Amparo Gmez

Archaeology and Scientific Explanation: Naturalism, Interpretivism and A Third Way1

Abstract
The explanation-understanding controversy has been a main topic of archaeological methodology since the mid 19th century. The arguments for explanation were dominant throughout much of the 20th century within the empiricist and post-empiricist approaches. However, towards the end, understanding approaches were widely adopted by archaeologists, due to the prevalence gained by the interpretive turn in both hermeneutics and post-modern radical version. The aim of this paper is to review the less radical positions within the interpretive turn, that is, the hermeneutical thesis about understanding, and to examine the possibility of convergence between them and post-empiricist approaches on explanation.

1.Contextualizing the explanation-understanding debate

in archaeology

Archaeologists have paid a strong attention to the philosophy of science in the search for epistemic and methodological grounds for their discipline. Archaeologists have not been limited to closely follow the debates and arguments of philosophers, but they have developed an interesting epistemic and methodological reflection within archaeology realm. This reflection has been so important that, to a large extent, the evolution of archaeological approaches is the result of the evolution of the philosophical perspectives in the discipline. As Wiley recalls, the training of young archaeologists included philosophy of science, as well as learning specific research techniques.2 How archaeologists should explain and, therefore, which is the appropriate model of explanation is one of the central topics of philosophical discussion in archaeology. This discussion has been posed in the context of leading philosophical schools: logical empiricism, structuralism, systems theory, Marxism, post-empiricism, hermeneutics and post-modernism. The above list gives an idea of the dif1 2 This paper has been written thanks to the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation research project FFI2009-09483. I am very grateful to Wenceslao J. Gonzalez for his insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things, Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press 2002, p. XII.

239 H. Andersen et al. (eds.), New Challenges to Philosophy of Science, The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5845-2_19, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

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ficulty entailed in addressing a debate that combines the usual philosophical topics with the specific issues of archaeological explanation. The difficulty increases if it is also taken into consideration that archaeology has been understood as history of the facts of the past, natural science and cultural history. The discussion about the appropriate model of archaeological explanation has had one of the major subjects in the explanation-understanding debate. What is at stake in this debate is the nature of archaeological explanation, and thus of archaeological knowledge. Significant methodological and epistemic views underlying this debate make it fundamental for assigning archaeology to one or the other of the perspectives indicated above. On the other hand, the arguments presented and their impact have considerable interest to the general philosophical discussion on explanation and understanding, and also for the inquiry into the boundaries between social sciences and cultural sciences. However, surprisingly, archaeology has not been considered in philosophical discussions and it has been situated in a separate field, cultivated basically by archaeologists themselves; something that should be corrected, given the fertility of the philosophical discussion that takes place within it. The explanation-understanding debate in archeology has its origins in the scientificist turn that this discipline took in the 50s in response to a first stage of the archaeological knowledge based on empirical data and their interpretation. Archaeology was established in the mid 19th century and was understood as a history with imprecise narratives of the influences between cultures. This traditional approach was questioned by North American and British archaeologists, who were persuaded that archaeology should be a science like the natural sciences, able to establish genuine scientific explanations of objective facts. This new view was developed mainly in the 60s with the work of a group of young archaeologists, headed by Binford.3 This approach was called New Archaeology and also Processual Archaeology. The New Archaeologists embraced neo-positivism as the genuine scientific philosophy. The scientific explanation was the Deductive-Nomological (D-N) model, and archaeological explanations should be based on confirmed universal laws. Hence it was essential to confirm the universal laws of cultural and historic processes of the past through the data found in the present excavations. In this context it was rejected any explanation different from the D-N model, and particularly any use of interpretation and understanding of archaeological data. Despite this radical approach, processual archaeologist soon saw that was impossible to avoid the recourse to interpretation in both the explanation and the confirmation of the laws. One of the main difficulties was that some degree of interpretation of the data was necessary in order to test the universal hypotheses; in the case of explanation, that the connection between hypothesis and data was not
3 See Lewis Binford, Archaeology as Anthropology, in: American Antiquity 28, 1962, pp. 217-225. Lewis Binford and Sally R. Binford (Eds.), New Perspectives in Archaeology. Chicago: Aldine 1968.

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deductive because it implied interpretation of the recorded data in accordance with said hypothesis. Binford, one of the most significant processual archaeologists, accepted the existence of auxiliary hypothesis connecting data with the hypothesis to be confirmed through interpretations of the meaning of these data,4 because the facts of the records do not have a clear and unambiguous meaning.5 In the late 70s and in the 80s New Archaeologists had to face the proposal made by Kuhn and other authors of Post-empiricist Philosophy. Processualists admitted the thesis of the theory laden of observation, and the same Binford stated:
objectivity was not attainable either inductively or deductively () Archaeological knowledge of the past is totally dependent upon the meanings that archaeologists give to observations on the archaeological record () there is not independent grounds for proving a hypothesis.6

The methodological approaches evolved and diversified, and archaeologists followed two main pathways in explanation: a) to defend the scientific explanation, but not the DN model, and b) explanation was rejected in favor of understanding, insofar as many archaeologists were increasingly pessimistic about processual archaeology, even in its pot-empiricist version. They denied that archaeology should be a science like the natural sciences, and turned their attention back to considering it as the history of the cultures of the past, and as a humanist discipline. This new approach was called post-processual archaeology (given its rejection of processual archaeology). This paper focuses on interpretative turn in post-processual archaeology. It will be centered in the efforts made by archaeologists to avoid understanding relativism and subjectivism by articulating some methodological requirements from the post-empiricist archaeology in the interpretative field, rather than from traditional hermeneutical resources. The aim of the analysis is to explore possible convergences between explanation and understanding in this context, as a first step towards a third way for a classic debate in archeology (and social sciences) with the purpose of exploring new perspectives on its settlement.

