I should confess that I am against the use of zen or esoteric reasoning
to archaeology. It seems that not many archaeologists still support the
idea that archaeology IS a science.
Maybe the point of discussion is the goal of archaeology. We deal with
past remains, but is this really our goal? Are we interested in knowing
people who lived in the Past?
I'm sorry, but, although interesting, it is an impossible objective. We
cannot understand why people acted in the past. Is then Archaeology an
impossible science? Only if our only objective was knowing the past.
It may seem ilogical, but the objective of archaeology, in my view, is
the present. We should understand why our society is like it is, in
other words, History is a kind of resoning, the way we reason
temporally. It has to do with causality, because what we should analyze
is the cause of ourselves as members of a society.
There is more on causal reasoning than standard aristotelic logics. We
do not need esoteric reasoning ways, because there are interesting new
ways of scientific reasonin:. probabilistic causality, non-monotonic
reasoning, default logic, etc.
Archaeology is a way of looking at ourselves and analysing why we are
like we are. We need data about the past, that is, how was our society
before the present. But, the goal is not to know the past in its own
terms, but as a means to know what has changed during the last 1000,
5000, 10000, 1000000 years.
Archaeology is the science of the diacronic, and a comparative science:
we are constantly comparing th past and the present. It is impossible a
totally sincronic description, but we can study how settlement patterns
have changed, how the subsistance resources changed, the effects of
ritual on social organization. And we do not need to reconstruct ritual
in order to know the relationship between non-economic bahaviour and
social order.
Archaeology is also the science of garbage. We study the material
effects of some social behavior. We do not need all information of a
society, in the same way that an astronome can "see" a black hole
without seeing it.
Science exists and it is effective. Oriental medicine can be very
useful, but when I have headache (always I read about zen archaeology) I
take aspirin.
Juan A. Barcelo
Universitat Autonoma Barcelona
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|