and B” without
thinking that there should be identifiable pieces that are
A and other pieces that are B. Structuralist emphases on
binary thinking are in disrepute nowadays, but never-
theless I wonder why we continue to be so prone to these
two fallacies and have to struggle so constantly against
them. Does this also tell us something about human
mental universals, or is it something about the structure
of certain languages, including English?
ro m h a r r é a n d g . j . p a r ro t t
Psychology Department, Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C. 20057-1001, U.S.A. 8 iii 00
The idea that there may be a place for hypotheses about
the emotions of past peoples, particularly invoked in the
context of archaeological research, seems at first sight
to be unrealistic. The possibility of historical studies of
emotions, such as those by Stearns (1989), depends heav-
ily on the existence of two classes of survivals—material
things, including the skeletons of children, the apparatus
of the torture chamber, and so on, and documents, full
of stories, commentaries, reports, and so on, such as the
material that has survived from the courts that ordered
the genocide of the Cathars. We have a very good idea
of the similarities and differences between our emotional
lives and those of the persecuted Cathars from transcrip-
tions of what they said in court. The witches of Salem
too left copious verbal material from which we can get
some idea of the emotional state of the “afflicted.” Ar-
chaeology poses a different problem from that posed by
history as we usually understand it. There are only the
skeletons and the artifacts.
It seems to us that Tarlow has not drawn the distinc-
tion between historical and archaeological studies
sharply enough for theoretical purposes. It is a moot
point whether Egyptology is history or archaeology.
There are documents galore, as well as lots of skeletons,
palaces, temples, and funerary goods. Some of her ex-
amples of emotion in archaeology are more like exam-
ples of the place of emotion hypotheses in history. Let
us reflect on the question of whether the argument is
covertly inductive. There are plenty of convincing his-
torical studies of the emotions of people now dead, but
these are people of our own culture in one of its earlier
manifestations. Then there are studies of peoples prob-
ably very unlike ourselves who have left a substantial

documentary record of their cultural lives, including per-
haps plays and poems. Things are getting a little strange
with the ancient Greeks. What would we have done with
Elektra? Sent her to a grief counselor, of course. The way
she went on was over the edge! Now we go a step farther,
into Amerindia, for example, or into Paleolithic Britain.
Wander around Avebury on a misty winter’s day and the
strangeness of the place will strike you. This is not just
a romantic reaction but a sense of how differently the
people who built this gigantic structure must have seen
the world and experienced their lives. But then, perhaps
they looked at it much as we would look at the Millen-
nium Dome. Historians interpret artifacts in the light of
texts that inform them of the cultural meanings of these
material things, on the assumption that the texts them-
selves are understood. Archaeologists must infer cultural
meanings without any assistance from texts. Herme-
neutic theory suggests that interpretation is difficult
enough with texts and other information sources about
cultural contexts, such as the household models in-
cluded among grave furnishings. Interpretation based on
bodily remains and artifacts alone must be difficult
indeed.
This is the logical problem we have with Tarlow’s ar-
gument, to the conclusion of which we are very sym-
pathetic. If, rightly, she opts more for social construc-
tionism than for crude biologism, one route to an
induction to the past is blocked. People biologically like
us are certainly not socially or culturally like us. We
know this already from our contemporary experience of
life with other tribes and other cultures. We sometimes
find the emotional lives even of other English-speaking
peoples opaque. We can converse with them, joke with
them, commiserate with them, be in love with them,
and yet find their emotional reactions baffling.
Towards the end of her paper Tarlow offers us three
principles that should govern the inclusion of an emo-
tional dimension in archaeology. Emotions are culturally
defined and contextually variable. They span a dimen-
sion from the strictly individual, such as chagrin, to the
predominantly social, such as ceremonial euphoria or
common dread at the first tremblings of an earthquake
(there will always be someone who rejoices in the storm
even if it is at hurricane force!). It seems to us that the
difficulties with induction which we have touched on
above are in some important respects irrelevant to the
project of incorporating an emotional dimension into ar-
chaeology. If we turn our minds from inductive meth-
odologies, with their close relationship to positivism,
and adopt something like Whewell’s (1842) idea of sci-
ence as a cyclical interaction between changing concepts
and a changing domain of “facts,” then we can find a
way to incorporate emotion hypotheses quite naturally.
By adopting a hypothesis about how a Neolithic crowd
felt on the summer solstice at Stonehenge, we can make
more sense of the monument itself, and with that richer
sense in hand we can offer more detailed reflections on
what it might have been like to be there, say, with respect
to the social class from which one came, and so on. Ideas
enrich facts and facts enrich ideas—that is the Whe-
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 733
wellian principle, and it is surely better scientific method
than inductive positivism.
ian hodder
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology,
Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A.
8 iv 00
Tarlow provides several reasons for the importance of a
critical awareness about emotion in archaeology. Of
these, in my view, by far the most important is that the
archaeological past often evokes an immediate emo-
tional response both from archaeologists and from oth-
ers. Most archaeologists are familiar with public fasci-
nation and wonder at how old an artifact is. Human
remains generate a variety of responses. In many parts
of the world, indigenous groups feel a sense of attach-
ment to ancestors. In many parts of Europe, visitors to
archaeological sites may experience disgust at the sight
of prehistoric human remains, especially if they have
evidence of defleshing, disarticulation, or burial beneath
floors of houses. It is important that these apparently
unmediated responses be opened to critique so that the
past can come to be something more than simply a re-
affirmation of our own taken-for-granteds.
Consideration of these immediate emotional re-
sponses indicates how clearly emotion is situated within
meaning. For example, people have to be informed of the
age of an artifact before the “wow” emotional response
occurs. They have to be told of the defleshing or the
beneath-floor burial before the “yuk” response emerges.
This demonstrates the importance of Tarlow’s point that
emotions are constituted through social meanings. A
similar point can be made about other experiential ap-
proaches in archaeology. The phenomenological (e.g.,
Thomas 1996) and structurationist (e.g., Barrett 1994)
approaches to bodies in monuments and landscapes have
at times sought to distance themselves from the inter-
pretation of symbolic meaning. The result is that uni-
versal bodies are described.
