A History of Archaeology and the Hard Sciences

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Abstract “Hard sciences” is a popular expression that appeared around the 1960s and usually includes the natural (biology, geology, physics, chemistry) and formal (mathematics, computer) sciences. The natural and hard sciences have occupied an increasingly important place in archaeology since the 1960s, to the extent that some of them—such as biology with DNA and genetics research—have felt it legitimate to appropriate archaeological topics. For their part, archaeologists have begun to speak of a “natural science turn.” The history of these interactions, however, cannot be summed up by the debates that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Their origins go back to the nineteenth century, when archaeology—especially prehistoric archaeology—emerged as a discipline focusing on the history of humankind as both a natural and a cultural phenomenon. This chapter explores the interactions between archaeology and the hard and natural sciences from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, taking central Europe as a case study. It follows four directions: the definition of disciplinary boundaries, the heuristic expectations of archaeologists regarding the natural and hard sciences, the political dimension related to the development of such collaborations, and the complexity of the epistemological issues emerging from those intensive interactions.