Philosophy of Archaeology

Edited by Adrian Currie (Cambridge University, University of Exeter)
About this topic
Summary Archaeology has long been a philosophically and methodologically reflective science. This, in addition to being situated between the physical, social and historical sciences, makes it ideal (and typically under-utilized) fodder for philosophical analysis and understanding. This entry attempts to include both the clearly philosophical, and work attempting new, integrative approaches to archaeological reconstruction. Major issues in the philosophy of archaeology are epistemological, methodological and ethical. Epistemically, the status of archaeological evidence, and its capacity to underwrite reconstructions of prehistoric social worlds, must confront the decay of traces over time and the limited applicability of repeated experimentation so favored of physical sciences. Methodologically, archaeologists worry a lot about how best to treat their evidence: the long debates between processualists, structuralists, post-modernists, etc... are a testament to this. Moreover, archaeology is by its very nature pluralistic: it draws together many forms of evidence, from a diverse range of fields (from physics to evolutionary theory to comparative religion), making it a hot-spot for integrative and disunified approaches to science. Finally, archaeologists are often in the business of utilizing the material remains of sometimes venerated - and sometimes politically explosive - past people. This requires an ethical understanding of the delicate relationships between the scientist and the (often politically underrepresented) groups who also lay claim to such remains.
Key works For rich philosophical and historical discussion focusing largely on the epistemological and methodological issues in archaeology, Alison Wylie's work is invaluable, particularly Wylie 2002 which collects several of her papers. Another important work covering the epistemological issues is Kosso 2001's 'Knowing the past' . The papers collected in the Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory provide a good overview of theoretical issues in the science.
Introductions Historically, epistemological discussion in anthropology has coalesced around the evidential status of so-called 'ethnographic analogy': the use of contemporary anthropological evidence to inform pre-historical reconstruction. Alison Wylie's "The reaction against analogy" Wylie 1985 both provides a history and a philosophical analysis. Currie 2016 connects these issues to reconstruction in biology. Another good introduction to epistemological issues (which connects archaeology to wider issues in historical reconstruction) is Jeffares 2008. For a nice introduction to ethical issues in archaeology, see Bahn 1984.
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  1. Templi Ptolemaei — A look at the Purpose of the Serapeum at Alexandria.Jan M. van der Molen - Jan 28, 2019 - University of Groningen.
    The most discussed of architectural marvels tend to be the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the Parthenon at Athens, supposedly because they are the ones we happen to have nominated ‘world wonders’; but that doesn’t mean all the rest of temple-type sites to be found across the greater Mediterranean area have less wonder about them. On the contrary; when wanting to explore and explain the role temples played in the lives of their ‘subscribers’ and a (...)
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  2. Archaeology and the philosophy of Wittgenstein.John L. Bintliff - forthcoming - Philosophy.
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  3. Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem.Anton Killin & Ross Pain - forthcoming - Biological Theory:1-15.
    Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...)
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  4. Monumental Origins of Art History: Lessons from Mesopotamia.Jakub Stejskal - forthcoming - History of Humanities.
    When does art history begin? Art historiographers typically point to the Renaissance (Vasari) or, alternatively, to Hellenism (Pliny the Elder). But such origin stories become increasingly disconnected from contemporary disciplinary practices, especially as the latter try to rise to the challenge of conducting art history in a more diversified and global way. This essay provides an alternative account of art history’s origin, one that does not try to alleviate the sense of disconnect, but rather develops a global, non-Eurocentric account. The (...)
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  5. Archaeological theory: the basics.Robert Chapman - 2023 - New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
    Archaeological Theory: The Basics is an accessible introduction to an indispensable part of what archaeologists do. The book guides the reader to an understanding of what theory is, how it works, and the range of theories used in archaeology. The growth of theory and the adoption of theories drawn from both the natural and social sciences have broadened our ability to produce trustworthy knowledge about the past. This book helps readers to see the value of archaeological theory and beyond what (...)
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  6. Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss. Band IV: Biologie, Naturgeschichte, Neurowissenschaft.Dirk Hartmann - 2023 - Paderborn: mentis.
