Painting Pictures: There Is Madness in Archaeological Methods

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One of the critiques *The Dawn of Everything* was subject to was that it failed to provide a clear method or had no method at all and that it was unscientific. There is some truth to these critiques since *The Dawn of Everything* does have its problems. However, underlying these critiques is a more pervasive problem, that of over-trusting the role of scientific methods and techniques, quantitative approaches, and technological means to understand the past. Despite the rhetoric, many of these so-called scientific approaches are anything but scientific in the strict sense of the word. They are just fast science, and as Byung-Chul Han has recognized, a purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It only reproduces and accelerates what is already available. More than providing strict scientific evidence or following stringent methodological rules, *The Dawn of Everything* does do something very well, something that most “science” in archaeology fails to do, and that is provide a picture of life in the past. People will never understand what it was like to live in the past through overly complex graphs or distribution maps, but they can through loose connections, multiple examples, and descriptions of past practices and lifeways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38156.0