Archaeology is an emotion factory. It provides objects
contextualized in knowledge for people to wonder at,
desire, fight over, hate each other for. Monuments and
artifacts become emotional symbols of nation (such as
Zimbabwe), nation and religious group (such as Ayod-
hya), or minority local group. They can become objects
of desire, prestige, and looting. But the archaeologist can
also destabilize these socially embedded emotional re-
sponses through an awareness of differences between
past and present and through a sensitivity to context. In
this way the apparently “universal” and “bodily” emo-
tional response can be opened to critique.
But how is it possible to destabilize our own emotional
responses by demonstrating a different response in the
past? I agree with Tarlow that a cognitive middle-range
theory of the mind will always fail to provide us with
any more than the most general of statements about the
past. If we accept that perception and cognition are at
least partly social, then it is difficult to see how artistic
734 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
expression, for example, can ever be linked to universal
cognitive processes. In my view, Tarlow is right to insist
on some component of social construction, however
tempered by the biological. But I believe she could go
farther in developing our understanding of the contex-
tualization of emotion. In particular, most of her con-
textualization deals with language; for example, she re-
fers to the view that language constitutes the emotions.
More emphasis could have been placed on the way in
which emotions are tied to material contexts. We can
extend Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion that conscious-
ness is always consciousness of something to say that
desire is always “desire of” and anger always “anger to-
wards” something/someone. It is never our objective
body that we feel but our phenomenal body, situated
within a context of things around it. It is through our
interaction with things around us that we learn about
our bodies and emotions, so that our feelings are to some
extent related to the objects we have experienced. And
again, this object world is situated within knowledge. It
is not enough to know what “sensations” are received.
There also has to be an understanding or embodied sub-
jectivity. One has to be able to read the signs of a storm
coming, understand the respect or love that is shown, or
realize that a bouquet of flowers is a love bouquet. The
flowers do not exist “in themselves.” Thus “we grasp
the unity of our body only in that of the thing” (p. 322)
but a thing embedded in social meaning. It is not just
that a kettle of boiling water can be used as a metaphor
for anger or the bubbling up of repressed frustration but
that the very experience and construction of anger
emerges within a world of suddenly exploding and bub-
bling material processes. My ability to simmer with an-
ger or burst with emotion is constructed within a world
of material-culture possibilities.
In terms of method, then it seems that Tarlow is di-
recting us towards a three-pronged approach. The ar-
chaeologist has to accommodate (a) evidence about bi-
ological propensities with (b) data from a material
context with (c) an interpretation of social meanings. I
would like briefly to provide an indication of the working
of this approach in relation to Tarlow’s example of the
compassion shown to disabled people. Clearly the social
meanings ascribed to “disablement” may vary, as may
what might be thought to be universal propensities to
care for disabled people if they remain “ productive.” Yet
how can we discern the response to such questions in a
particular archaeological context? In the 9,000-year-old
archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey we have
found many burials under the floors of houses (Hodder
1966). Burial beneath the houses is probably related to a
centrality of ties to the ancestors within social relation-
ships. Humans do not seem to be buried outside houses
in the settlement at Çatalhöyük—except in one case
found so far. One man had been buried in a refuse mid-
den. It was remarkable that this one external burial also
showed traces of a long-term, chronic illness. This im-
plies that although there was social support for his sur-
vival, he was also regarded in some sense as an “out-
sider.” The emotion “compassion” is here tempered by
more complex and contradictory notions. In similar
ways, other emotional responses to the archaeological
remains can be disturbed. For example, rather than being
seen as disgusting, the burials beneath the floors at Ça-
talhöyük may have been seen as productive and essential
for the continuation of the lineage. In these ways, our
own visceral responses can be confronted with a different
emotional past.
h å k a n k a r l s s o n
University of Lund, Institute of Archaeology,
Sandgatan 1, 223 50 Lund, Sweden. 13 iii 00
Tarlow’s paper is an interesting and informative attempt
to explore the issue of emotion in archaeology. It con-
tains a comprehensive overview of approaches to emo-
tion both in archaeology and in other disciplines, as well
as discussion of how an archaeology of emotion might
be carried out. On a general level I agree with Tarlow
that it is necessary for archaeology to strive to incor-
porate approaches to emotion because emotion is abso-
lutely central to human experience and the way society
works. I also agree with the arguments that emotions
should be regarded as cultural as well as biological and
that they cannot be separated from the context of cul-
tural meaning and social understanding. However, I do
have some reservations when it comes to the episte-
mological and methodological positions presented in the
paper and Tarlow’s one-sided concentration on past
emotions.
Tarlow argues that past social emotional values are
accessible to archaeological study, but when discussing
the epistemological and methodological dimensions un-
derlying this argument the paper shows some ambigui-
ties. At the same time as Tarlow stresses that the study
of past emotion is possible, she points out that our un-
derstandings of past emotions are influenced by present
individuality, cultural understandings, and subjectivity.
There is also an ambivalence in Tarlow’s rejection of
(methodological) empathy and her argument that “an all-
out rejection of empathy is not appropriate for whose
who study the social past” and “in order to make social
or cultural claims about the past it is surely necessary,
at however general a level, to assume some ‘common
humanity.’” Having rejected both sociobiological uni-
versals and, on a general level, empathy as possible paths
to past emotions, Tarlow states that “if emotions are
meaningful, meanings are also emotional and archaeo-
logical understandings of meanings and emotions in the
past must go hand in hand.” From this it follows that
past emotions are accessible through the study of past
meanings and through studies of the contextual rela-
tionship material culture–(social) emotion–meaning.
However, is it possible to grasp past meanings, and how
are we to do it? I presume that it is here that “common
humanity,” consisting of the circumstance that we have
“the capacity and proclivity for experiencing emotions,”
is to bridge the gap between past and present. If so, this

means that Tarlow cannot free herself totally from meth-
odological empathy or its problems.