    Volume IV (which comprises two half-volumes) focuses on the life sciences, whose object of research is life itself, that which (necessarily) mediates between the physical and the psyche. Typical philosophical questions in this context include: What is “life” in the sense of the term relevant to the life sciences? How do we know that life has not “always existed” but must have arisen in the course of abiogenesis from inanimate nature? And how is it possible to know something about how (...)
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  7. How WEIRD is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity.Anton Killin & Ross Pain - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):539-563.
    In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...)
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  8. Objects of Authority: A Postformalist Aesthetics.Jakub Stejskal - 2023 - New York, USA: Routledge.
    Is the celebrated elegance of Cycladic marble figurines an effect their Early Bronze Age producers intended? Can one adequately appreciate an Assyrian regal statue described by a cuneiform inscription as beautiful? What to make of the apparent aesthetic richness of the traditional cultures of Melanesia, which, however, engage in virtually no recognizable aesthetic discourse? Questions such as these have been formulated and discussed by scholars of remote cultures against the backdrop of a general scepticism about the prospects of escaping the (...)
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  9. Bones without Flesh and (Trans)Gender without Bodies: Querying Desires for Trans Historicity.Avery Rose Everhart - 2022 - Hypatia 37 (4):601-618.
    In 2011, a 5,000-year-old “male” skeleton buried in a “female” way was discovered by an archaeological team just outside of modern-day Prague. This article queries the impulse to name such a discovery as evidence of transgender identity, and bodies, in an increasingly ancient past. To do so, it takes up the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers as a means to push back against the impetus to name such discoveries “transgender” in order to shore up (...)
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  10. Archaeological situations: archaeological theory from the inside out.Gavin Lucas - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book is an introduction to theory in archaeology--but with a difference. Archaeological Situations avoids talking about theory as if it was something you apply but rather as something embedded in archaeological practice from the start. Rather than see theory as something worked from the outside in, this book explores theory from the inside out, which means it focuses on specific archaeological practices rather than specific theories. It starts from the kinds of situations that students find themselves in and learn (...)
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  11. Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline.Allison Mickel & Nylah Byrd - 2022 - History of the Human Sciences 35 (2):3-28.
    Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of (...)
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  12. Evidence and analogy in Archaeoastronomy.Francesco Nappo, Giulio Magli & Giovanni Valente - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-25.
    This paper addresses the role of analogical reasoning in archaeoastronomy - the discipline which studies the connections between the ancient monuments and the heavens. Archaeoastronomy is a highly interdisciplinary science, placed at the border between the humanities – especially archaeology – and the scientific approach to cultural heritage. As a consequence, its scientific foundations are a delicate matter. We plan to investigate here the question of what constitutes the evidence for analogical inferences in archaeoastronomy and to what extent one can (...)
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  13. What Makes the Identity of a Scientific Method? A History of the “Structural and Analytical Typology” in the Growth of Evolutionary and Digital Archaeology in Southwestern Europe (1950s–2000s).Sébastien Plutniak - 2022 - Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 5 (1).
    Usual narratives among prehistoric archaeologists consider typological approaches as part of a past and outdated episode in the history of research, subsequently replaced by technological, functional, chemical, and cognitive approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, this paper addresses several limits of these narratives, which (1) assume a linear, exclusive, and additive conception of scientific change, neglecting the persistence of typological problems; (2) reduce collective developments to personal work (e.g. the “Bordes’” and “Laplace’s” methods in France); and (3) presuppose the (...)
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  14. Archaeology and intentionality: understanding ethics and freedom in past and present societies.Artur Seang Ping Ribeiro - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
    Archaeology and Intentionality explores perhaps one of the most overlooked topics in archaeology, that of intentionality. In archaeology, most explanations of human behaviour rely on intentionality and this book fills a surprising gap in the literature. By identifying the historical trajectory of the notion of intentionality, this book reframes our understanding of what it means to act intentionally and how archaeologists provide explanations concerning past (and present) societies. In general, this book presents a strong framework for archaeological research, one that (...)
