Martin--
Right, I agree ..but I was under the impression that using the 'hard'
sciences as part of archaeological or anthropological analyses was the
whole point of interdisciplinarity, or a more holistic view of a certain
historical or geographical context. I'm still not so sure about the Po Mo
stuff, though I think its criticism of science and push toward
abandonment of 'grand narratives' is more a reflection of what has become
of scientific discourse than a real ground-breaking idea in itself.
Continuing on that train of thought, looking at research as not merely a
search for facts, data, information, but rather as an evolving entity
that is not meaningful because those facts 'exist' but rather because they
are
meaningful to us in the here and now, maybe post-modernism can be put in
its place ....
I really don't think that it is necessary, or even productive to think of
science in the western sense [empirically, i presume] when we go about
researching, if nothing more than to add another facet to our method.
On Sun, 29 Nov 1998, Martin Byers wrote:
>
>
> Elliot Richmond wrote:
>
> > Let me jump into this thread late (after it seems to have almost dwindled away).
> >
> > I wonder if our desire to categorize archaeology (or anthropology or any
> > other -ology) as a science relates more to the privileged position we give
> > to science in western culture. The spectacular success of science over the
> > last three or four hundred years may have seduced us into assuming that the
> > scientific approach is always best. The heart of post modernism (at least
> > in my mind) is the acknowledgement that science may not provide the best
> > answer, or even be capable of providing any answer at all.
> >
> > Clearly, there are questions within the context of archeology ("How old is
> > this thing?") that are best answered by scientific procedures. But there
> > are other questions ("What did this thing mean to its owner?") that science
> > is ill-equipped to answer.
> >
> > Elliot Richmond
> > PhD candidate in science education
> > University of Texas at Austin
> > [log in to unmask]
> > http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4758/
>
> I have no trouble speaking of archaeology as a science; but I do have concerns
> about confusing the technical methods that we borrow from the other sciences,
> particularly chemical, biological, nuclear, etc., to analyze the material cultural
> data with what we mean by prehistoric archaeology. These techniques are an important
> - indeed, essential - part of generating data which we then use to explain the
> archaeological record in social and cultural terms. But it is the latter that gives
> point to the technical analyses themselves. After all an anthropological
> characterization and account of the dietary practices of modern human societies
> always presupposes a social theory about human diet. Chemical, biological and other
> organic scientific technical analyses are necessary to establish what is actually
> eaten and without the latter we really do not have much to say. But natural science
> theories cannot be used to substitute for social anthropological theory of diet. It
> is the dietary practices as cultural practices - and the way these fit into and
> participate in the constitution of the structure of modern social life - that makes
> the study anthropological. If this is the case for the social sciences of modern
> societies, why should we expect any less of a prehistoric archaeological analysis
> of diet? Again, we need to know the substantive content of what the prehistoric
> community habitually consumed and relate it to the range of resources that were
> available - and this requires the growing repertoire of technical methods
> archaeology is developing parasitically by drawing on natural sciences, or else we
> really have nothing to say. But the data revealed by these technical analyses do not
> make up the diet as a human cultural phenomenon. This does not deny, of course, that
> substantive food is an essential part of any human diet. But it is the cultural and
> social structures that are realized when humans consume food that constitute this
> consumption as a human diet, rather than as simply the diet of some non-human
> species that might have consumed the same or equivalent range of foods as do humans.
>
> So, I guess what I am saying is that I have no problem defining archaeology as a
> science as long as it is clear that our object of study is not the empirical data in
> all their material-physical complexity, but the social complexity that generated
> them. The technical analysis of the data is simply a method to this goal.
>
>
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