The possibility of grasping past meanings has been the
focus of theoretical debate in archaeology in recent dec-
ades. From my point of view, Tarlow simplifies this de-
bate in pointing out that “those archaeologists who have
argued that there is little or no point in attempting to
study meaning in the past would probably reject emotion
research for similar reasons.” I am among those archae-
ologists who do not think it is possible to reach meaning
or emotions in the past, but this does not automatically
lead me to a rejection of or any resistance towards emo-
tion research in archaeology. My epistemological stand-
point instead leads me to an interest in the direction of
an archaeology of emotions. I would like to argue that
such an approach ought not to be restricted to study of
emotions in the past but ought also to be directed to-
wards our own emotional responses to the past. As ar-
chaeologists we are, at least from my viewpoint, using
the past to create an emotion of security through the
existential identity our profession mediates for us. Tar-
low seem to dismiss such a self-critical or self-reflexive
direction of emotion research in archaeology as “self-
absorbed” and “narcissistic” (at least when it comes to
the works of Michael Shanks), but if emotion is some-
thing we should value in the past, it should also be im-
portant and worthy of attention in ourselves. Unfortu-
nately, Tarlow’s text creates an unnecessary separation
between different emotional interests and approaches in
archaeology. I am convinced that the self-critical ap-
proach to emotions constitutes the reflexive and self-
critical dimension that is somewhat neglected in Tar-
low’s paper, and I am also sure that, despite their
different epistemological grounds, these approaches to
an archaeology of emotion can be fruitfully combined.
Despite the criticism presented above, Tarlow’s call
for an archaeology of emotions is one that we should
support, since it can certainly enrich archaeological dis-
course, but her approach should be extended. Those in-
terested ought to continue their research on the past
relationship between emotions, meanings, and material
culture, but I would argue that this research ought to be
combined with a radical self-critical research directed
towards present-day archaeological emotions and their
sociopolitical implications.
susan kus
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Rhodes
College, 2000 N. Parkway, Memphis, Tenn. 38112,
U.S.A. (Kus@Rhodes.edu). 17 iv 00
We archaeologists have long made use of emotion in our
descriptions and explanations of past cultures. In facing
up to this fact, Tarlow is right to argue for “a critical
awareness of our assumptions about emotion in the
past.” She is also right to point out that this does not
mean that we all need to take to doing the archaeology
of emotion, just as earlier calls for “engendering” ar-
chaeology, as she also points out, did not mean that we
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 735
all had to be on the trail of “securely sexed human bur-
ials.” It does mean, however, that some of us ought to
be allowed and encouraged to pursue issues of emotion
where the data and the context permit. Indeed, I would
argue further that the strength of our research and our
contributions in this field of study will depend on our
sensitivity to the fit between our data and our questions
rather than on the sheer will to be “current” or “cutting-
edge,” as has often been the case with whatever happens
to be the vogue in the discipline.
Tarlow says: “Emotion is a profoundly difficult area
to theorize—and this paper is no more than an attempt
to explore some of the territory we have yet to map.”
She is to be thanked for supplying us with some charting
of issues, particularly useful for those newly approaching
the terrain. Certainly, the case that we need to steer clear
of essentialist arguments of physiological hard-wiring of
emotions, on the one hand, and “disembodied” construc-
tivist arguments, on the other, is well made. But often
the charting we are offered is about what traps to avoid
or what issues some of the adventurous in archaeology
have inadequately handled. In some way this aspect of
the charting makes me timorous and fearful. I find my-
self worrying about making statements that will label
me essentialist or constructivist. I already dread having
the label of “positional empathizer” applied to one of my
efforts (i.e., Kus 1997). At other points of the mapping,
where Tarlow does indicate where we might look more
closely at issues, for instance, at “how metaphor operates
in material culture” or “how things become emotionally
meaningful,” I crave more details to imagine my way
from the map into the territory. Certainly, she does point
us in the direction of studies of cambric handkerchiefs
and mourning in 18th-century Britain (Barker-Benfield
1992) and male bodily beauty and elite masculinity in
Bronze Age Europe (Treherne 1995), but I would have
welcomed some enticing details to secure my sense of
theoretical place.
Perhaps we need to be further seduced, cajoled, and
even humored into venturing into the territory of affect
and emotion. If we are to handle issues of the inter-
twining of meaning and sentiment in praxis, if ethos is
a critical focus, then the “style” of our ventures and the
“style” of the subsequent maps we produce become rel-
evant and central issues as well. I would argue that this
should encourage us to move stylistically beyond the
crispness of scholarly pronouncements and the passive/
aggressive angst of postmodern critique. Indeed, it seems
to me that, in addition to a sensitivity to fit between
data and question, style of presentation is an issue that
merits inclusion in our continuing discussion on this
most challenging of archaeological ventures.
john leavitt
Départment d’Anthropologie, Université de Montréal,
6128 Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, PQ, Canada H3C
3J7. 18 iv 00
Tarlow’s paper is both an overview of emotion in ar-
chaeological research and a set of proposals for where to
736 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
go from here. Beyond this, it is a superb brief summary
of the current state of emotion research in anthropology
more generally. Its publication in current anthropol-
ogy reveals to anthropologists a range of challenging
work being done by their archaeological neighbors.
Tarlow notes that after years of treating emotions as
either epiphenomena of a universal human (or primate
or, indeed, mammalian) biology or as merely one more
aspect of infinitely variable cultural meaning systems,
“much scholarship of emotion is now moving towards
approaches which synthesize elements of the two
schools,” recognizing that emotions are “both biological
and cultural” (Tarlow 1999:35). She quotes me a couple
of times, which is very flattering, but then to my horror
includes me among the reviewers of “the literature of
emotion” who “have identified poles of extreme biolog-
ical universalism and of cultural constructivism/relativ-
ism and then presented their own work as uniquely bal-
anced and synthetic.” I don’t remember making any such
claim in the paper cited (Leavitt 1996). What I did there
was simply to ask how anthropologists might proceed
without conceptualizing emotions either as primarily bi-
ological or as primarily cultural but necessarily as both.
I proposed three directions of research: (1) histories and
critiques of Western emotion concepts and categories, (2)
analysis of emotions as collective and stereotypical
rather than as purely individual, and (3) acceptance of
the legitimacy of ethnographers’ own “naı̈ve” reactions
as material for analysis. While I illustrated some of these
proposals with an extended example from my research
in the Central Himalayas, I do not, in fact, see my own
work as particularly exemplary in this regard, although
I continue to try. Contrariwise, Tarlow herself has illus-
trated two of the three points in a way that might well
be called “balanced and synthetic.” For the first point,
her work contributes to our understanding of the change
in what we might call emotional regimes in the modern
West and in particular the rise of romantic love and “af-
fective individualism” (Tarlow 1999:chap. 5). As to the
third, Tarlow’s work (1999) is one of the best examples
we have of the use of one’s own empathetic reactions to
help understand the emotions of others—not by asserting
the identity of the two but by recognizing the cultural
differences between them.
