Is archaeology a science

[Dinosaur]

In the old days (before commercial archaeology, anyway) people used to go and dig sites or examined finds etc to test a hypothesis - that was a far more 'scientific' approach than the modern reality in this country ('I'm being paid to do a watching brief on this pipeline even though I'd rather be finding out whether there's a regular pattern to the Roman villas along this valley'). There seems to be very little enthusiam for actually testing hypotheses - an example: I've seen several musings in the literature as to whether the irory for Anglian/Saxon purse rings had been obtained from a contemporary African source or whether they were using fossil mammoth ivory from Siberia or thereabouts, but I'm unaware of anyone ever having taken the jump and spend a few quid getting a C14 date [I'd be interested to hear if anyone has actually done this] - simple, case solved, the ivory's 80k years old, move on to some other puzzle....got some here if anyone's got the funding....

[GnomeKing]

(applause) very well said Jack.

RE: " explain to me the science of trying to match up a field boundary shown on a tithe map to a feature in the ground, or thow interpretating earthworks or aerial photos fits, for a couple of examples." - ---------------- DARK MATTER - DARK FORCE - THE BIG BANG - GENETICS - EPIGENETICS......need i go on? (not really; Jack has already said it)

[oh, and BTW : Palaeontology....]

Why talk ourselves out of science? how does this help? - - truly, there are no fundamental distinctions, just a continuum of human thoughts about what may or may not be Real.

Science began before Newton. >.

the 'Scientific Method' is itself a philosophical theory written to describe how 'scientists' appeared to work..
>>Cosmology, Biology, Geology and other natural sciences all derive from systematic observation, not a strong concept of Experiment/Repeatability/Thesis-Anti-thesis >>> these concepts develop historically along with the development of of ever greater sophistication of devices (i.e. Natural/observational vs Instrumental/experimental practitioners of 'science'

>> ..'Scientific Method' + Institutional Science has been show by many 20th c thinkers to be far from infallible in regard of Truth or freedom from Subjectivity....(insert appropriate refs at will, though I remain forever fond of my former tutor Stephanie Koerner, she (and her own former tutors) are as good a place to start as any....)

We should consider seriously basic issues of linguistics - - 21st c. minds are very conditioned to perceive in terms of opposition and duality - this creates huge towers of flawed reasoning and unnecessary complexity.

In that regard: consider; Science should be a noun, not a verb. Science ('objective' knowledge) can be conceptually 'possessed', but can not be 'done' - in the same as I can 'have' knowledge/education/perspectives, but i not 'do' knowledge/eduction/perspectives.

Science then is an end result, more than it is a process. Experiments, for example, are a tool, not a defining activity.


So - does it all matter?
Yes! - 'science' is not boring/remote as some seem to think (no more boring than a Roman CBM report anyhow).
Nor do Real Scientists find archaeology laughable - in fact (if you meet any, if they really exist) Real scientist are more often deeply fascinated by insights that archaeology provides. Many 'Great Scientists' have had close connections with archaeology and anthropology (not to mention art, music ect)

Most importantly however for a sustainable future for UK professional archaeology : we should affiliate closely with the values and tools of 'science', just as we might call ourselves Social Scientists, and just as we harness the power of Social Benefit for archaeology, or concepts of Shared Heritage and 'imagining the past'.

Don't talk the science out of archaeology (or vice-versa) - who benefits?

there are no dualities - just horses for courses.


[A final thought : archaeology is only indirectly about people - in my Excavation i have no end of natural processes of abandonment and disposal, decay, soil formation, timescapes etc.....but never the people - They are precisely what is missing.]

[Jack]

That's all perfectly true and while I would concede that archaeology is or can be 'scientific' and, compares quite well to some other 'science' subjects, it so many other things too, depending on which direction you are coming from. You seem to take the view that it is and should only be a science, with anything else dismissed as 'story telling' and moving away from the evidence..

Yes. But story-telling using the evidence can be just as engaging as making it up.

Ignoring the evidence to make a better story often happens when the media 'interpret' scientific data. My favorite example was the drop in salinity measured in the gulf stream....erm overturning halide current..er whatever its called. Some scientists decided a while back to do a set of readings of salinity at its end where it drops and returns south...somewhere near iceland I think. the results were reported by the media as
'drop in salinity in gulf stream shows it may stop causing new ice age!'
It was such a good story that someone made a film about it, 'the day after tomorrow.'
But when the new ice age didn't happen folk seemed blamed the scientists who got it wrong again.

Now I actually read a more detailed account of the research in the NERC magazine. The scientists did indeed say that the salinity seemed low, and that if it got too low the current could stop and if that happened NW Europe would stop being warmed. But they also said that these were the first measurements taken and the natural variability was unknown. Further measurements were needed.
And lo and behold, when further measurements were taken, they found that the first measurements were probably within the natural variability of the system.

