Introduction: epistemology and archaeology – disinvestiture of a modernist inheritance

Epistemology is as troubling as it sounds. A mention of the word conjures stuffy, abstract reasoning and worse, rules of logic. None of which would square very well with the idea of archaeology as a hands-on (and dirty) activity ‘out there’ in some remote location. What would archaeology have to do with this hallowed specialization of philosophy, with the study of the nature of knowledge and justification? Yet the answer, I suggest, is everything and nothing. That is, archaeology, more than most other disciplines in either the sciences or humanities, has many hurdles to jump in getting from the down and dirty of field work to accepted knowledge claims of just what happened ‘out there’ in the past. There are all sorts of epistemological warnings which flash when archaeological reasoning goes about bridging past and present, from objects in ruin in the present to subjects in the past. All of this complicated further by the fact that archaeology, unlike the experimental sciences or textual humanities, ‘destroys’ – or at least transforms – the tenuous remnants of evidence it does have in its pursuit of explaining this tattered evidence. Once the site is surveyed and diagnostics collected, or the site features excavated, there is no replicating the experiment. For this idiosyncratic process archaeology may be seen as a predatory species of inquiry. Yet archaeology produces far more than it destroys. Documentation is the trade-off for this destruction-to-know. Representations in multiple media and of various content stand-in for the archaeological objects once they are destroyed, removed or reburied. The photographs, maps, profiles, radiocarbon results, soil sample analyses and artifact distribution graphs must represent what is no longer in situ. Additionally, like other areas of inquiry, these representations form the basis for justifying explanations. It is no good to offer an account of the rise of a complex city-state without the attending maps showing increased urbanization through time. Archaeology, then, strongly depends upon representational documentation to jump these epistemological hurdles from site to claim. And in its strict reliance upon representations to counter the diminution through investigation of the archaeological record, archaeology rests its case in epistemology’s court upon representation. In other words, trading the archaeological explanadum for media which correspond to it, everything in archaeological justification depends upon representation. Following the historical development of archaeological reasoning in Anglo-American archaeology, such was the claim of last chapter: representation is the epistemology of archaeology.

Yet archaeology has nothing to do with epistemology. Or as I will argue in this chapter, archaeology ought to have nothing to do with epistemology. This sounds as if I am forwarding the idea of an ‘anything goes’ position, one which, exactly lacking explicit criteria for evaluating knowledge claims, would un-bundle archaeology as rigorous inquiry capable of seeving out fraudulent or fringe claims to the past from more justified, truthful accounts. Without epistemological standards, archaeology would have no means of judging what is objective from what is fraudulent, and would slide on one of Ian Hodder’s ‘chutes’ towards undermining relativism. A position which is irresponsible, anathema to scholarly inquiry, and constitutes performative self-contradiction – i.e. the relativist’s claim that ‘no claims are true’ is true. Contrary to such a position, I will argue that epistemology for archaeology is deeply and common-sensically wedded to the evaluative criteria of representational correspondence for judging knowledge claims. Whether supplemented by other scientific values of ‘parsimony’ (Ockham’s razor), ‘coherence’ and so forth, such representational correspondence presupposes a series of untenable dichotomies. The foremost amongst these are a reality-representation split which agonistically and artificially separates archaeologists (representers) from archaeological matter (reality), and, derivatively, a subject-object split which collectively create the very conditions for skepticism in terms of poising subjective versus objective factors in explanation. Hung upon the ‘horns of the dilemma’ which such dichotomies impose upon interpretation, archaeologists have been far from successful in reaching consensus as to what constitutes a ‘good explanation’. To the contrary, recent debates highlight how, when explicitly wrangled with, epistemological concerns have done very little for archaeology. Instead, the proverbial epistemological ambiguity which results from a commitment to correspondence (and by default to the dichotomies it presupposes) has dispersed the discipline into insular, intellectual camps which propose, evaluate and condone very different types of explanations.

While many archaeologists, following arguments in the post-Kuhnian disunity of the sciences, see such hyper-plurality of research foci as cumulatively affecting a more comprehensive and unified-in-disunity archaeology (following Peirce’s popular pragmatic metaphor of the fibrous cable), I suggest that such complimentarity of plural approaches to the past is specious as long as epistemology is tied to correspondence. More strongly, while similarity of archaeological reasoning and justification is often depicted as the unifying anchor of diverse theoretical programs, this very epistemic foundation in fact fractures the discipline at bedrock due to the unhelpful dichotomies which fundamentally inhere in it’s constitutive metaphysics. As surveyed in Chapter 1, such incompatibility is most evident in the growing importance of global heritage fostering the inclusion of alternate frameworks for understanding the past which often confound correspondence notions of justification. Instead, I want to show the relevance in practice of the move by recent science studies to mediation as a non-representational and deeply empirical manner of justifying claims. Augmenting such non-dichotomous mediation, I want to equally draw out a pragmatic sensibility, which likewise presupposes no debilitating and skepticism-inducing splits between knowledge and knower in its focus on usefulness in practice as its account of justification of knowledge claims. Both of these recent currents of thought deliberately pose themselves as ameliorative and non-skeptical alternatives to long-held factious disputes between science and the humanities and analytical and continental philosophy. Facing intractable dilemmas regarding skepticism, both advocate, in identifying epistemology tied to correspondence as the corrosive source of such doubt, a suspension of its unrealistic ideal and the push for practical, utilitarian approaches to justification of claims. Archaeology, straddling the antagonism created by these self-same disputes, has both much to gain and to offer in participating in these alternate conceptions of practice and justification. Finally, rather than more ‘importation’ of extra-disciplinarian ideas, I want to follow tentative moves already made by critical archaeologists and post-processualists in disbanding several key dichotomies and highlight how archaeology presently operates, albeit implicitly, with a pragmatic sensibility. This is particularly the case with its aforementioned acceptance of multiple research platforms as well as the turn to social responsibility and the democratic inclusion of heritage stakeholders in making archaeology beneficial for wider societal goals.

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