Archaeology, a Historical Science of Multiplicities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the Cold War of the twentieth century, the coterie of scientists at Los Alamos who had developed nuclear bombs continued their dominance through creating the National Science Foundation and the Santa Fe Institute. NSF science is laboratory-based physical sciences, manipulating "the tiny" as Derek Turner says. Its extreme form would be Hempel's hypothetico-deductive procedure, which Lewis Binford advocated. Historical sciences (archaeology, paleontology, geology) are radically different: their data are truly "givens", to be interpreted by analogies with ethnographically observed and historically described communities. Every data set results from historical contingencies, an infinitude of multiplicities. This understanding of histories fits demands from non-Western nations for recognition of their historical knowledge; it is postcolonial. In this paper, I describe the method of historical sciences and make a distinction between "decolonization" (in which the usually White professional is the agent) and postcolonialism that recognizes the validity of the many realities resident in languages and cultural knowledge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37812.0