متیو جانسون از تاثیرگذارترین باستان شناسان نظریه پرداز در باستان شناسی فرافرایندی  است. وی سالهای بسیاری را صرف پژوهش بر ساختارهای اجتماعی و عاملیت انسانی در قرون وسطی انگلستان کرده است . آنچه در پی می آید مصاحبه ای است که در بهار سال جاری بین متیو جانسون و عمران گاراژیان

با محوریت زمینه و شرایط تئوریک آن و مسئله فرایند در باستان شناسی انجام شده است.

این گفتگو به زبان انگلیسی انجام و منتشر می شود.

O: I have a new question about context.  What exactly does context mean, from a general perspective in archaeology?
M: The strength, and at the same time the weakness, of context is the very wideness of the concept.  The first sense of ‘context’ is a practical matter: you understand a layer in an archaeological site by reference to the context; you understand grave goods, weapons, jewelry in graves by reference to their contextual associations.  The second sense of context is a theoretical sense, related to the insight that a specific question cannot be considered independently of its theoretical framing.  – why ask that particular question and not others? The third sense of context refers to the relationship between past and present, and the insight that any statement about ‘the past’, however commonsencsical or factual, is made within the context of the present.  Therefore, there is always a constant-back-and-forth in which the past is always seen in the context of the present and vice versa.  So context is a very broad and multivalent term, and it links up all these senses, theoretical and practical.
O: what is the relationship between temporal and spatial scale with context?
M: I am not sure if I understand your question. You are speaking about spatial and temporal scales, about a short term and the long term?
O: yes about the relationship between the term ‘context’ and spatial and temporal scales. For example: "a context as a layer".  What exactly the logical relationship between them?
M: it is certainly a multiple relationship.  There are many different contexts; you can have small scale, medium scale and large scale contexts. The point I would make is that the number and nature of contexts varies according to the scale and complexity of the society under study.  Thus for a Paleolithic site we might think about how people move from one region to another on a season or animal bases. In historical archaeology the context is or can be global.  Historical archaeology has the particular  challengofin talking about very small scale actions of human beings, for example smoking a pipe or eating a meal, but on the other hand it is connected to a very global structures. So the nature of context depends on where you are working and what you are working on.
O: Traditional archaeologists could be argued to concentrate on context in terms of  sequential, temporal scale. What is the relation between context and temporal scale? Can we concentrate on context in temporal scale without thinking about spatial scale?
M: For me, any temporal scale is also spatial in nature.  One of the particular challenges of archaeology is its very long time span.  Because much of archaeology is concerned with the very long term, but at the same time much of the archaeological record is made up of elements created very quickly.  Think about Maryam’s stone tools, for example.  We see very long term patterns in stone tool use, typology and assemblage.  However, each individual tool was created in maybe an hour or even a few minutes, and we can see very clearly the precise sequence of individual actions that made up the production of that tool, probably by a single human being.  Traditional archaeology tends to focus on one of these scales and tends to prioritise the long term; it tends also to link spatial to temporal scales through use of an implicit evolutionary framework, and assumption that things move from simple to cpomplex over the very long term.  
O: How we can know about the normality of context? For example, Bam before the earthquake was in  abnormal condition but after that it changed to an abnormal condition.
M: You make an interesting point about Bam. Six years ago an earthquake destroyed Bam and thousands of people were killed but today people are returning and living there again. So as an archaeologist one of the thing that we find over and over again is terrible catastrophe, met with huge resilience in the human population.  Events such as devastation through natural catastrophes or world wars often have little long-term effect on population trends.  The point I’m making here is that I don’t see a sharp, black and white division between a ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ context.
O: But do you agree that as an archaeologist we can’t know about the condition of a context from a dead context?
M: our job as archaeologists is to translate.  We deal with dead remains and our job is to understand those remains and write something intelligible about them; so our job is to translate faithfully between the living and the dead.  I want to come back to normal and abnormal context. In some ways the condition of abnormality can be treated  as  a ‘normal condition’. I'll give you an example. If you look at the borders between England and Scotland  for three to four centuries England and Scotland were at less constant war.  There was a constant exchange of raids, skirmishes, and casual violence.  From this to-and-fro- emerged a structure of feud and competition which, over those centuries, was actually quite stable.   So in a sense when you get to an abnormal situation, if you look behind the abnormal condition you often see long term processes playing themselves out.
O: but how about people’s reaction to the abnormal context or condition?
M:I prefer to use different words. You use context condition and normal/abnormal. The word I prefer to use is horizon.  Horizons often mark a very sharp break in long term structures.  Prior to a particular horizon, the people have a pattern in everyday life,   but after it new patterns emerge.  Patterns or structures or traditions  can be very long lasting.  Archaeology shows us that some patterns  or some structures  are very deep and long-lasting, but they can nevertheless stop suddenly and take a different direction.  
O:another question.  How to predict the future?
M:  Archaeologists, and intellectuals generally, have a very poor record at predicting the future.  Think about what happened in the  20 century.  European intellectuals, with exceptions, failed to predict the rise of fascism, two world wards, the collapse of Communism, the continuing resilience of capitalism…
O: but if we have not predict or predictable models why we are studying the past?
M: we study the past because we want to understand it, but that doesn’t mean that we can predict a future. We can suggest some possibilities:  for example, studying the past at Bam suggests that were always terrible unforeseen disasters but human beings come back from disaster over and over again.
O: But what do you think about small scale predictions? I think we can have some prediction about, for example, settlement patterns in Bam. We concentrate as archaeologists on long term process which  are themselves composed of some short term processes. And some of these short terms have an important effect on the long term. For example the earthquake in Bam has had an important effect on the long term of the city and the people’s life. As conclusion in abnormal condition we can have some prediction.
M: Again, my problem with that is that I don’t accept this binary classification into normal conditions and abnormal conditions.  For me, human history is much more fluid.  One person’s normality is another person’s abnormality.  The rhythms of history, and of human life, are much more subtle and complex.  But then, if they were simple, they wouldn’t be worth trying to understand.
 

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http://anthropology.ir/node/6938