This is only to correct one of my points: we can study past activities,
and how people acted in the past, but we cannot "understand" (in the
collingwood sense of the word), because there is not any information
about "intention".
Archaeology is a science of global processes and not of remote
artifacts. We can study the social formation of garbage and how
different social acts are related with garbage formation. Studying the
temporal changes on those social acts, we will be able to understand
something about the present. The question is not "why people made this
2500 years ago? But once we know they made this act, then we can estudy
the temporal consequences, aand/or discontinuities of this fact.
Juan A. Barcelo
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