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  15. The Archaeology and Philosophy of Health: Navigating the New Normal Problem.Carl Brusse - 2021 - In Anton Killin & Sean Allen Hermanson (eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Cham: pp. 101-122.
    It is often taken for granted that notions of health and disease are generally applicable across the biological world, in that they are not restricted to contemporary human beings, and can be unproblematically applied to a variety of organisms both past and present (taking relevant differences between species into account). In the historical sciences it is also common to normatively contrast health states of individuals and populations from different times and places: e.g., to say that due to nutrition or pathogen (...)
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  16. Prehistoric Stone Tools and their Epistemic Complexity.Manjari Chakrabarty - 2021 - In Zachary Pirtle, David Tomblin & Guru Madhavan (eds.), Engineering and Philosophy: Reimagining Technology and Social Progress. Springer Verlag. pp. 101-121.
    In his 1997 paper “Technology and Complexity” Dasgupta draws a distinction between systematic and epistemic complexity. Entities are called systematically complex when they are composed of a large number of parts that interact in complicated ways. This means that even if one knows the properties of the parts one may not be able to infer the behaviour of the system as a whole. In contrast, epistemic complexity refers to the knowledge that is used in, or generated by the making of (...)
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  17. Book Review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins. [REVIEW]Petar Gabrić - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:702361.
    Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of studies and discussions claiming that Neanderthals engaged in a range of “symbolic” behaviors, including personal ornament use (Radovčić et al., 2015), funerary practices (Balzeau et al., 2020), visual arts (Hoffmann et al., 2018), body aesthetics (Roebroeks et al., 2012), etc. In Paleolithic archaeology, it has become mainstream to axiomatically infer from these putative behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in symbol use and that Neanderthals thus possessed some form of language. Rudolf Botha's bombastic title "Neanderthal (...)
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  18. Music Archaeology, Signaling Theory, Social Differentiation.Anton Killin - 2021 - In Sean Allen-Hermanson Anton Killin (ed.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Synthese Library. Springer Verlag. pp. 85-100.
    Musical flutes constructed from bird bone and mammoth ivory begin to appear in the archaeological record from around 40,000 years ago. Due to the different physical demands of acquiring and working with these source materials in order to produce a flute, researchers have speculated about the significance—aesthetic or otherwise—of the use of mammoth ivory as a raw material for flutes. I argue that biological signaling theory provides a theoretical basis for the proposition that mammoth ivory flute production is a signal (...)
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  19. The Twain Shall Meet: Themes at the Intersection of Archaeology and Philosophy.Anton Killin & Sean Allen-Hermanson - 2021 - In Sean Allen-Hermanson Anton Killin (ed.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Synthese Library. Springer Verlag. pp. 1-4.
    Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy grew out of an interdisciplinary conference on the Upper Palaeolithic, “Digging Deeper: Archaeological and Philosophical Perspectives”, held on Miami Beach, Florida, in December 2017. The previous decade had seen increasing numbers of publications on topics of interest to both philosophers and archaeologists, so the time was ripe for a conference which served to generate constructive dialogue between researchers from both disciplines. Themes discussed included art, music, the mind, symbols, mortuary practices, and archaeological methodology. This volume (...)
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  20. Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy.Anton Killin & Sean Allen-Hermanson (eds.) - 2021 - Springer Verlag.
    This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster (...)
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  21. Psychoanalysis and the antinomies of an archaeologist: Andrea Carandini, the ruins of Rome, and the writing of history.Tom McCaskie - 2021 - History of the Human Sciences 34 (3-4):49-75.
    Freud’s fascination with the ruins of ancient Rome was an element in the formation and development of psychology. This article concerns the intersection of psychoanalysis with archaeology and history in the study of that city. Its substantive content is an analysis of the life and career of Andrea Carandini, the best-known Roman archaeologist of the past 40 years. He has said and written much about his changing views of himself and about what he is trying to do in his approach (...)
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  22. Aesthetic Archaeology.Jakub Stejskal - 2021 - Critical Inquiry 48 (1):144-166.
    The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...)
