The Position of Archaeology within the Academic Disciplines: Contemporary Views from Practicing Archaeologists

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology has long occupied a fruitful and yet uneasy position within academia in the United States. Anthropological archaeology has long drawn methods and theories from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, which in many ways has expanded the interpretive and analytical possibilities of the discipline. However, it has also caused much debate and epistemic anxiety over what archaeology actually “is” and where it fits within the classificatory nexus of the academic disciplines. This ultimately leads to questions such as: What should the constitutative goals of archaeology be? Which philosophies of science should we look towards to guide our research? Is there are a “proper” archaeology, and what might that look like? Drawing on both quantitative survey data and a series of ethnographic interviews with practicing and publishing archaeologists, in this paper I present the current range of thoughts on these questions within contemporary archaeology. In doing so, I highlight the diverse and complex, and at times messy and contradictory, views that archaeologists hold about the epistemic status and positionality of our discipline, and how this impacts the knowledge we produce about the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37219.0