tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post4751291851771210105..comments2024-03-28T11:48:17.788-07:00Comments on Publishing Archaeology: Science, social science, and archaeology: Where do we stand?Michael E. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03942595266312225661noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-90004749585057286852020-10-11T18:17:16.919-07:002020-10-11T18:17:16.919-07:00Hi. Thanks for this blog. I am an ex - not entirel...Hi. Thanks for this blog. I am an ex - not entirely by chance when I noticed from the inside, during post-graduate studies and in the field during archaeological expeditions, of the often artisanal and almost amateurish way of dealing with the attempts at explanatory theory by many archaeologists - archaeologist (my specialization was the Neolithic of the Near East). Being Italian I come from the degree course in History but since the first year I have dedicated myself, in addition to the courses of Archeology and History, to those of Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy of Science, Epistemology and Methodology, Theory of knowledge and, in my spare time, Political Science and Economics. Simon gets the point, in my opinion. And Michael is right in saying that archaeologists devote too little to these aspects, and I add they totally ignore what happens within disciplines whose 'more seriously scientific' approach could help (it is the universal problem of specialism) - e.g. Economics. But many archaeologists also ignore the closest theory and history of historiography, and ignore - in Italy for sure - the history of anthropological theories: they only choose the one that is most convenient at the moment, like in the supermarket. I am structuralist, I am idealist, I am materialist, I am marxist... It is neither science nor archaeology, only ideologies (or poor philosophies) without foundation - in the way used by archaeologists - in the concrete functioning of the human world, present and past. Has the archaeologist ever seriously posed (not in the world of utopia) the concrete problem of how resources are allocated, with the tools made available by modern Economics? How man responds concretely to the problem of scarcity? What impact can all this - which is a matter especially for economists - have on archaeological explanations and theories?<br /><br />In my opinion, moving from the bipartition between natural sciences and humanities to the tripartition by adding the social sciences was in part already obsolete after Popper, Hempel, and Gadamer (and after Menger's tripartition in theoretical, historical, applied sciences) and does not solve the question. I suspect that the generous and noble attempt of the New Archaeology did not understand much about Popper-Hempel, giving it a version of nineteenth-century positivism or Viennese neo-positivism. I suspect that today it is about the same, and that it is easier (at best, at worst we end up embracing the excesses of postmodern epistemological relativism) to turn to the latest publication of sociology of science available, thinking it can solve who knows what. In all this, for instance, the implications of the so-called 'methodological individualism' (which for Economics is a bit like reinventing the wheel), the version that Max Weber gave before and Raymond Boudon after, are not considered (or liquidated with ideological reasonss, without real critical confrontation), or the overlap between Gadamer's hermeneutic circle and Popper's conjectures and refutations (so-called unified method theory), or the role of unintentional consequences of intentional human actions (methodological individualism does not imply ignoring the study of social interrelationships, but rather the opposite. Just as it does not imply avoiding studying states, societies, cultures, collective phenomena...). Perhaps a deepening of these questions could benefit Archaeology (but also the bulk of Sociology). My two cents... <br />Carlonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-19188352260040232662020-10-11T18:16:48.205-07:002020-10-11T18:16:48.205-07:00Hi. Thanks for this blog. I am an ex - not entirel...Hi. Thanks for this blog. I am an ex - not entirely by chance when I noticed from the inside, during post-graduate studies and in the field during archaeological expeditions, of the often artisanal and almost amateurish way of dealing with the attempts at explanatory theory by many archaeologists - archaeologist (my specialization was the Neolithic of the Near East). Being Italian I come from the degree course in History but since the first year I have dedicated myself, in addition to the courses of Archeology and History, to those of Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy of Science, Epistemology and Methodology, Theory of knowledge and, in my spare time, Political Science and Economics. Simon gets the point, in my opinion. And Michael is right in saying that archaeologists devote too little to these aspects, and I add they totally ignore what happens within disciplines whose 'more seriously scientific' approach could help (it is the universal problem of specialism) - e.g. Economics. But many archaeologists also ignore the closest theory and history of historiography, and ignore - in Italy for sure - the history of anthropological theories: they only choose the one that is most convenient at the moment, like in the supermarket. I am structuralist, I am idealist, I am materialist, I am marxist... It is neither science nor archaeology, only ideologies (or poor philosophies) without foundation - in the way used by archaeologists - in the concrete functioning of the human world, present and past. Has the archaeologist ever seriously posed (not in the world of utopia) the concrete problem of how resources are allocated, with the tools made available by modern Economics? How man responds concretely to the problem of scarcity? What impact can all this - which is a matter especially for economists - have on archaeological explanations and theories?