Deploying Kronfeldner’s concept of human nature in archaeology

Abstract

This essay represents a reflection on the role and relevance of the concept of human nature in archaeology, inspired by the ideas about human nature presented and elaborated by Maria Kronfeldner in the book What?s Left of Human Nature?. It is a comment from an archaeologist?s perspective. Kronfeldner formulated three ways in which human nature can be conceptualized: classificatory, descriptive and explanatory human nature. In the text, I review the archaeological and anthropological topics for which the three aspects of human nature are relevant. In the first part, I address the problems related to the concepts of classificatory and descriptive human nature in the late Pleistocene, when Homo sapiens was not the only species of the genus Homo on the planet. In the second part, I discuss the role of human nature from the epistemological position when it comes to the theoretical basis of reconstructing human behavior in the past and the more general anthropological issue of establishing cross-cultural regularities and laws. This is by no means a comprehensive and detailed survey of the potentially relevant topics, but it should illustrate the usefulness and relevance of Kronfeldner?s concepts for the fields of archaeology and anthropology.