2.Post-processual archaeology and the interpretative turn

Post-processual archaeology emerged in the 80s and it was consolidated in the 90s. This approach took its inspiration from a range of schools of thought, hermeneutics, symbolic and structuralist trends, neo-Marxism, post-structuralist and
4 5 6 See Binford, An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Seminar Press 1972. Binford, Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press 1978, p. I. Lewis Binford and Jeremy Sabloff, Paradigms, Systematics and Archaeology, in: Journal of Anthropological Research 38, 1982, pp. 138-139. (mine).

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post-modern thought.7 Many different types of research questions have their place in post-processual archaeology: gender, power, symbolism, ritual action, personal identity, nationalism, and so on. One of the most prominent approaches in post-processual archeology has been the interpretative turn. The focus of interpretative archaeology is that the past is made intelligible through interpretation and understanding of the actions of situated individuals who produced the material culture, whose remains are studied by archaeologist through the present data records. Thus, interpretative archaeologists do not accept that societies are made up of a series of underlying mechanisms, process, patterns or forces that determine human behaviour, and neither do they consider collective or group behaviour to be the essential. Therefore, archaeologists should not inquire into these fields to understand the cultures of the past, but in the intentions, thoughts and reasons of people to act as they did it. General theories are rejected to the extent that each culture is a specific case and it must be studied as such (they are opposed to the great theories like the eco-materialists theories). The variability of material culture cannot be explained in terms of laws, generalisations, models or functions, but interpreting and understanding human action and activity, just what the processualists considered epiphenomena without any explanatory capacity. Understanding is considered the art of understanding meaning, of making it comprehensible, and data record meaning is achieved through interpretation. The most basic level of access to the world is the interpretive one, since what it is observed means something insofar as it is interpreted it, and then can be understood. The main argument of interpretative archaeology is, that there is no definitive knowledge of the past, and no single methodology can reveal it to us.8 This approach has to deal with some questions that are transferred from hermeneutics to archaeology: the problem from where it is made the interpretation,

Many are the authors in each tendency; some of the most prominent are: in hermeneutics particularly Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Currents Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986. Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, in: American Antiquity 56, 1991, pp. 7-18; in structuralism, Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Lart parietal: langage de la prhistoire. Paris: ditions Jrme Millon 2009. Robert W. Preucel, The Postprocessual Condition, in: Journal of Archaeological Research 3, 1995, pp. 147-175; in Neo-Marxism, Mark P. Leone (Ed.), Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. New York: Kluwer 1999. Brucer Trigger, Hyperrelativism, Responsibility, and the Social Sciences, in: Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26, 1989, pp. 776-797; and in post-modern archaeology, Christopher Tilley, Material Culture and the Texts: The Art of Ambiguity. London: Routledge 1991 or John Bintliff, Postmodernism, Rhetoric and Scholasticism at TAG: The Current State of British Archaeology, in: Antiquity 65, 1995, pp. 274-278. Julian Thomas, Introduction: The Polarities of Post-processual Archaeology, in: Julian Thomas (Ed.), Interpretative Archaeology. A Reader. London: Continuum International Publishing Group 2002, p. 3.

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(just from the present, or the past has any weight?) and so, relativism and subjectivism problems. Hodder, the most influential author of interpretative turn in archaeology addresses these problems following mainly to Collingwood, but also to Dilthey. Hodder believes that archaeology maintains close links with history and historicism. Material culture is significantly constituted and it is the result of deliberate actions by individuals whose intentions must interpreted in order to understand this culture. If archaeologists have to understand the past, they must pay attention to what Collingwood described as insides of actions (despite the inferential distance that they may have), that is, the thoughts and intentions behind the events of the past. Of course the outside of the events are the first discovery, but as the event really important is an action, it is necessary to get at the subjective meanings, at the inside of events.9 Hodder subjectivism is an attempt to interpret the evidence primarily in terms of its internal relations rather than in terms of outside knowledge.10 To this end, archaeologists must explore research strategies that make it possible to understand cultures as significant products that encode subjective meanings. This kind of understanding involves both the past and the present from where interpretations are made; notions of the past and present can enter into a dialogue, but the past is interpreted in terms of the present. The answer given to the problem of subjectivism by Hodder, during the 80s, is the same that gave Collingwood and Dilthey with the introduction of an objective mind capable of bridging the distance between the intentional meanings of past individuals, permanently fixed life expressions and our own understanding in the present.11 But in two works published in the 90s Hodder takes distance of Collingwood and deals with Gadamer, Ricoeur and Habermass hermeneutics. In these works Hodder does some comments on method and objectivity in order to introduce a critical and political dimension in hermeneutic archaeology, regarding the incorporation of other voices in the interpretation of the past. From this point of view, he argues the critical role of the data, claiming that, the moment of critique in the hermeneutic processes is the interaction with data to produce possible worlds.12 Therefore he defends certain room for objectivity with expressions as a guarded objectivity of the past,13 the organized material has an independence,14 or material culture as excavate by archeologists is dif9 Hodder, Reading the Past: Currents Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, op. cit., p. 79. 10 Hodder, The Domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell 1990, p. 21. 11 Harald Johnsen and Bjrnar Olsen, Hermeneutics and Archaeology. On the Philosophy of Contextual Archaeology, in: American Antiquity 57, 3, 1992, p. 109. 12 Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, in: American Antiquity 56, 1991, p. 12. 13 Hodder, Ibid. p. 10. 14 Ibid. p. 12.

