ГНОСЕОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ОСНОВАНИЯ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ РЕКОНСТРУКЦИЙ В АРХЕОЛОГИИ

Abstract

The article is aimed atdescribing and analyzingtheoretical and methodological foundations of social reconstruc-tions in archaeology. The subject of social reconstructions is the social structure and the object is the funerary ritual. Funerary monuments are the widespread sources, which makes it possible to usequantitative methods for studying the social structure of ancient societies. The social structure, funerary ritual, and their factor mathematical model are considered as self-sufficient multi-structural objects. The authors statethat the invariant of a social structure is re-flected in the funerary ritual. The specific kind of invariant is defined in manyways by the gnoseological conditions of the building of the mathematical model. The following gnoseological foundations of the mathematical model are highlighted: theoretical and methodological approaches, cognitive and value orientations of the researcher; quality of the excavations, field research, which are reflected in reports, and planimography of funerary monuments. The main theoretical and methodological approaches for studyingsocial structures are described, namely, historicism, evolu-tionism, and cultural-historical, structural-functional and systematic approaches. The authorsanalyze the influence of hypothetic-deductive presuppositions of the researcher on the representative set of burials,the selection of the condi-tions for the analysis, and the interpretation of the resulting model. Theyconclude that there is a lack of interdiscipli-nary operational terms and theoretical grounds for the analysis of the processes of getting and understanding the re-sults. The formalized language of the mathematical model does not embrace the social object to its fullest. Semiotic structures of the funerary ritual are of asyncretic nature,which contradicts the uniqueness of mathematical refer-ences. The main difficulties are manifested in the separation of pragmatic, mythological, and mental social meanings of archaeological artifacts. They are apriori hidden from the researcher because of the difference in cognitive struc-tures at the different stages of the historical course. The further perspectives are the following: 1) to form interdisci-plinary operational terms allowing the researcher to move from the empirical data to gnoseological constructs; 2) to find the ways to minimizethe influence of subjective structures on the outcome of the mathematical analysis ofar-chaeological material