If in that paper I pointed to any work as exemplary, it
was to Michelle Rosaldo’s, which went very far toward
working through and out of the biology/culture divide.
The idea that emotions are “embodied thoughts,” here
attributed to the Lutz and White review essay of 1986,
was originally Rosaldo’s, appearing in an essay published
posthumously (Rosaldo 1984:143, cited in Leavitt 1996:
524).
While in principle Tarlow accepts the inadequacy of
either purely cognitive-cultural or purely bodily-biolog-
ical approaches to emotion, in practice she seems to
come down on the cultural constructionist side. “Social
emotional values,” she writes, “rather than “individual,
subjective emotional experience may be of greater in-
terest to archaeologists,” and by emotional values she
means values that are societally “attributed to certain
emotions,” “emotional standards.” This is what I called
replacing emotions with their cultural definitions, the
key move of those favoring the cultural-cognitive re-
duction. Tarlow’s sympathy for this side of the opposi-
tion is understandable as a reaction against archaeolo-
gists’ general tendency to assume the priority of the
universal biological body. Yet to switch from one side of
the necessary complexity of emotions to its opposite is
to throw the bodily baby out with the universalist
bathwater.
What seems to me to be Tarlow’s final privileging of
the cultural over the bodily is closely related to a dif-
ference between us involving the second of the three
points mentioned above, the individual and varying ver-
sus the collective and stereotypical aspect of emotions.
For Tarlow, since what is subjectively experienced can
only be individual, it necessarily varies “from person to
person or even within a person. Responses are not pre-
dictable or even consistent.” My own view (Leavitt 1984,
1996) is that while emotions are subjectively experienced
and therefore by definition individual, important aspects
of them are also likely to be highly stereotypical and,
indeed, highly predictable. We all have some idea of what
we are supposed to feel in certain situations: millions of
us cry or feel like crying at the same point in a given
film. As I write, Passover and Easter are both a few days
away, and millions of English-speaking North Americans
know perfectly well what they are supposed to feel in
relation to at least one of these holidays. Much of the
effort expended on collective observances like these
seems aimed at inculcating specific affective dispositions
in the young, and this in a multisensory and bodily as
well as a cognitive/aesthetic mode: we feed, surprise,
entertain our children and each other so that we can all
feel something specific together as we are saying/tasting/
singing/smelling/remembering specific Passover or
Easter things. Tarlow opens her book by proposing that
the emotions evoked in gravestone inscriptions were re-
ally felt, and while she gives an individual and unique
case, the fact that this case has things in common with
others in the same “emotional regime” is what allows
her to offer an archaeology of bereavement.
These distinctions seem especially important for ar-
chaeology, which is, after all, an art of inference from
the material. Prehistoric archaeologists, at least, do not
have the luxury of written documents to tell them what
words people were using to describe their subjective
states or even their affective values: as Tarlow puts it,
the problems specific to archaeology are its reliance on
materiality and the meagreness of its contexts. In this
case, the bodily side of emotion is precisely what is avail-
able for inference. This is not because all bodies are the
same, as biological universalists assert, but simply be-
cause thinking and feeling bodies may be expected to
leave traces in a way that a thinking mind or a singing
voice will not. And archaeology as a field, with what
may well be its illuminating limitations, seems called
upon to follow the traces left by socio-emotional, that
is, collective thinking-and-feeling mind-body, regimes.

lynn meskell
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University,
New York, N.Y. 10027, U.S.A. (LMM64@columbia.edu).
14 iv 00
Tarlow has made an important contribution to our un-
derstanding of personal relationships within the wider
framework of social archaeology. Her programmatic
statements over the years (Tarlow 1992, 1997, 1999) have
prompted archaeologists to move beyond reductionist
readings of power-based motives in the archaeological
past. As always, archaeology has been at least a decade
behind critical developments in social science theorizing
and has therefore glossed over the potentials of uncov-
ering culturally specific emotional indices in the past.
This is in part a result of the hegemony of European and
British prehistorians in the development and mainte-
nance of archaeological theory. Their inability to con-
duct an archaeology of emotion should not have impeded
those who do have adequate data for the task, especially
those who work in historically embedded cultures. As
Tarlow hints, we must be careful not to speak for others’
data. This tendency is particularly pervasive at present
in Britain, where “poor data resolution,” as Tarlow notes,
is mixed with a desire for poststructuralist theory—
irrespective of its applicability. Clearly not all archae-
ologists have the appropriate data for every theoretical
concern and that fact should not result in the silencing
of those who do. Her example of the trajectory of gender
archaeology is a salient one: few would deny those who
have the data the construction of gendered histories. As
Tarlow states, “the historicization of emotion is an im-
portant political project” inextricably tied to questions
of meaning and social life. We should not let semantics
impede us.
Tarlow seems surprised that reactions to death in
Egypt mirror our own: many diverse societies express
grief and undergo bodily transitions through the pro-
cesses of death and burial. We should also remember that
New Kingdom Egyptian culture pre-dates our own by
some 3,500 years—so we must be mindful of teleological
tropes. In making these assertions we should recentre
the many levels of data appropriate to the question of
emotion in Egypt: an explicit vocabulary, literary texts
about death and mourning, personal letters expressing
grief, wall paintings showing funerals, ritual practices
for the deceased, and even hired female mourners. Such
a wealth of evidence is hard to ignore. There is also a
considerable body of evidence for the discourse of love
at this time. Social theorists writing on the topic have
generally considered romantic involvement as a variable
connected to the modernization process. Weber, Haber-
mas, Parsons, and Simmel have presented romantic love
either as an instrumental aid to the maintenance of ra-
tionalized society or as a functional resource for increas-
ing social integration and communication in a social uni-
verse that is fragmented and atomistic (Lindholm 1999:
243). Thus, romantic love has usually been perceived by
social theorists to be a relatively modern and particularly
Western phenomenon: again Egyptian data challenge this
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 737
temporal chauvinism. We can employ various love po-
ems and personal letters articulating love and friendship,
along with texts that suggest that many romantic unions
were based on choice rather than arrangement or eco-
nomic imperatives (Meskell 1999, 2000). Although
sketched briefly, I hope that such materials would be
viewed as significantly different from those existing in
prehistoric contexts. Similarly, this work on Egypt
should be distanced from the more fictional ac-
counts—often couched in terms of gender archae-
ology—critically summarized by Tarlow.
