The Nature of Archaeological Knowledge and Its Ontological Turns (original) (raw)
Related papers
Self-reflexive turn to ontological debates in archaeology
Archaeological Theory at the Edge(s), eds. S. Babić and M. Milosavljević, Faculty of Philosophy - University of Belgrade, 2022
The paper provides a short overview of the archaeological approaches closely related to the so-called “ontological turn.” It is argued that the alleged reorientation of archaeological theory from epistemology to ontology, broadly referred to as the “ontological turn” strikingly mirrors the political, technological, and environmental issues and context of the contemporary world, and for that reason, its relevance in archaeological research of the past must be deeply, selfreflexively reconsidered.
Archaeology after Interpretation: returning humanity to archaeological theory
Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material conditions that made the presence of a kind of humanness possible? This paper attempts to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between these two options and argues the case for, and briefly contemplates the practical implications of, an archaeology of the human presence. Archaeology's propensity to range across a variety of theoretical approaches, from the positivism of the new archaeology, through structuralism, post-structuralism and phenomenology, and on to the current concerns with the extended mind, network theory and the new materialism, and all within a period of fifty or so years, has been taken as indicative of an intellectual posturing that detracts from the 'real' business of doing archaeology (Bintliff 2011 and 2015). This criticism seems, to me at least, to miss the point. All these theoretical approaches are no more than ways to think about the same fundamental question: why do we do archaeology? They allow us to evaluate what we are attempting to bring into view by our study of the material residues of the past. The means by which we establish the object of our studies are not the same means as those that we must employ to achieve such an objective. It has been the failure to distinguish between our definition of what we are studying from the question of how we intend to study it that has resulted in the various theoretical approaches appearing as if they were needless methodological distractions rather than the essential mechanisms that will open-up perspectives on the reality that is the objective of our studies. This confusion between objective and method, which is expressed by the assumption that the objective of archaeology is given by the current methodology, continues to have a detrimental effect upon wider perceptions of the discipline. Most outside observers, along with all too many practitioners, define archaeology in the banal terms of digging, discovery of old things, and the physical analysis of those things (cf. Thomas 2004, 67-9). It is from this perspective that the history of archaeology is written as the development of techniques of recovery and material analysis. This consigns archaeology to the role of antiquarianism, the relevance of which for many contemporary concerns seems marginal at best. Such a negative perception surely contrasts with the more challenging view that archaeology could offer of itself, namely as an enquiry into the full chronological and global extent of humanity's place in history.
Experiencing the past: interpretive archaeology and a turn to ontology
This is an edited version of a discussion with Jos Bazelmans, Peter van Dommelen, and Jan Kolen that took place in Leiden in the National Museum of Antiquities on Friday 12th 1993, following a three-day seminar I presented at Leiden University on technology, innovation and design, under the title Archaeological Realities. Another version appeared in Archaeological Dialogues 1: 56-76 (1994). While I sketch the main elements of an interpretive archaeology (a term preferable to “post-processual”), this is the first introduction to archaeology of a materialist position, what some have called an ontological turn, associated with a focus upon embodied experience and engagement with materials, sources, remains of the past in creative production — how people relate to materialities. Since this discussion various archaeological standpoints, theories, frames, have been fleshed out — Symmetry, Entanglement, Object Oriented Ontology, and derivatives of Actor Network Theory. See Bjornar Olsen, Shanks, Tim Webmoor, Chris Witmore 2012 Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California 2012), Ian Hodder Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Wiley Blackwell 2012) and, for a brief overview of these topics in 2015 — Julian Thomas “The Future of Archaeological Theory” Antiquity 89: 1277-86 (2015).
The attitude towards science in the changing panorama of Archaeological Theory
Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia, 2021
As archaeology becomes more scientific, archaeological theory has remained antithetical to the practice of science. Additionally, as more scholars and funding are poured into the archaeological science, theory will become an obsolete practice unless we find a way to reach a consensus and an understanding of how science can be integrated with other aspects of archaeology. Part of the reason of this state-of-the-art is due to of theoretical influences in archaeology, which come from Continental Philosophy, a broad school of thought that developed largely as antithetical to science in specific, and to a crude and unrealistic view of "modernism" in general. This opposition to science and modernism has trapped scholars into a dialectic in which the pre-modern or pre-literate past (and present) societies are viewed in opposition to science and what is modern, but as anthropologists have come to recognize, this opposition makes little sense and obfuscates a richer and complex view of reality. This paper suggests moving beyond this dialectic and understanding how and in what ways science can operate alongside other agendas, namely those that prioritize the practical and historical views of past reality.
Archaeology and the New Metaphysical Dogmas: Comments on Ontologies and Reality
Forum Kritische Archäologie, 2019
One of the most popular approaches in archaeological theory today is the New Materialisms. Unlike previous trends, such as processual and postprocessual archaeology, which established themselves as empirically based and to some extent accurate representations of the past, the New Materialisms have put forward arguments in the form of ontology, that is to say, as accurate representations of “reality” in itself. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that metaphysical speculation and the discussion of ontology holds little value for archaeology, since this type of research does not concern the empirical record on which archaeological explanations tend to be based. Furthermore, the problem with metaphysics is that it upholds dogmas concerning what counts as “true ontology” or “reality”. The paper ends with the suggestion that an ontology, in the philosophical sense, is not actually necessary in archaeology and that “reality” and “real” should be understood in their more conventional sense.
In the light of some significant anniversaries, this paper discusses the fate of archaeological theory after the heyday of postprocessualism. While once considered a radical and revolutionary alternative, postprocessual or interpretative archaeology remarkably soon became normalized, mainstream and hegemonic, leading to the theoretical lull that has characterized its aftermath. Recently, however, this consensual pause has been disrupted by new materialist perspectives that radically depart from the postprocessual orthodoxy. Some outcomes of these perspectives are proposed and discussed, the most significant being a return to archaeology -an archaeology that sacri fices the imperatives of historical narratives, sociologies, and hermeneutics in favour of a trust in the soiled and ruined things themselves and the memories they afford.