Chapter Conclusions

Archaeology confronts two dilemmas. The failure of modernist epistemology, with its inherent dichotomous thought, creates an internal anxiety. This epistemic anxiety, and the resultant ‘epistemic settlements’, disperse the discipline into hyperplural, insulated niches. Additionally, there is an impasse between epistemology and ethics. The ‘external mandate’ to integrate non-archaeological stakeholders into archaeology confronts an epistemology incapable of doing so beyond a superficial level. My argument is that we should extend a sensibility already operating within archaeology to resolve both of these dilemmas. This sensibility is non-epistemological and pragmatic. Focusing upon mixtures of actants in practice, we no longer need worry about epistemic correspondence of archaeologist to archaeological. Archaeowork is knowledge without mirrors. By suspending epistemology and using pragmatic criteria of evaluation instead, archaeology retains a plurality of approaches which are no longer epistemologically incompatible. Finally, the shift to the values of practical outcomes for archaeological practice allows for the integral inclusion of stakeholders. Epistemology closes-down archaeology as a discipline of ‘no’, while practical outcome, as we shall see at Teotihuacan (Chapter 7), forms the basis of a series of non-epistemological values held by these inheritors of global heritage.

Forward to Chapter 4: The past was never no longer: Teotihuacan Maps as Gathering of Associations

Containments

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