The writings on Egypt that Tarlow cites were deeply
influenced by her work on the mortuary archaeology of
the Orkneys (Tarlow 1999). The early work was centred
around embodiment, trying to distance archaeology from
the fascination with inscriptive Foucauldian models of
the body politic and replace it with more nuanced and
contextual readings of Egyptian personhood. Interest-
ingly, this project was not about empathy—a word used
only once in the paper to argue that we can never fully
empathize with Egyptian individuals as such, yet we
might access the material reflections of their own at-
tempts at construction and presentation of the self in
life and death (Meskell 1996:11). The later work reiter-
ated that we cannot truly empathize in any cognitive
way and yet something other than social constructivism
must be considered. The extremes of social constructiv-
ism and essentialism are unlikely to yield the most fruit-
ful explanations, whereas the interstices offer the most
productive terrain. Again this foregrounds our herme-
neutic dilemma in these endeavours.
Tarlow’s analysis of emotions as complex bodily ex-
periences (recalling the concept of the emotional as em-
bodied cultural knowledge [see Csordas 1994]), cultural
meanings, social values, and personal idiosyncrasy is par-
ticularly valuable. Social anthropologists like Lila Abu-
Lughod (1985, 1991, 1993) have shown the potentials in
a contemporary (Egyptian) setting. She argues that formal
institutional domains are not cross-culturally applicable
and that coherent systems of meaning can exist in seem-
ingly contradictory ways: the discourse of honor and
shame is set beside the poetic discourse of vulnerability
and attachment (Abu-Lughod 1991:162; 1993). Her com-
pelling studies of the Egyptian Bedouin could be em-
ployed to rethink the lyric and nonlyric genres of writing
in ancient Egypt. Tarlow’s call for greater interdiscipli-
narity is timely. In this spirit I conclude with the words
of the Nobel-prizewinning Mexican poet Octavio Paz
(1995:164), who has written persuasively about the emo-
tions: “If the study of political and religious institutions,
economic and social patterns, philosophical and scien-
tific ideas is indispensable for an understanding of what
our civilization has been and is, why shouldn’t the same
be true of the study of our feelings, among them both
imaginary and real, for a thousand years?”
738 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
steven mithen
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading,
Whiteknights, P.O. Box 218, Reading RG6 6AA, U.K.
(S.J.Mithen@reading.ac.uk). 16 iii 00
This is an interesting and worthwhile contribution high-
lighting the need for archaeologists to make explicit ref-
erence to past emotional lives and the immense theo-
retical and methodological difficulties involved in that
task. I fully agree with Tarlow’s general argument that
any specific emotion that an individual may experience
is dependent upon both biology and culture. How could
it possibly be otherwise? This appears to be the position
that all the scholars she cites in her paper would accept,
although some would certainly place relatively more em-
phasis on either biology or culture. None of those whom
she cites as adopting a biological approach to emotion
appears to deny the significance of culture as an influ-
ence, while Tarlow herself states that most constructiv-
ists accept that emotions have some biological aspect. I
have always rejected a biology/culture dichotomy in my
work and was careful to do so in the one piece of work
I have produced which explicitly dealt with emotion. In
this regard I feel that Tarlow, seemingly desperate to find
a biological determinist, has misread my position. Before
illustrating this, let me state that my 1991 article was
not produced to defend my work on human decision
making in light of criticism by Julian Thomas as Tarlow
asserts. It was simply written in astonishment that any-
one could believe that prehistoric people are condemned
to the status of dehumanized robots when an archaeol-
ogist finds that the mathematical modelling of their de-
cision-making processes is a useful research strategy.
That is an absurd viewpoint and one that I wished to
correct—there was certainly no need to defend my pre-
vious work against Thomas’s simplistic charges. In light
of Thomas’s reply (1991a), I dismally failed at that task.
Tarlow states that my view of emotion is functional
and adaptive. Well, yes, emotions can be functional and
adaptive and as such are likely to play a very important
role in decision making. Tarlow implies, however, that
this is the entirety of my position, as did Thomas (1991a).
In fact, I argued that emotions are functional in that they
enable individuals to be rational decision makers. While
this may help explain why emotions evolved and how
rationality can be achieved, it certainly does not imply
that any emotion whenever expressed is serving some
functional role. Once evolved, emotions are likely to be
expressed and used in contexts which have no functional
significance. While all references to rational decision
making and human adaptation will require an implicit
or explicit reference to emotions, the converse does not
hold (Mithen 1991:13–14). As Tarlow notes, in that paper
(and in the quote above) I was simply referring to a basic
set of emotions that are probably more firmly embedded
within our biology than others. This distinction might
be phrased in a variety of ways. For instance, Lynn Mes-
kell, whose work Tarlow seeks to contrast with my own,
states that “emotional elements might be universal but
emotional experiences are not” (1999:130)—a view that
seems quite compatible with those I have expressed (al-
though exactly what an emotional element is remains
unclear to me).
It is a sad reflection of the level of discussion and de-
bate in our discipline today that any archaeologist who
feels that our evolutionary history has something to con-
tribute to an understanding of human thought/behav-
iour/action/emotion/culture is automatically accused of
being a functionalist or adaptationist alone. I am very
happy with those labels—I wish there were more of us
around—but this does not mean that I believe that ev-
erything about emotion or any other feature of humanity
can be explained in those terms. Tarlow confuses beliefs
about useful research strategies (which functionalist/
adaptationist ones certainly are) with beliefs about the
world. My short article was not a statement of my view
of the nature of emotion in archaeology as Tarlow claims.
I am not so rash as to attempt such an undertaking
within a three-page journal article.
