Philosophy of archaeology;Philosophy in archaeology

Abstract

This chapter discusses the philosophy of archaeology. Archaeology crosscuts a number of fields. In some contexts, it is treated as an autonomous discipline and is housed in free-standing archaeology departments and institutes, but more often, it is taught and practiced as a component of anthropology, art history, or classics. The intellectual traditions characteristic of archaeology in these disciplinary contexts differ substantially from one another. The chapter provides an overview of the interchange between philosophers and archaeologists—first, the analyses philosophers have developed of archaeology and then, philosophical debates within archaeology—culminating in the formation of a philosophical interfield that is sometimes referred to as meta-archaeology. The chapter also considers six focal themes in the philosophical debates that have taken shape in and about anthropological archaeology: explanation; evidential reasoning; ideals of objectivity (including relativist challenges and arguments for epistemic pluralism); foundational and ontological questions (social theory, concepts of culture); normative issues (ethics and socio-politics of archaeology); and metaphilosophical questions about the role of philosophical analysis in, and its value to, a field like archaeology.