<br /><br />In my opinion, moving from the bipartition between natural sciences and humanities to the tripartition by adding the social sciences was in part already obsolete after Popper, Hempel, and Gadamer (and after Menger's tripartition in theoretical, historical, applied sciences) and does not solve the question. I suspect that the generous and noble attempt of the New Archaeology did not understand much about Popper-Hempel, giving it a version of nineteenth-century positivism or Viennese neo-positivism. I suspect that today it is about the same, and that it is easier (at best, at worst we end up embracing the excesses of postmodern epistemological relativism) to turn to the latest publication of sociology of science available, thinking it can solve who knows what. In all this, for instance, the implications of the so-called 'methodological individualism' (which for Economics is a bit like reinventing the wheel), the version that Max Weber gave before and Raymond Boudon after, are not considered (or liquidated with ideological reasonss, without real critical confrontation), or the overlap between Gadamer's hermeneutic circle and Popper's conjectures and refutations (so-called unified method theory), or the role of unintentional consequences of intentional human actions (methodological individualism does not imply ignoring the study of social interrelationships, but rather the opposite. Just as it does not imply avoiding studying states, societies, cultures, collective phenomena...). Perhaps a deepening of these questions could benefit Archaeology (but also the bulk of Sociology). My two cents...Carlonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-40628964230701979632016-02-12T16:36:04.316-07:002016-02-12T16:36:04.316-07:00@Simon - Let me think about this a bit. I am not ...@Simon - Let me think about this a bit. I am not really an expert thinker in this area. I do write about it, though, because it seems that much of archaeology is really screwed up about theory and epistemology, and someone has to talk about these things from a scientific viewpoint. I'm not sure I have it on the best definition of science. Also, I don't want to just dump on the humanities as having bad explanations or being irrelevant, and I will go into that further in my next posts. There is very rigorous scholarhip in the humanities, but it differs from science, and I will try to put my finger on this. I'll try to reply again later when I've thought this through more fully.Michael E. Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03942595266312225661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-6422232801695950852016-02-12T15:41:26.373-07:002016-02-12T15:41:26.373-07:00I'm struggling to make sense of this post. The...I'm struggling to make sense of this post. The starting-point seems to be a rejection of an old logical-positivist vision of science - so general laws are out, and experiment is no longer crucial. But the result is a definition of science that is so broad it is hard to distinguish from any reasonable inquiry: science gives primacy to reason and observation; has a critical spirit, and involves a diverse interconnection of theory and evidence. For sure you might find some wild postmodernists who would define what they do differently, but I don't really see that this new and improved definition excludes <i>any</i> inquiry worth its salt, including anything that should pass muster in the humanities.<br /><br />The table from Kagan 2009 suggests that what makes the humanities distinct is a focus on meaning. Maybe, but you seem to be encroaching on semantics with major goal of social science number 4: 'Interpreting culturally or historically significant phenomena'.<br /><br />Possibly such interpretation is to be non-semantic, which would mean (I assume) carried out purely on the level of quantifiable correlations. But I question if an archaeology so restricted can really produce the goods.<br /><br />The most established social science is economics, which proceeds by way of a method of abstraction. Specifically (and as first formulated by J.S. Mill and Alfred Marshall) economics places a large ceteris paribus clause around all factors that <i>cannot</i> be reduced to a reductive system of measurable relationships. The idea is that this simplified model still tells us <i>something</i> about the world we live in. Maybe this makes sense, <i>in economics</i> (maybe).<br /><br />But to apply such a reductive prison to the distant and long period past would seem to remove from the picture by assumption a very substantial part of what needs to be examined and explained. Put crudely, you are surely going to end up with economic explanations of such human revolutions as the origins of agriculture or the advent of urban life, and this because all the non-economic factors are identified as semantic and dismissed as the proper subject of the 'humanities'.<br /><br />I am aware of my presumption in writing all this, and I suspect that most of my objections can be dismissed with some fairly standard arguments. But for what it is worth, the idea of a scientific archaeology set out in the post seems to me to simply bypass the problem of subjectivity (dropping it into a litter bin labelled 'humanities' and 'postmodernism') rather than grappling with it.Simonhttp://yemachine.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-91051752710700978002016-02-12T13:08:08.274-07:002016-02-12T13:08:08.274-07:00@Richard - I also came into archaeology from a mat...@Richard - I also came into archaeology from a math/science background, and it took me a long time to recognize that science and a scientific approach might need defending in archaeology. But many of those who defended science vocally and publicly (Binford and the new archaeologists, for example), had a simplistic and limited view of science which was then easy for the postmodernists to dismiss or make fun of. Biology would have been a much better model for archaeology than was physics and chemistry. I agree with your analyses. This is a complicated issue, but one that needs more discussion. When a prominent archaeologist can publish the idea, in 2013, that the theoretical alternatives for archaeologists are limited to processualism and post-processualism, or when a prominent archaeologist can say that archaeology must be either a natural science or the humanities, this signals to me that our theoretical and epistemological situation is pretty bad.Michael E. Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03942595266312225661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-2473570793075234032016-02-12T11:16:00.480-07:002016-02-12T11:16:00.480-07:002)The alternative, science, is hard. You must pres...2)The alternative, science, is hard. You must present ideas that are open to scrutiny and may later be proven wrong. Furthermore, archaeology is especially difficult, because what you’re trying to study are past societies and your data are pits and potsherds, a fragmentary archaeological record over which you have very little control. I remember being dismayed at simultaneously studying big ideas like changing human societies in one course, and detailed methods like ceramic typologies and seriation in another, and being at a loss for connecting the two. I recall being briefly inspired when learning about processualism in archaeological history and Binford’s definition of middle range theory (which I know you object to, Dr. Smith), thinking, aha, now, with a better understanding of formation processes, surely someone will help explain to me how to work backwards from pits and pots and settlement patterns to institutions and social complexity and ritual. I was still thinking that someone could lay it all out for me programmatically, e.g. “Here: this is what moieties,” for instance, “definitively look like in the archaeological record; when you observe X then you can infer Y as established by middle range theory Z.” Turns out, making defensible inferences is harder than that, something that I continually struggle with and hope to get better at. But I think the key is to continually look to the data for patterns, rather than counting on the next fad theory to suddenly satisfactorily explain all results.<br /><br />3)Academia is high pressure. Publish or die. Sometimes, it’s simply easier to take some high-level abstract theory, “apply it” to some data, a viola! You’re “creating meaning.” And it can't be wrong, because all of our data are subjective and based on the theoretical lens through which we view it, right? Also, by tying yourself to some specific scholar’s high-minded but subjective and untestable theory, you have automatically joined a community of supporters who may reference your work. Win-win, right?<br />Richard M.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2971081717687612908.post-19126811829354386192016-02-12T11:14:29.376-07:002016-02-12T11:14:29.376-07:00Long time reader here, first time commenter. I app...Long time reader here, first time commenter. I appreciate the effort you put into defending scientific archaeology, especially in such an accessible medium as this blog. I also wanted to share a few of my own thoughts. My perspective may be considered derisive and ignorant by some, but I sincerely hope no one takes it personally.<br /><br />I came into the field of archaeology/anthropology with a science background and naively assumed that all its practitioners had a social science epistemology like yours, Dr. Smith. In undergrad, when I first encountered various postmodernist ideas, I found them to be incomprehensible and therefore easily dismissed them. I hadn’t yet formulated my own view nearly as explicitly as you have here, however, and my fellow students and I would have been well served by an emphatic and rational defense of scientific archaeology such as this. I’m a few years out with my master’s working in CRM now, but when I attend conferences or look at recent publications I’m still baffled by these debates in academia. I find especially interesting your perspective that it’s anthropology/archaeology specifically, uniquely among the social sciences, that is still struggling with science and these debates. I think I can partly see why.<br /><br />When reflecting upon my own education, I feel as though had I not started out with a strong scientific worldview, I might have fallen down a “slippery slope” to less rigorous thinking due to many factors, some of which are unique to the field. I think anthropological pedagogy should be examined for its role in creating this divergence. Here’s my own, highly simplistic multi-part hypothesis for why some archaeologists might come to find postmodernist ontology and epistemology so alluring:<br /><br />1) When I was introduced to the anthropological axiom of cultural relativism, I understood it as part and parcel of a scientific approach in order to remain objective and non-ethnocentric while studying cultures outside my own, but also recognized it as an ideal that is almost impossible to completely achieve that serves to make us continually aware of our own bias. I believe some of my fellow students saw it differently; they internalized it as a literal challenge, as an ethical imperative, and as an anthropological endorsement of relativism more generally. Perhaps because more is better, some then make a profound ontological leap and abandon all notion of objective truth, believing reality is merely composed of subjective experiences. When absolute relativism is coupled with a strong sense of social justice and a concern with dismantling hegemony, scholarship must be about creating “safe spaces” for others to share their “own truth.” To this peculiar postmodern world of solely ideas, which denies an objective reality by which to empirically evaluate them, scientific criticism and debate are antithetical. Perhaps this is appealing because it allows one to deal in solely emotional, factless rhetoric, which I argue comes easily, especially when you feel as though you are defending some noble ethic of fairness implicit in certain versions of moral relativism. This brings me to my second point, and I'm hitting the comment length limit so I'm posting it as a separate comment below:Richard M.noreply@blogger.com