Tarlow is quite wrong to state that the questions ad-
dressed in evolutionary psychology are when, how, and
why emotions came to exist. Evolutionary psychology
is also interested in understanding the consequences of
our evolutionary history for human behaviour and
thought, whether those be in the present or in the his-
toric or prehistoric past. Some of that behaviour and
thought may be adaptive and functional. It is essential
that studies of these remain prominent on an archaeo-
logical agenda. It is one of the truly remarkable features
of humankind that we are able to act in adaptive fash-
ions, and by dismissing this ability—and the study of
how emotions enable us to do this—we will never move
beyond a shallow understanding of the human condition.
Other consequences of our evolutionary past, however,
may have no functional or adaptive significance to-
day—there may, for instance, be a vast number of what
S. J. Gould described as spandrels. But these too will
require reference to our evolutionary history if we are
ever to achieve an adequate understanding of them. Tar-
low makes a serious error of judgement if she thinks that
the work of Dawkins or Trivers can be dismissed in the
same fashion as the appalling popular expositions and
mis-presentations of ideas from evolutionary psychology
that are unfortunately so much loved by the media.
It seems difficult to question Tarlow’s conclusion that
emotions should be regarded as cultural as well as bio-
logical. But it seems likely to me that some types of
emotions will be more deeply rooted in our biological
constitution than others. I rather doubt that any woman
in the past has suffered the loss of a young child without
emotions (or emotional elements) similar to those which
we describe as grief and sorrow. Until I can find evidence
to the contrary it seems not unreasonable to accept such
emotions/emotional elements—however expressed—as
biologically universal for Homo sapiens, probably for the
whole Homo genus, and most likely for the great apes.
If Tarlow can provide any evidence against this—
presumably a case study in which women lack such feel-
ings when they lose a young child (other than when those
women are suffering from a pathological condition)—I

will be happy to reconsider this biological deterministic
position.
julian thomas
School of Art History and Archaeology, University of
Manchester, Manchester, U.K. (J.S.Thomas@soton.ac.
uk). 24 iii 00
I am fully in agreement with Tarlow’s argument that the
human body can be lived and material without existing
outside of the social and cultural world. At times,
though, her contribution seems to imply the opposite.
When she suggests that “both body and culture matter”
and that “emotions are both biological and social” or
writes of “the relationship between the body and cul-
ture” there seems to be danger of conflating “the body”
with “the biological” and seeing both as extrinsic to cul-
ture. Biology does not provide us with a transparent un-
derstanding of what the body is really like which can be
distinguished from the culturally composed accounts of
the body found elsewhere. It is one form of knowledge
amongst others, created under specific historical and so-
cial conditions.
I am also broadly sympathetic with the aims of an
archaeology of emotion as she outlines them: as a means
of challenging assumptions concerning emotions in the
past and as a way of questioning the naturalness and
universality of the way we are now. However, I am con-
cerned that her emphasis on the psychological literature
has led her by default to underemphasize the role of emo-
tion as an aspect of our being-in-the-world. She is quite
right to say that we have little choice in our emotional
attunement: we are “delivered over” to our emotional
state (Heidegger 1962:174). But I would like to see a little
more consideration of emotions or moods as relational
conditions as opposed to isolated experiences. The mood
that we find ourselves in affects the way that we un-
derstand and act in relation to others and material things.
As far as empathy is concerned, it is worth stressing
that the reason I and others have rejected such an ap-
proach is that it is generally associated with “getting into
the heads” of past people and thinking their thoughts
(e.g., Hodder 1992b:17). This seems to me to imply a
Cartesian distinction between mind and body, where our
objective appears to be to enter the subjective world of
the individual mind. This need not preclude an “ar-
chaeology of meaning,” but such an archaeology will be
one which is built on the notion that meanings are cre-
ated in the world, in the relations between people and
things. Similarly, I do not see that the suggestion that
human being always find themselves enmeshed in power
relations is a basis for an empathetic approach, given that
the character of these relationships is radically con-
tingent.
Finally, I hope I may be allowed to quibble with Tar-
low’s characterization of my own approach to the ex-
perience of prehistoric monuments and landscapes,
which I hold not to be empathetic. She suggests that “it
must be necessary to assume that in some way modern
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 739
human experience does align with past human experi-
ence.” I do not believe that this is the case, so long as
we adopt a very particular understanding of materiality.
Archaeologists have generally assumed that material
things are a dead record of the actions of human beings
whose thoughts and agency have died with them. I sug-
gest instead that the relations between people and things
are social relations: non-human things are integral to the
social field (e.g., Latour 1986). When we as archaeologists
engage with the material things that made up a past
world, we are doing more than perusing arrangements of
matter. Potentially, our engagement can amount to the
“working” of a series of significant relations in the pro-
duction of a meaningful understanding. The intention of
this procedure is not to replicate a past meaning but to
create an interpretation which “stands for” that mean-
ing, as an analogy or allegory. Such an allegorical mean-
ing has to be recognized as a modern cultural product,
something which is of and for the present.
This approach is legitimate not because it allows us
to congratulate ourselves that we have thought and felt
the same things as past people but because it starts to
delineate the kinds of experiences that were available to
them. Experience is not something that is undergone by
pre-given or hard-wired consciousnesses which simply
come into contact with worldly things and react accord-
ingly. On the contrary, experience is part of a process in
which human subjects are continually coming into be-
ing. My own experience of a past materiality is the only
one that is available to me, but I can use it as a means
of addressing the differentness of past experiences and
in the process of appreciating the different ways in which
human beings have constituted themselves in the past.
Reply
sarah tarlow
Leicester, England. 2 vi 00
I thank all the commentators for their serious consid-
eration of my paper. Their critiques are challenging and
important. Many problematic issues and questions have
been raised, and I cannot pretend to have the answer to
them all. I myself feel that I am still groping towards the
formulation of a coherent position which nevertheless
empowers the kind of writing about the past I want to
do. Differences among us relate to the kinds of material
we are accustomed to working with, to our various phil-
osophical outlooks, and to the academic traditions from
which we come. Nevertheless, I believe that many of the
points made here are differences of emphasis or meth-
odology rather than profound philosophical incom-
patibilities.
I will comment on a few of the general issues that
have arisen.
The position of the subject. Campbell and Hansson
suggest that past emotions are ultimately irretrievable;
740 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
similar points are made by Thomas and Karlsson. Given
the impossibility of “recapturing” past emotions, Camp-
bell and Hansson’s preferred orientation is therefore to-
wards “our relation with the past.” I agree that the at-
tempt to “re-create” past emotions in their varied,
contradictory, and subtle nature is a futile endeavour.
