Inference in Paleoarchaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In interpreting the archaeological record, archaeologists either explicitly or unknowingly construct inferences on the basis of referential knowledge or models that are external to that record. Common sources of this knowledge include experiments, ethnography, social studies, biological theories, and our own experiential logic. However, the application of these “middle-range theories” in interpreting emergent properties of the paleo-record often employs a single line of hypothetico-deductive reasoning as a direct path to all levels of behavioral interpretation. This risks reducing the complexity of record formation to singular explanations, and producing interpretations that are predetermined by the units of analysis of the models used. Our discipline has been aware of these theoretical and practical issues. Nonetheless, and despite the increasing multitude of available data and the variety of advanced analytical approaches, overcoming these issues when inferring past behavior is still extremely uncommon. With examples including stone, osseous, sediment, and other kinds of archaeological finds, we aim for presentations exploring and enacting different ways of alternating between the models and the data to construct archaeological inference.