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  23. “I’m Not Saying It Was Aliens”: An Archaeological and Philosophical Analysis of a Conspiracy Theory.Derek D. Turner & Michelle I. Turner - 2021 - In Sean Allen-Hermanson Anton Killin (ed.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Synthese Library. Springer Verlag. pp. 7-24.
    This chapter draws upon the archaeological and philosophical literature to offer an analysis and diagnosis of the popular ‘ancient aliens’ theory. First, we argue that ancient aliens theory is a form of conspiracy theory. Second, we argue that it differs from other familiar conspiracy theories because it does distinctive ideological work. Third, we argue that ancient aliens theory is a form of non-contextualized inquiry that sacrifices the very thing that makes archaeological research successful, and does so for the sake of (...)
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  24. L'ideologia degli archeologi: egemonie e tradizioni epistemologiche alla fine del postmoderno.Edoardo Vanni - 2021 - Oxford: BAR Publishing.
    This book focuses on the relationship between different epistemological and theoretical advances in archaeology within different academic and philosophical traditions."--Publisher's web site.
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  25. Archaeological theory in dialogue: situating relationality, ontology, posthumanism, and indigenous paradigms.Rachel Crellin - 2020 - New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Edited by Craig N. Cipolla, Lindsay M. Montgomery, Oliver J. T. Harris & Sophie V. Moore.
    Archaeological Theory in Dialogue presents an innovative conversation between five scholars from different backgrounds on a range of central issues facing archaeology today. Interspersing detailed investigations of critical theoretical issues with dialogues between the authors, the book interrogates the importance of four themes at the heart of much contemporary theoretical debate: relations, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms. The authors, who work in Europe and North America, explore how these themes are shaping the ways that archaeologists conduct fieldwork, conceptualize the past, (...)
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  26. Rewriting history: changing perceptions of the archaeological past.Dennis Harding - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Every generation re-writes history in its own way'. Re-writing History applies Collingwood's dictum to a series of topics and themes, some of which have been central to prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology for the past century or more, while some have been triggered by more recent changes in technology or social attitudes. Some issues are highly controversial, like the proposals for the Stonehenge World Heritage sites. Others challenge long-held popular myths, like the deconstruction of the Celts and by extension the Picts. (...)
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  27. Theoretical and Philosophical Examinations of the Foundations in Japanese Archaeology(日本考古学の理論的・哲学的基礎:発掘報告書と型式(学)を中心に).Nakao Hisashi - 2020 - כוורת 16:1-9.
    The present article examines the theoretical foundations of Japanese archaeology epistemologically. The section 2 epistemologically examines excavation reports as one of the foundational works in Japanese archaeology, i.e., what excavation reports are and should be. It is argued that with a lack of epistemological justification of excavation reports, their epistemological status is highly puzzling. The section 3 also epistemologically and methodologically examines types or typology as one of the foundational methods in Japanese archaeology and it is claimed that definition of (...)
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  28. Introduction: Archaeology and Philosophy.Anton Killin & Sean Allen-Hermanson - 2020 - Topoi 40 (1):203-205.
    This paper introduces a Special Issue of Topoi entitled "Archaeology and philosophy".
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  29. Violence and climate change in the Jomon period, Japan.Hisashi Nakao - 2020 - In Gwen Robbins Schug (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change. New York:
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  30. Rivediamoci tra 2000 anni...: il nostro tempo visto dagli archeologi del futuro.Marina Rubinich - 2020 - Trieste: Editreg di Fabio Prenc.
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  31. Brent Maner. Germany’s Ancient Pasts: Archaeology and Historical Interpretation since 1700. ix + 354 pp., illus., notes, bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. $40 (paper). ISBN 9780226593074. [REVIEW]Kathleen Sheppard - 2020 - Isis 111 (2):405-406.
  32. Sacrificing Homo Sacer: René Girard reads Giorgio Agamben.Pierpaolo Antonello - 2019 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 24 (1):145-182.