However, I do not agree that we should therefore aban-
don the attempt to say anything meaningful and plau-
sible about the past. I am more optimistic than they are
insofar as I do not believe that humanizing the past nec-
essarily involves the identification of sameness, and in
this paper I have considered how one might get beyond
that. This is also where I diverge a little from what I
understand to be Harré and Parrott’s suggestion that (any
old) hypothesis about past emotions will enrich inter-
pretation. It strikes me that, by downplaying the “real-
ness” of the experiences of past people or rejecting the
requirement that modern interpretation should in some
way align with those experiences (see Schutz 1967 for a
discussion of alignment), we really do risk seeing our-
selves in a looking glass. However, if Harré and Parrott
mean only that, even though emotions are never ulti-
mately “knowable,” incorporating ideas about emotion
into the stories we tell about the past is a good thing,
then, provided that the stories we tell are plausible and
conform with available evidence, I agree that richer,
more interesting archaeologies will result. To loosen that
condition would be, for me, unfulfilling and something
of an evasion of the challenge of archaeology. It is the
limitation of interpretive ambition in this way that I am
wary of, not reflexive awareness itself, despite Karlsson’s
fear that I have established an either/or dichotomy be-
tween the study of emotion in the past and its exami-
nation in the present. This was never my intention, and
nowhere did I suggest that our own emotional responses
are irrelevant. My point was that we are, as far as I can
see, in no danger of neglecting emotion in ourselves in
the present but, unless this self-analysis is part of a
broader project of writing about the past, it is unlikely
to be particularly interesting. Another point relating to
the limitation of archaeological ambition is made, in dif-
ferent ways, by Meskell and Kus. Kus, reasonably, argues
that archaeologies of emotion need not be compulsory,
but “where the data and the context permit” those who
wish to explore these questions should be encouraged to
do so. Meskell makes a similar point, rather more
strongly. I agree that it is not necessary or appropriate
for all archaeologies to include a consideration of emo-
tion, but to write about past people’s understandings of
their worlds we do need to consider emotion. For clari-
fication I would add here that, so long as archaeologies
are plausible, I do not see why any period or scholar
should be excluded from the project of writing mean-
ingful, rich, complex, and social pasts (see Lampeter Ar-
chaeology Workshop 1997:175 for a discussion of the sort
of criteria by which interpretations of the past may be
evaluated).
Empathy. In writing this paper, I found thinking about
the limits of empathy to be the hardest part; some of
this was to do with the rhetorical stances adopted by
different thinkers (or the languages with which they felt
comfortable). Ambiguities of language and meaning af-
fect the various responses of the commentators here, but
differences are not wholly semantic. Karlsson points out
that I cannot entirely free myself of what he calls “meth-
odological empathy.” I have tried to make a distinction
between “methodological empathy”—the uncritical pro-
jection of one’s own perceived or imagined responses
onto others—and the recognition of some shared char-
acteristics. I concluded that without some acknowl-
edgement of the latter, in a very general way, it would
be difficult to know how archaeological evidence might
inform the writing of pasts. My understanding of this
general alignment between past and present people in-
cludes such broad principles as these: human life has
always been complex; humans perceive and interpret
their world and act in ways that are generally consistent
with their understanding of the world and themselves;
people are self-aware; although the specifics of culture
are immensely variable, the existence of culture can be
assumed. In this way, I think that the differences be-
tween Thomas and myself relate partly to the languages
we feel happy to use. Thomas himself repeatedly uses
expressions such as “being-in-the-world” and makes
comments such as that “relations between people and
things are social relations.” These are the kind of com-
monalities or alignments between past and present hu-
man experience which I suggest are necessary in order
to allow the possibility of interpretation of social mean-
ing. Ultimately, I am interested in knowing about the
past and knowing about past people’s experience, and I
think those are legitimate goals for archaeologists,
though I make a strong distinction between “knowing
about” past experiences and actually having that expe-
rience oneself.
Pan-human emotions? Commentators vary in the de-
gree to which they feel that it may be legitimate to con-
sider some emotional responses as in some way pan-
human. Mithen, Cowgill, and Leavitt all suggest that I
may have underemphasized the degree to which emo-
tional propensities and experiences are shared.
Leavitt argues that some emotions in particular cir-
cumstances are in fact highly predictable or even ste-
reotypic. His examples of our widespread susceptibility
to emotional manipulation in, for example, film and
emotional concurrence about certain socio-religious fes-
tivals demonstrate this. Nevertheless, these emotional
effects, first, are very variable in personal experi-
ence—not everybody will find the same films funny or
sad or romantic—and, second, depend on shared cultural
context. The emotional meanings of, say, Christmas, are
different in different countries: in cultures which have
no cultural tradition of Christmas, the holiday may pro-
voke emotions of fear, anxiety, hostility, or nothing at
all. Leavitt thinks that, in favouring “social emotional
values” as a goal for archaeological study of emotion, I
am advancing the view that actual experienced emotions
are not predictable. He is right insofar as, for me, the
identification of what “millions of English-speaking
North Americans . . . are supposed to feel” (which I

would call emotional values) is firmer ground for the
production of archaeologies; claiming to predict experi-
ences in specific, individual cases is not necessary. This
does not, however, mean that emotions are not deeply
felt and widely shared “genuine” experiences.
Mithen challenges me to find evidence of an occasion
on which a woman, for non-pathological reasons, did not
feel emotions like grief and sorrow on losing a young
child. In response, I could argue that responses to child
death are culturally complex; adequate translation may
not be possible in culturally specific circumstances
(where, for example, a child is given to the gods). Simi-
larly, responses to the death of a child who was suffering
from some serious medical condition may not be the
same as reaction to the death of a healthy child, nor may
the reaction to the death of a child brought up under a
system of shared care or by foster parents. In circum-
stances where the parent in some way brings about the
child’s death, such as, for example, sex-selective infan-
ticide, emotional reactions will not always be the same.
Because the meanings of different kinds of death, the
meaning of childhood, and the nature of the parent-child
relationship vary enormously among societies, so will
responses to child death. Given this complexity and var-
iability, child death is not an emotional constant.
