My research interests center on understanding the ways in which archaeology intersects with the natural and social sciences. More specifically, I am interested in how postmodernism (the general cultural movement) and postpositivism (its specific philosophical expression) are currently being interpreted and implemented by processual and postprocessual archaeologies. In the early 80s, archaeological theory was defined by a binary opposition between processual and postprocessual archaeologies, leading to more or less hardened positions. Over the past fifteen years or so, a number of alternative approaches have grown up and these reflect varying degrees of commitment to processual and postprocessual archaeologies. One of the most interesting of these, and one which in some respects bridges the two extremes, is the archaeology of gender. The topics it has taken up- such as sex and gender, gender ideology, and equity issues- demonstrate very clearly why archaeology must be understood as a social practice.
I began my work on archaeological theory while a graduate student at UCLA where I coauthored an article with Tim Earle which evaluated the "Radical Critique" of Processual archaeology. We were disturbed by what we saw as relativistic leanings in the writings of Ian Hodder and his students. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, I organized a Visiting Scholar conference devoted to the "Processual/Postprocessual Debate" and through my readings and interactions became convinced of the need for a broader, more diverse approach to archaeological method and theory than that supplied by a strict adherence to processualism. This led to my collaboration with Mark Leone on an article looking at popular discourse surrounding the passage of NAGPRA and, more recently, to my work with Ian Hodder in preparing a Reader on archaeological theory and practice. We view our Reader as a context for people to form their own opinions about such topics as whether or not archaeology is moving towards Grand Theory.
As Associate Curator of North American archaeology at the University Museum, I study the indigenous peoples and cultures of North America, with a special focus on the Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest. My Masters thesis at UCLA was an exploration of settlement change among ancestral Puebloan communities on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico from A.D. 1100 to 1550 using a model of succession borrowed from human geography. Over time there was a clear shift in settlement towards larger villages spaced more or less regularly along the Rio Grande valley. Using this work as a baseline, my Ph.D. dissertation evaluated the significance of dual residence as a key component to the colonization process. I was able to show that the practice of "living at the lands" in field houses and farming communities during the growing season, so characteristic of the Pueblo peoples in the late 19th century, has considerable antiquity and that, as villages grew in size, but became fewer in number, the distances that people traveled to their fields increased. I did not, however, provide an adequate explanation for the presence of field houses located near their villages during all time periods.
I am currently directing the Kotyiti Research Project, a collaborative research project with the Pueblo of Cochiti, New Mexico. We are gathering archaeological and historical information on Kotyiti, an ancestral Cochiti community occupied from A.D. 1640-1694, and spanning the periods of the Pueblo Revolt and Spanish Reconquest. Kotyiti is particularly important to the people of Cochiti Pueblo. According to their oral narratives, it was the sixth of seven ancestral villages occupied in their southward migrations from Frijoles Canyon in what is now Bandelier National Monument. It was also one of the major sites of Pueblo resistance during the Spanish Colonial Period and is mentioned in the contemporary accounts of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, Antonio de Otermín, and Diego de Vargas. Although Adolph Bandelier first mapped the pueblo in 1880 and Nels Nelson excavated all 136 rooms in 1912, almost nothing has been published. Our initial goal is to remap the community using modern survey equipment and to document architectural variability (masonry styles, wall intersections etc.) in order to reconstruct building sequencing. Future field seasons will shift to locating contemporaneous sites on survey.
1996 (editor, with I. Hodder) Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: A Reader. Basil Blackwell Press, Oxford.
1996 Cooking Status: Hohokam Ideology, Power, and Social Reproduction. in Interpreting Southwestern Diversity: Underlying Principles and Overarching Patterns, edited by P. Fish and J. J. Reid, Arizona State University, Anthropological Papers No. 48.
1996 (with J. N. Hill and W. N. Trierweiler) The Evolution of Cultural Complexity: A Case from the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. in Emergent Complexity: The Evolution of Intermediate Societies, edited by J. E. Arnold, pp. 107-127. International Monographs in Archaeology, Ann Arbor.
1995 The Postprocessual Condition. Journal of Archaeological Research 3:147-175.
1994 (with M. Chesson) Blue Corn Girls: A Herstory of Three Early Women Archaeologists at Tecolote, New Mexico. in Women in Archaeology, edited by C. Claassen, pp. 67-84. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
1993 (with J. Barker) A Social History of Maize on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. in Papers on the Early Classic Period Prehistory of the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico, edited by T. Kohler and A. Linse, pp. 105-119. Washington State Univ. Dept. of Anthropology Reports of Investigations 65.
1992 (with M. P. Leone) Archaeology in a Democratic Society: A Critical Theory Approach. in Quests and Quandaries. edited by L. Wandsnider, pp. 115-135. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois Univ., Occasional Paper 20.
1991 (editor) Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois Univ., Occasional Paper 10. Carbondale.
1990 Seasonal Circulation and Dual Residence in the Pueblo Southwest: A Prehistoric Example from the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York.
1991 The Philosophy of Archaeology. in Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past. edited by R. W. Preucel, pp. 17-29. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois Univ., Occasional Paper 10.
1987 (with T. K. Earle) Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique. Current Anthropology 28:501-538.
1987 Settlement Succession on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. The Kiva 53:3-33.
Or e-mail me at rpreucel@sas.upenn.edu !