    Taking as its point of departure the existing critical literature on the intersections between René Girard’s and Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenetic theories, this essay aims to add further considerations to the debate by discussing some of Agamben’s intuitions within a Girardian paradigmatic explanatory framework. I show how by regressing the archeological analysis to a pre-institutional and pre-legal moment, and by re-examining the antinomic structure of the sacred in its genetic organizing form, one can account more cogently for certain key issues relevant (...)
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  33. Change and Archaeology.Rachel Crellin - 2019 - New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
    Change and Archaeology explores how archaeologists have historically described, interpreted, and explained change and argues that change has been under-theorised. The study of change is central to the discipline of archaeology but change is complex and this makes it challenging to write about in nuanced ways that effectively capture the nature of our world. Relational approaches offer archaeologists more scope to explore change in complex and subtle ways. Change and Archaeology presents a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, new materialist approach to change. It (...)
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  34. From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology.Adrian Currie & Anton Killin - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (2):263-279.
    Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, (...)
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  35. Cinematosophical introduction to the theory of archaeology: understanding archaeology through cinema, philosophy, literature and some incongruous extremes.Aleksander Dzbynski - 2019 - Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press. Edited by Maciej Adamski.
    What is archaeology? A research field dealing with monuments? A science? A branch of philosophy? Dzbyński suggests the simple but thoughtful equation: Archaeology = History = Knowledge. This book consists of 8 chapters presenting a collection of characteristic philosophical attitudes important for archaeology. It discusses the historicity of archaeological sources, the source of the algorithmic approach in archaeological reasoning, and the accuracy of logical and irrational thinking. In general, this book is concerned with the history of archaeologists' search for a (...)
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  36. Music Pluralism, Music Realism, and Music Archaeology.Anton Killin - 2019 - Topoi 40 (1):261-272.
    According to pluralism about some concept, there are multiple non-equivalent, legitimate concepts pertaining to the ontological category in question. It is an open question whether conceptual pluralism implies anti-realism about that category. In this article, I argue that at least for the case of music, it does not. To undermine the application of an influential move from pluralism to anti-realism, then, I provide an argument in support of indifference realism about music, by appeal to music archaeological research, via an analogy (...)
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  37. 弥生時代中期における戦争:人骨と人口動態の関係から(Prehistoric Warfare in the Middle Phase of the Yayoi Period in Japan : Human Skeletal Remains and Demography).Tomomi Nakagawa, Hisashi Nakao, Kohei Tamura, Yuji Yamaguchi, Naoko Matsumoto & Takehiko Matsugi - 2019 - Journal of Computer Archaeology 1 (24):10-29.
    It has been commonly claimed that prehistoric warfare in Japan began in the Yayoi period. Population increases due to the introduction of agriculture from the Korean Peninsula to Japan resulted in the lack of land for cultivation and resources for the population, eventually triggering competition over land. This hypothesis has been supported by the demographic data inferred from historical changes in Kamekan, a burial system used especially in the Kyushu area in the Yayoi period. The present study aims to examine (...)
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  38. What Can the Lithic Record Tell Us About the Evolution of Hominin Cognition?Ross Pain - 2019 - Topoi 40 (1):245-259.
    This paper examines the inferential framework employed by Palaeolithic cognitive archaeologists, using the work of Wynn and Coolidge as a case study. I begin by distinguishing minimal-capacity inferences from cognitive-transition inferences. Minimal-capacity inferences attempt to infer the cognitive prerequisites required for the production of a technology. Cognitive-transition inferences use transitions in technological complexity to infer transitions in cognitive evolution. I argue that cognitive archaeology has typically used cognitive-transition inferences informed by minimal-capacity inferences, and that this reflects a tendency to favour (...)
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  39. Speculative Annihilationism: The Intersection of Archaeology and Extinction.Matt Rosen - 2019 - Hampshire: Zero Books.
    This monograph argues that a set of considerations in the metaphysics of time, and a certain conception of metaphysical realism, ought to motivate a particular understanding of archaeological theory and practice distinct from the post-processual, post-modernist, and cultural-historical frameworks that have tended to dominate the subject.
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  40. Archaeological theory in practice.Edward M. Schortman - 2019 - Routledge: London ; New York. Edited by Patricia A. Urban.