Equally, Mithen’s expectation that it is the mother who
will experience the significant responses of grief and sor-
row reflects the gendered emotional expectations of a
particular cultural context. If he is willing to substitute
“parent” for “mother” in his challenge, one good ex-
ample might be the case of the Inca official Caque Poma,
whose daughter was sacrificed to the sun deity (described
in Sillar 1992:113). In this case, the involvement of the
child’s father in her death, the apotheosis of the “dead”
girl, and Caque Poma’s consequent social elevation are
likely to have produced in him feelings quite different
from those one would expect in a modern Western be-
reaved parent. It is also worth noting that Mithen’s ex-
emption of pathological conditions permits a situation
in which any mother who does not demonstrate the
“right” emotions can be dismissed as aberrant. However,
the diagnosis of pathological conditions as they relate to
emotional states is not objective and neutral but serves
to promote and naturalize certain culturally expected
emotional responses by pathologizing those which de-
viate from the ideal. We have quite a tradition in the
West of “diagnosing” women who do not conform to
idealized gender stereotypes as hysterical, neurotic, or
whatever. Even 50 years ago unmarried girls who became
pregnant in Britain could be confined to mental insti-
tutions, so caution must be taken in attributing patho-
logical status to deviance. Mithen clearly feels misrep-
resented by this paper, and I apologize if I have
inadvertently done so. However, on rereading his work
and my own I still fail to see inaccuracies in my presen-
tation of his article, though of course there are differ-
ences of emphasis and clearly we take different ap-
proaches. I do not know why Mithen, who claims here
both that he is and is not a biological determinist, objects
to my “accusing” him of being a functionalist or adap-
t a r l o w Emotion in Archaeology F 741
tationist if he is “very happy with those labels.” For me,
the main problem remains that for Mithen emotions are
assumed to be “things” whose existence and nature are
not in doubt but whose aetiology and function need to
be explained. I disagree with him at the level of the ar-
ticulation of the “problem” and do not consider looking
at emotion as something to be discussed in terms of “the
human condition,” assuming that the nature of that con-
dition is already and unproblematically known, a useful
way to proceed.
Cowgill suggests that “whatever is innate constitutes
material out of which (rather than on which) local con-
structions are formulated,” and I find this an appealing
and useful distinction. I agree with him that, at this stage
in our discussions, it will not be particularly profitable
to pursue the question of what is innate and what local
as if they were separable entities. Perhaps it does not
matter very much for the purposes of archaeological dis-
cussion that some, including Cowgill, are more sym-
pathetic towards the idea of pan-human emotional pro-
pensities and others, including me, are warier. In practice
there is broad agreement that emotions cannot be as-
sumed but are important, and maybe that is as far as we
need to go together in order to approach the challenge
of writing emotional archaeologies.
Archaeological contexts. Harré and Parrott argue that
I have not drawn sufficient distinction between histor-
ical and archaeological studies. They comment that “in-
terpretation based on bodily remains and artifacts alone
must be difficult indeed.” Social archaeologists would
surely agree: archaeological interpretation is very diffi-
cult. Nevertheless, we employ a wide range of evidence
including architecture, space, flora and fauna, and land-
scape use, as well as the human remains and artifacts
that Harré and Parrott mention. Archaeology is a mature
discipline, and over many decades archaeologists have
developed sophisticated and creative ways of interrogat-
ing the evidence available. This sounds self-congratu-
latory, but it is intended to express that modern archae-
ological practice is generally imaginative about what
might count as evidence, as Averill recognizes, and am-
bitious about its interpretation. All of this is not to say
that an archaeology of prehistoric emotion is no harder
than the emotional history of the 20th century, but I
think many archaeologists and historians, including my-
self, would resist making sharp distinctions between ma-
terial culture and textual sources of evidence. Of course,
material culture requires careful and critical interpre-
tation in terms of its context of production and use, and
ultimately its meaning is “unknowable” in the sense
that there is no final closure or fixity, but then the same
is true of texts. The difference between historical and
prehistoric periods—and here I slightly disagree with
Meskell, I think—is not an absolute discontinuity be-
tween the study of periods for which textual sources are
available and those for which they are not but a contin-
uum where different kinds and quantities of evidence
are available. Interpretation is harder when there is less
evidence. It is not clear to me, however, why a weak
distinction between historical and archaeological con-
742 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000
texts of interpretation makes my argument “covertly
inductive.”
Traps and anxieties. I am saddened by the apprehen-
siveness this paper has induced in Susan Kus—a scholar
whose work I particularly admire. Emotion is difficult
to “get right,” and I certainly would not claim to be able
to do it myself. The language available to us seems to
have a strong current which brings one back round into
complicity with the very philosophical positions one has
tried to escape—a failure Thomas points out in my own
work and one which Cowgill is also aware of having to
“struggle so constantly against.” But the difficulty of
doing emotional archaeologies or of finding adequate
conceptual and representational tools should not make
us fearful of trying. My attempts here to take a critical
position were certainly not intended to “police” archae-
ological interpretations. Rather, I had hoped to make ex-
plicit some of the difficulties in positions which are
sometimes uncritically assumed. There will be no right
way of “doing emotion.”
Hodder and Kus both would have wished for more dis-
cussion of how emotions are involved in the kinds of
material context frequently encountered by archaeolo-
gists. The aim of the present paper was to argue the
importance of emotional archaeologies and to explore
some of the theoretical issues and possible approaches
rather than to provide methodologies or list case studies,
although a number are discussed here. Progress in writ-
ing emotional archaeologies must be made by responding
to particular archaeological contexts such as the fasci-
nating and challenging example outlined here by Hodder.
I greatly appreciate the privilege of engaging in chal-
lenging dialogue on the subject of emotion and am par-
ticularly glad of the interdisciplinary nature of this de-
bate. Commenting on work in other traditions, one feels
clumsy and aware of the inadequacies and incoherences
of one’s own position. I am therefore very grateful to all
the commentators for their support, questions, guidance,
suggestions, and corrections. I am convinced that this is
an area we need to develop in the disciplinary context
of archaeology. I agree with Meskell that continued in-
terdisciplinary discussion will be essential to progress in
this area, and I share Averill’s hope that archaeology may
also be able to make a significant contribution to the
interdisciplinary field of emotion studies.
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