The attitude towards science in the changing panorama of Archaeological Theory (original) (raw)

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.