    Many students view archaeological theory as a subject distinct from field research. This division is reinforced by the way theory is taught, often in stand-alone courses that focus more on logic and reasoning than on the application of ideas to fieldwork. Divorcing thought from action does not convey how archaeologists go about understanding the past. This book bridges the gap between theory and practice by looking in detail at how the authors and their colleagues used theory to interpret what they (...)
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  41. Bibliographical Evolutions: From Archaeoastronomy to Astronomy in Culture.Luís Tirapicos - 2019 - Isis 110 (S1):1-12.
  42. La influencia epistemológica del modelo cartesiano de la mente en arqueología cognitiva.Alfredo Robles Zamora - 2019 - Límite: Revista de Filosofía y Psicología 14 (14).
    The aim of this work is to expose the Cartesian Model of the mind in Cognitive Archaeology and point out how it relates to the questions behind this branch of archaeology. Based on this, some of the premises assumed by the Cartesian Model and how they influence the formulation to the problem of epistemological relativism in the branch are explained. According to this problem, since there is no way to evaluate hypotheses in this research area, the investigations on cognition, based (...)
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  43. Philosophy, archaeology and the Enlightenment heritage: Cartesian representationalism in applied contexts.V. P. J. Arponen & Artur Ribeiro - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (3):60-63.
    Cartesian representationalism and the Enlightenment heritage more broadly continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the 21st-century human scientific theory and practice. This introduction to a special section on the topic surveys some aspects of that heritage.
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  44. An archaeology of the contemporary era.Alfredo González Ruibal - 2018 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book approaches the contemporary era--a period comprised between the late nineteenth and the twenty first centuries--as an archaeological age that can be defined by specific material processes. It argues that the materiality of our era, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, tells something profound and original about us--something disturbing, as well. The aim of the book is twofold: it reflects on the theory and practice of the archaeology of the contemporary past--its epistemology, politics, ethics and aesthetics--and it seeks to (...)
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  45. More than representation: Multiscalar assemblages and the Deleuzian challenge to archaeology.Oliver J. T. Harris - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (3):83-104.
    In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and the world (...)
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  46. Relational identities and other-than-human agency in archaeology.Eleanor Harrison-Buck & Julia Ann Hendon (eds.) - 2018 - Louisville: University Press of Colorado.
    Explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. Cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts"--Provided by publisher.
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  47. Assemblage thought and archaeology.Ben Jervis - 2018 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    From examinations of prehistoric burial to understanding post-industrial spaces and heritage practices, the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is gaining increasing importance within archaeological thought. Their concept of 'assemblages' allows us to explore the past in new ways, by placing an emphasis on difference rather than similarity, on fluidity rather stasis and unpredictability rather than reproduceable models. Assemblage Thought and Archaeology applies the notion of assemblage to specific archaeological case studies, ranging from early urbanism in Mesopotamia to 19th (...)
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  48. A quantitative history of Japanese archaeology and natural science.Hisashi Nakao - 2018 - Japanese Journal of Archaeology 6 (1):3-22.
    This study examines the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science through a quantitative analysis of the two most authoritative archaeological journals and two other relevant journals in Japan. First, although previous studies have emphasized the impact of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo on the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, results of the present study suggest that its impact has been more limited than previously assumed. Second, while previous studies claimed that research funding by the Japanese (...)
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  49. A meaning holistic (dis)solution of subject–object dualism – its implications for the human sciences.Tero Piiroinen - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (3):64-82.
    This article presents and analyses a social-practice contextualist version of meaning holism, whose main root lies in American pragmatism. Proposing that beliefs depend on systems of language-use in social practices, which involve communities of people and worldly objects, such meaning holism effectively breaks down the Enlightenment tradition’s philosophical subject–object dualism. It also opens the human mind up for empirical research – in a ‘sociologizing’, ‘anthropologizing’ and ‘historicizing’ vein. The article discusses the implications of this approach for the human sciences, for (...)
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  50. Death of the passive subject.Artur Ribeiro - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (3):105-121.
    In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that (...)
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