12th August 2009, 01:05 AM
Epistemology in the site hut! That?s worth breaking off from the cross word for! If anyone doesn?t like theory, tune out now 'cause we?re going? JAZZ!
Thanks srd123, for taking the time to expand on your previous point ? it makes perfect sense ? but I?m afraid I disagree with your premise and because of that, I think your agenda for wider public engagement with archaeology is deeply floored.
Let me say that there is a lot of common ground between us: I too am passionate about engaging the public with the past, and am also a big fan of the Seahenge book. Francis Pryor is an excellent writer, and he has lived through some major changes in British archaeology. His book is democratically accessible to the wider public, but first and foremost it tries to make the evidence credible in terms of the people of the past. It stands apart from the crowd because its not just an archaeology book ? its life writing and it?s a love story. My issue here is because you're advocating something from the other side of the line. I think it's fair to say you are a sceptic, and believe that because statements about the past are uncertain, we can never be sure of what happened. This has led you to a pragmatic solution where the point of archaeology should be to help people deal with present day contemporary issues, rather than establish secure knowledge.
Yes, we have a partial grasp of the past, and must often make key assumptions in advance of evidence. We also have a partial grasp of the present too, but that doesn't mean we can't strive for communal understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. That we cannot know anything because, well, we cannot know anything, is a circular argument. Irrespective of the nefarious influence of the present, the findings of archaeology have altered our perception of the world irreversably. Without totally abandoning the scientific method, your idea does not stand up to the evidence from the trenches.
Janet Spector adopts this position in her book 'What this Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Historic Wahpeton Village', a presentation of results from a research project about a nineteenth-century Dakota village. Taking an inscribed awl handle recovered from the site and re-constructing how the hide working tool was used and displayed in gendered practices, Spector writes an imaginative account of the young girl who originally used and lost the object. Her explicitly feminist archaeology is concerned with the way knowledge claims are embedded within the specific narrative and rhetorical structures she adopts to present the site. As a female practitioner, Spector projects herself onto the past, and her empathic narrative approach is constructed to give credence to contemporary claims and movements for social justice. She embraces multivocality as a distinct solution to the question of what constitutes scientific knowledge, but simultaneously argues that some interpretations are better than others (a feminist reading is better than a reading that marginalises the role of women). This creates a disjunction between notions of truth and politics, and so undermines both the struggle for emancipation in the present and the evidence on which that struggle could be based.
Bruce Trigger is very good at putting these debates in context, and if, as I assume, you are currently studying, I would urge you to read him fully. His final words from his final chapter from his final book, written shortly before he died, are very fitting here:
'In a world that, as a result of increasingly powerful technologies, has become too dangerous and is changing too quickly for humanity to rely to any considerable extent on trial and error, knowledge derived from archaeology may be important for human survival. If archaeology is to serve that purpose, archaeologists must strive against heavy odds to see the past and the human behaviour that produced it as each was, not as they or anyone else for their own reasons wish them to have been.'
http://www.diggingthedirt.com
Thanks srd123, for taking the time to expand on your previous point ? it makes perfect sense ? but I?m afraid I disagree with your premise and because of that, I think your agenda for wider public engagement with archaeology is deeply floored.
Quote:quote:Originally posted by srd123
...archaeology, no matter how gifted and dedicated the archaeologists, can never hope to fully explain the past and answer the questions. Indeed, even working out the questions in the first place is often a stumbling block. It can only hope to create stories that use interpretations of the past as their framework but are really metaphors for the present.
Let me say that there is a lot of common ground between us: I too am passionate about engaging the public with the past, and am also a big fan of the Seahenge book. Francis Pryor is an excellent writer, and he has lived through some major changes in British archaeology. His book is democratically accessible to the wider public, but first and foremost it tries to make the evidence credible in terms of the people of the past. It stands apart from the crowd because its not just an archaeology book ? its life writing and it?s a love story. My issue here is because you're advocating something from the other side of the line. I think it's fair to say you are a sceptic, and believe that because statements about the past are uncertain, we can never be sure of what happened. This has led you to a pragmatic solution where the point of archaeology should be to help people deal with present day contemporary issues, rather than establish secure knowledge.
Quote:quote:Originally posted by srd123
Thus, returning to the point above.....archaeology probably says more about the world today than it can ever hope to say about the past because what we call the past is only yet another tool that we use to express our understandings of present reality.
Yes, we have a partial grasp of the past, and must often make key assumptions in advance of evidence. We also have a partial grasp of the present too, but that doesn't mean we can't strive for communal understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. That we cannot know anything because, well, we cannot know anything, is a circular argument. Irrespective of the nefarious influence of the present, the findings of archaeology have altered our perception of the world irreversably. Without totally abandoning the scientific method, your idea does not stand up to the evidence from the trenches.
Quote:quote:Originally posted by srd123
And, rather than telling people what happened in the past as a "done deal", we give them a framework to base their own interpretations on, and to place themselves within the ever-evolving pastscape.
Janet Spector adopts this position in her book 'What this Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Historic Wahpeton Village', a presentation of results from a research project about a nineteenth-century Dakota village. Taking an inscribed awl handle recovered from the site and re-constructing how the hide working tool was used and displayed in gendered practices, Spector writes an imaginative account of the young girl who originally used and lost the object. Her explicitly feminist archaeology is concerned with the way knowledge claims are embedded within the specific narrative and rhetorical structures she adopts to present the site. As a female practitioner, Spector projects herself onto the past, and her empathic narrative approach is constructed to give credence to contemporary claims and movements for social justice. She embraces multivocality as a distinct solution to the question of what constitutes scientific knowledge, but simultaneously argues that some interpretations are better than others (a feminist reading is better than a reading that marginalises the role of women). This creates a disjunction between notions of truth and politics, and so undermines both the struggle for emancipation in the present and the evidence on which that struggle could be based.
Bruce Trigger is very good at putting these debates in context, and if, as I assume, you are currently studying, I would urge you to read him fully. His final words from his final chapter from his final book, written shortly before he died, are very fitting here:
'In a world that, as a result of increasingly powerful technologies, has become too dangerous and is changing too quickly for humanity to rely to any considerable extent on trial and error, knowledge derived from archaeology may be important for human survival. If archaeology is to serve that purpose, archaeologists must strive against heavy odds to see the past and the human behaviour that produced it as each was, not as they or anyone else for their own reasons wish them to have been.'
http://www.diggingthedirt.com