just cleaning out my mailbox and ran across this -
i know i'm being provocative here, but i still think there tends to be a trend towards those who like to make-up theories without worrying whether they have any correspondence to (i.e. independent of) empirical "facts" - just out of the blue, for the fun of it, as an intellectual exercise, etc. - at the same time, downplaying the importance of "facts" (and so heading off potential lines of criticism) -
 
i also have a collection of statements to the effect that archaeology is an "art" or that it is a mix between a "humanities" and the "social sciences", and hodder asserts somewhere that archaeology and geology are both "historical sciences", etc. - i really don't think there is any clear concensus - even for those who want to be "scientists" there often is no clear understanding about what "science" is or what's particularly scientific about any given method or argument - hodder ("the archaeological process") keeps repeating that archaeology is irreproducable (you can only dig a site once), but then so are autopsies, earthquakes and a lot of astronomical observations...
is archaeology falsifiable (popper) or... what did hempel say?
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Arch-theory list is for international discussions, reviews, and exchanges o [mailto:[log in to unmask]]Im Auftrag von Robert Jeske
Gesendet am: Dienstag, 12. März 2002 17:57
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: An anecdote
This is not meant as criticism, but I think sometimes we worry too much about labels, and not enough about doing what we do....

No one ripped me up (unless I missed the post) about my assertion that our statements about the past must be conditioned by a correspondence to the empirical record (recognizing that theory plays a large part in how we encounter that empirical record), so I'll assume that most of us agree with that.  That, in essence, is science.  We make up a theory to explain phenomena, then test our theory by exploring its implications for how the archaeological record is structured.  The more different things we can make hypotheses about that turn out to be supported by the empirical record, the happier we are with our theory.  When our expectations (i.e., hypotheses) aren't supported, we start to think about new theories.  But it's all about satisfying ourselves that our statements make sense by going from theory to data, back to theory, back to data, and so on.  You can call it contextual, you can call it hermeneutics, you can call it tacking, you can call it science.  Any way you look at it, it's archaeology.

If anyone has a radically different view of what we do when we do archaeology, I'd be happy to hear what it is.
Bob

geoff carver wrote:


And as for being "scientific": is there a general concensus that that is
what archaeologists want to be? I keep running up against opposition to
the very idea...
 

--
"No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does." -- Christopher Morley

Robert J. Jeske, Ph. D.
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Sabin Hall 275B
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53201
414-229-2424
414-229-5848 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/ArchLab/

Any opinions expressed here, reasonable or otherwise,  are mine. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.