Editing Post-processual archaeology (section)

=== Materialism and idealism ===
Whereas the processualists had been firm [[Cultural_materialism_(anthropology)|materialists]], and the [[culture-historical archaeology|culture-historical archaeologists]] had, by contrast, been idealists, the post-processualists argued that past societies should be interpreted through both materialist and idealist ideas. As Johnson noted, "Many postprocessualists claim that we should reject the whole opposition between material and ideal in the first place."{{sfn|Johnson|1999|p=102}} While recognizing that past societies would have interpreted the world around them in a partially materialistic way, the post-processualists argue that many historic societies have also placed a great emphasis on [[ideology]] (which included [[religion]]) in both interpreting their world and influencing their behaviour. Examples of this can be seen in the work of Bernard Knapp, who examined how the social elite manipulated ideology to maintain their political and economic control,<ref>Knapp, B. 1988.</ref> and of [[Mike Parker Pearson]], who asserted that tools were just as much a product of ideology as were a crown or a law code.<ref>Pearson, Mike Parker. 1984:61.</ref>

Using an example to explain this belief in materialist-idealist unity, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson looked at the idea of [[landscape]] among past societies. He argued that:

:On the one hand, a materialist view of landscape tends to stress how it may be seen in terms of a set of resources, for example for [[hunter-gatherer]]s or early farming groups. This leads one to turn, for example, to optimal foraging theory and other economic models for an understanding of how people exploited the landscape 'rationally'. Postprocessualists like to argue that landscapes are always viewed in different ways by different peoples. They reject the 'rational' view of 'landscape-as-a-set-of-resources' as that of our own society and one that is ideologically loaded in its own way, loaded towards ideas of commodity and exploitation found in our own society. They suggest that ancient peoples would have had different views of what was 'real' in that landscape. On the other hand, an exclusively idealist view of landscape does not work either. Postprocessualists like to stress that such an understanding of landscape was not formed in the abstract—that the way people moved around and used that landscape affected their understanding of it.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|p=102}}