Thats what I mean about ignoring the evidence or going beyond the evidence to tell a story. You look very silly when someone comes up with more evidence that prove your treasured story wrong. Its the reason why scientific reasoning was invented.

The new ice age was a good story .......it was just a load of bollox though.

But it is ultimately about people not pots, as I believe someone once said, so without the stories is it really telling us anything? I quite like the idea of it being more like a philosophical or theorectical discipline, using science and even guess work (there, I've said it!) to come up with a realistic or sensible interpretation.

Trial and error is a viable scientific technique. Fabulous and engaging stories can be made using the evidence. Questions can be just as engaging as made up answers.

Wouldn't restricting it to just science make it a bit boring and limited?

Read all about it: pots had milk in them!

No.

[RedEarth]

I don't think we really disagree all that much Jack, my concern was what appeared to be your general stance that all archaeology was science and that anything was 'story telling' as in 'fairy stories'. Obviously the stories have to be based on the evidence, as much as possible of which should be scientifically derived, but there surely needs to be the occasional leap of imagination or guess?

[P Prentice]

i'm with you red - there are so few provable facts, so few precisely excavated contexts and so few new lines of evidence that we need to tell better stories and push at the believable sometimes - just to retain a degree of relevance in this material world

for me archaeology is all interpretation. sometimes we have pointers but we have hardly any facts about the people who became us. i want to hear extreme views, new ideas and stimulating guesswork . we can use science but we are not really scientists

[Dinosaur]

We could take a slightly more scientific approach though, and in fact better-thought-out projects do employ some 'scientific' approaches - you dig a section across a ditch and it has 2nd century pot in it, then you dig another section (effectively testing the results of the first section - who says repeatability isn't possible in 'destructive' field archaeology?) but the new bit has 4th century pot in it, so you sit down and work out a way to resolve the inconsistent results (usually by digging more of the ditch) - am reasonably certain thats how things are done in most other scientific disciplines. If the solution turns out to be that they really did apparently spend 200 years digging and back-filling along a ditch, then you put that hypothesis out there for either yourself or others to disprove later - just because there are 300 year old unproven mathematical theorems out there hasn't led anyone to suggest that maths isn't a science....

[GnomeKing]

PP : you might not say you are a scientist - I say that I am

(but apparently its all 'just' interpretive - i hope you don't have any Stratification to deal with....)

Dino : i like your attitude - logical methods and problem solving are a key to (good) field archaeology.

[moreno]

Repeatability independently tested to verify results, yes. 'We' use scientific methods, we may consider our subject a soft science, we can debate archaeology philosophically. At the end of the day, hopefully we do our best to understand the past. It's the best I can do :face-approve:

[Dirty Dave Lincoln]

I'm going to vote 'Yes' - wasn't it Maureen Lipman who said "You get an ology, your a scientist!!"

Good enough for me!

[Dinosaur]

Dino : i like your attitude - logical methods and problem solving are a key to (good) field archaeology.

Decades of having to get sites/reports past management and curators who ask awkward questions! - long since figured it was easier to have the answers in advance, plus a few in reserve that they hadn't thought of. :face-approve:

My approach to most sites is to work from the final report backwards (obviously this is an ever-changing, but when I'm getting someone to dig a hole I'm always thinking ahead to the final product) - what information/graphics/photos/specialist reports etc am I going to need to not end up looking like a total t*t. Being aware of all the relevent research agendas etc is an advantage, what might be of interest to other archaeologists or the client, that can have a significant impact on what to dig/not dig and to what extent, how much and in what way [on a recent job we spent a day digging a dump of crockery out of Victorian cesspit which probably otherwise wouldn't have been dug so the client will have something to put in a display case once the development's finished]. If you know in advance that you're going to be digging a henge, read the literature first, too late in PX to realise that you should have been dedicating site resources to looking for burials etc external/coaxial to the entrances (and visiting curators are less likely to give you a hard time once they realise you know your stuff and can quote parallels etc at them). Smoothed things considerably this summer when I was immediately on discovery able to say 'that timber circle is way up there in diameter/complexity/geometry, there are only so-many known, they generally date from such-and-such time period' etc - cut straight through any discussions about what to then do with it. Plan any science in advance as far as possible (and know what's available, what's likely to work where etc, the practicalities and what you're likely to get out of it, always with an eye to value-for-money and what the client is likley to be prepared to pay for) - the job I just finished is on a bit of landscape where we've had bitter experiences in the past of charcoal etc barely surviving (turns out we were right!) so I got OSL written-in from the outset as a fall-back option. Negative evidence is important, if you're going to need to say that something wasn't there you need to be able to demonstrate that and explain why