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Working With the Material Culture
Much of the material presented in this book is the result of a far more detailed analysis, which is not possible to fully present here. This analysis was facilitated by the construction of a large and detailed database. The vast amount of data at the cemeteries was impossible to process and manipulate without the help of a computer programme. In constructing a database, or in entering data into a programme, the researcher must decide on the information that he or she will include in the study. The researcher must also classify the numerous pieces of data in a coherent and uniform manner in order for the computer programme to be able to run tests (or queries) to find patterns. In order to achieve this result, however, in order for the programme to work, the researcher imposes his or her own ideas about what is deemed to be valuable information. In actuality, these decisions at the beginning of the analytical process have a crucial bearing on the final results. Yet, researchers are rarely candid with regard to these distorting factors, and the use of apparently scientific methods gives an air of (false) objectivity to such studies.
This research, although aided by a database and necessitating the production of queries and graphs, was subjective from the outset. My main concern was to identify and document as many different aspects of the data from the sites as possible. The decision to do so was due to two related factors. Firstly, certain assumptions have often been repeated concerning the cultural practices of the X-Group, such as the characteristics of their pottery, the usual body positions that they deemed to be appropriate in death, the colours found in their material culture. I wanted to test the assumptions about each of these suppositions. Secondly, in attempting to test these assumptions, I had to suppose that other variables were possibly important in X-Group practices and material culture, and it was these that would be both interesting and significant to find. Following this course meant recording a very high number of small details about the artefacts, which other researchers with a different approach may have deemed unimportant. Bill Adams, in his two-volume work on Nubian ceramics, describes a similar process in the development of