Philosophy of Archaeology

The object of the present article is to study the relations between the forms of knowledge production in archaeology and the existing systems of publication in academic journals. We explore the predominant criteria in peer-review processes and the relative importance of their epistemological dimension. The results are discussed in terms of the social, political and  institutional implications of contemporary academic archaeology, suggesting a need to strengthen epistemological criteria in the peer-review processes, thus improving the justification of the assertions that archaeology makes about the past. This is important for archaeology as a discipline that claims to generate a contribution to present-day society, but it requires changes in institutional policies at local and regional levels in order to be effective.

The concept of time has often been (over)looked at through
the narrow spectrum of processual and positivist
approaches to archaeological science. Researchers are still
oblivious to the many vectors and planes of existence on
which different experiences of time are being placed.
Furthermore, they are not taking into consideration time’s
phenomenological quality, through which it is experienced,
lived, and not simply calculated and placed. Consequently,
the directions and strata in which time can be exposed and
addressed are many and not necessarily metaphorical. This
paper will explore different methodological approaches
towards the many biases involved in the process of phenomenologically
studying simultaneous, distinct time
experiences for archaeologists and in archaeology.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1751696X.2018.1505812

This study examines the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science through a quantitative analysis of the two most authoritative archaeological journals and two other relevant journals in Japan. First, although previous studies have emphasized the impact of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo on the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, results of the present study suggest that its impact has been more limited than previously assumed. Second, while previous studies claimed that research funding by the Japanese government from the latter half of the 1970s was an important factor in developing the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, the present study shows a result inconsistent with the claim. Finally, although I admit that the previous studies have properly captured some aspects of the relationship between Japanese archaeology and science, I conclude that we should look at the broader array of contributors to the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science.

In recent philosophy of archaeology, the role of the ‘object’ has been written about with growing significance. Though a number of theoretical frameworks have been advantageously utilized to investigate this trend, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is uniquely cross-purposive in how it focuses upon and, simultaneously, redefines (and therefore loses sight of) ‘objects’ themselves. By analyzing and refuting Carl Knappett’s argument for an ANT inspired archeological project, I show how its chief contribution to the philosophy of archaeology is a convoluted understanding of the relationship between ‘object’ and researcher, underscoring its lack of applicability to actual archaeological work.

How do archaeologists work with the material traces they identify as a record of the cultural past? How are these data collected and how are they construed as evidence? What is the impact on archaeological practice of new techniques of data recovery and analysis (especially those that originate in the physical and life sciences)? How do archaeologists work with old evidence in pursuit of new interpretations, and how do they adjudicate conflicting evidential claims based on the same or overlapping bodies of data?

To answer these questions, the authors of this book identify key examples of evidential reasoning in archaeology that are widely regarded as successful, as pivotal to the development of the field, or as instructive failures, and build nuanced analyses of the forms of reasoning they exemplify. This case-based approach is predicated on a conviction that archaeological practice is a repository of considerable methodological wisdom, embodied in tacit norms and skilled expertise; it is rarely made explicit, except when contested, and has been largely obscured by the abstractions of high profile crisis debates. Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology captures this wisdom in a set of close-to-ground principles of best practice.

Contents

Introduction: The Paradox of Material Evidence
Chapter 1: Archaeological Evidence in Question: Working between the Horns of a Dilemma
Chapter 2: Archaeological Fieldwork: Scaffolding in Practice
Chapter 3: Working with Old Evidence
Chapter 4: External Resources: Archaeology as a Trading Zone
Conclusions: Reflexivity Made Concrete

Innovative modes of collaborative practice are transforming archaeology; descent communities and archaeologists jointly define the research agenda and pursue programs of historical, archaeological inquiry together, sometimes bringing strikingly different conceptual schemes and methodologies to bear on questions of common concern. The tolerance of epistemic pluralism necessary for such practice has attracted sharp critiques from skeptics – philosophers (e.g., Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge, 2006) as well as archaeologists – who decry the compromises they believe it entails for properly scientific inquiry conceived in terms of the traditional ideal that science, proper, should be value free. By contrast, I contend that these collaborations can and often do significantly improve archaeological practice empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. I argue that when these projects succeed they illustrate the virtues of extending the cognitive-social norms of Longino’s proceduralist account of objectivity – specifically, her “tempered equality of intellectual authority” – beyond the confines of the scientific community (2002, 128-135). In the process, I identify the diversity of pluralisms that are a source of creative insight in these projects and I make the case that critics who fear this pluralism misrecognize the complexity of and contingency of the epistemic norms they defend.

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring key instances of exemplary practice, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term.

Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material "things" as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer practitioners within archaeology and well beyond.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1.  Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice
Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman


Part I. Fieldwork and Recording Conventions

2.  Repeating the Unrepeatable Experiment
Richard Bradley

3.  Experimental Archaeology at the Cross Roads: A Contribution to Interpretation or Evidence of ‘Xeroxing’? 
Martin Bell

4. ‘Proportional Representation’: Multiple voices in Archaeological Interpretation at Çatalhöyük
Shahina Farid

5. Integrating Database Design and Use into Recording Methodologies
Michael J. Rains

6. The Tyranny of Typologies: Evidential Reasoning in Romano-Egyptian Domestic Archaeology
Anna Lucille Boozer




Part II. Cross-field trade: Archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies

7. The Archaeological Bazaar: Scientific Methods for Sale? Or: ‘Putting the ‘Arch-’ Back into Archaeometry’
A. M. Pollard and P. Bray

8. Radiocarbon Dating and Archaeology: History, Progress and Present Status
Sturt W. Manning

9. Using Evidence from Natural Sciences in Archaeology
David Killick

10. Working the Digital: Some Thoughts from Landscape Archaeology
Marcos Llobera

11. Crafting Knowledge with (Digital) Visual Media in Archaeology
Sara Perry


Part III. Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation

12. Uncertain on Principle: Combining Lines of Archaeological Evidence to Create Chronologies
Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle

13. Lessons from Modelling Neolithic Farming Practice: Methods of Elimination
Amy Bogaard

14. Evidence, Archaeology and Law: An initial Exploration
Roger M. Thomas

15. Law and Archaeology: Modified Wigmorean Analysis
Terence Anderson and William Twining

16. Traditional Knowledge, Archaeological Evidence, and Other Ways of Knowing
George Nicholas and Nola Markey


Part IV: Broader perspectives: Material Culture as Object and Evidence

17. Evidence of What? On the Possibilities of Archaeological Interpretation
Gavin Lucas

18. Meeting Pasts Halfway: A Consideration of the Ontology of Material Evidence in Archaeology
Andrew Meirion Jones

19. Matter and Facts: Material Culture and the History of Science
Simon Werrett

Despite obvious affinities with feminist research programs in neighboring fields and the feminist commitments of its founders, several prominent advocates of “gender archaeology” explicitly reject any feminist “influences.” This reflects ambivalence about the broader epistemic implications of their content critiques of androcentrism in archaeology: that these raise deeper questions about the viability of “aperspectival” ideals of objectivity. I argue that, in exposing the situated partiality of mainstream archaeology, gender archaeology is a form of reluctant social constructionism. Rather than capitulate to critics who insist that this threat to objectivist ideals must be circumscribed, I advocate reformulating them in proceduralist terms.

Published in Portuguese as “Os que conhecem, conhecem bem: teoria do ponto de vista e arqueologia de gênero”: special issue of Scientiae Studia on ‘Feminist Approaches to Philosophy and Sociology of Science,” edited by Sylvia Gemignani, Márcia Tait and Hugh Lacy, 15.1 (2017): 13-38.

Available online as the 2016 Katz Distinguished Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucEM1t3Drek

I’m often asked why, as a philosopher of science, I study archaeology. Philosophy is so abstract and intellectual, and archaeology is such an earth-bound, data-driven enterprise, what could the connection possibly be? This being a Dewey lecture I construe this question in autobiographical terms: how did I come to work at this odd intersection between fields? I also take this as an opportunity to reflect on a major sea change that has taken place in philosophy of science in the forty years since I began thinking about how philosophy and archaeology bear on one another. I see this as an eminently Deweyan shift toward grounding philosophical analysis in a robust, richly contextualized understanding of scientific inquiry. Philosophers of science have long argued for such grounding in historical terms but what is distinctive, and distinctively Deweyan, at this juncture is a commitment to take up questions arising in and from practice, questions that matter to researchers and also policy-makers, funders, and, indeed, all those affected by the practice and results of scientific inquiry.

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. Not only are they notoriously fragmentary but the conceptual and technical scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence can be as constraining as it is enabling. A recurrent theme in internal archaeological debate is that reliance on sedimented layers of interpretative scaffolding carries the risk that “pre-understandings” configure what archaeologists recognize and record as primary data, and how they interpret it as evidence. The selective and destructive nature of data capture in archeology further suggests that there may be little scope for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet archaeologists have been strikingly successful in mining old datasets for new insights. I situate these concerns in the broader context of debate about the epistemic standing of the historical sciences, and then consider three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data. The first two – secondary retrieval and recontextualization – are a matter of reconfiguring the scaffolding that underpins evidential reasoning. The third turns on redeploying old data in the context of computational models that support the experimental simulation of the cultural systems and contexts under study.

Archaeology is nothing if not a modeling discipline, despite longstanding ambivalence about models. Archaeologists model the data they recover from the archaeological record, the sources on which they draw to interpret these data, the specific events and activities that produced the surviving traces, and the encompassing social, cultural, ecological contexts and processes in which these events and activities took place. I argue that it is most productive to think about archaeological practice as a genre of empirically grounded, investigative reasoning with and through models – a perspective elaborated by recent advocates of a “model-based archaeology” (Kohler and van der Leeuw 2007). In this chapter I address the question: What are archaeological models? I propose a taxonomy of the kinds of models archaeologists build and use, distinguished by specificity and representational function. In the process I address two further questions: What do archaeologists use models to do? And, how do they learn from models?

In commenting on the state of affairs in contemporary archaeology, Wylie outlines an agenda for archaeology as an interdisciplinary science rooted in ethical practices of stewardship. In so doing she lays the foundations for an informed and philosophically relevant ‘meta-archaeology’.