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ferent from our assumptions.15 This allows him to oppose to post-structuralism and post-modernism relativism, since we are not interpreting interpretations.16 However, his advocacy of objectivity is not easy to hold in the late hermeneutics. Hodder needs some method that allows him to ensure a proper interpretation of the past, beyond his advocacy for self-criticism and the acknowledgment of subordinate voices (such as women or indigenous people) as a subjective requirement. Nonetheless, it is also true that Hodder offers some clues in the way of the method, when he attaches to internal consistency and external experience an important role in evaluating the interpretative hypotheses (as will be seen below).17 2.1 Other post-processual answers to Relativism and Subjectivism Neo-Marxist, structuralist, and post-modern perspectives have given other answers to the problems of subjectivism and relativism. Neo-Marxists give great weight to ideologies to understand the changes in societies of the past (compared with traditional Marxism that gave weight to the economic infrastructure).18 NeoMarxist central thesis is that archaeology has a major ideological-political content, but archaeologists must make their interests and beliefs explicit, and be politically responsible for their claims about the past; that is the only possible objectivity. This viewpoint has been important in the emergence of local archaeologies in third world countries insofar as neo-Marxists pay attention to the role of the cultural archaeological past in determining the historic identity of regions. The object of structuralist archaeology is the structure of the thought which exists in the minds of those who elaborated the artefacts and created the archaeological record (analyses are synchronic). There are constant patterns in human thought in different cultures (dichotomies for example), and the categories observed in one sphere of life will appear in another: culture categories to delimit social relations will also be detected in other different areas, like the delimitations in decorating pottery. In any event, structuralist archaeologists assume that it is possible to access these universal meanings objectively (semiotics) and hence archaeologys interpretations are objectivised.19
15 Hodder, Ibid., p. 12. 16 Ibid., p. 12 (his italics). 17 In the same, Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, pp. 7-18, and in: Hodder, The Post-processual Reaction, in: Hodder, Theory and Practice in Archaeology. London: Routledge 1992, pp. 160-168. 18 See, Leone, Liberation not Replication: Archaeology in Annapolis Analyzed, in: Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 76, 1986, pp. 97-195. Trigger, Marxism in Contemporary Western Archaeology, in: Archaeological Method and Theory 5, 1993, pp. 159-200. Russell C. Handsman, Early Capitalism and the Center Village of Canaan, Connecticut: A Study of Transformations and Separations, in: Artifacts 9, 1981, pp. 1-2. 19 See Leroi-Gourhan, Lrt parietal: language de la prhistoir, op. cit., and Preucel, The Postprocessual Condition, pp. 147-175.

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In the 90s, post-modern theses boomed in post-processual archaeology. This movement was inspired by the post-modern philosophy, Critical Theory, poststructuralism and literary criticism, and it took a radical interpretative stance. It opposed not only the processual approach, but also certain schools of post-processual archaeology, such as neo-Marxism or structuralism. Post-modern archaeologists insist on highly relativist and constructivist positions. They consider that any interpretation refers to the outside world; hence the only support for knowledge is a network of interpretations.20 Archaeologists simply construct their data, and even the facts, from their theories, their cultural present and their subjectivity. Data records should be understood as texts that are interpreted in different ways from different readings made by individuals with different interests, ideologies and beliefs. Interpretations are always presentist, contextual and circulars and all of them have the same right to be sustained, there is no way to establish whether one is more correct or better than any other. Therefore what is being questioned by post-modern archaeologists is the whole edifice of knowledge that characterises the Modernity that must be totally deconstructed. Finally, several authors have recently opted to inquire about methodological and epistemic criteria that allow the introduction of some degree of objectivity in the field of interpretation avoiding radical relativism, and thus constituting a certain third way of the post-processual archaeology.

3.Common ground between processual and post-processual archaeology

Recently, several post processual archaeologists have followed a new way given the sterility of debates between processual, hermeneutics and post-modern archaeologists, according to these authors. This new approach tries to find some common ground between post-processual and processual post-empericist archaeologies, despite of major differences between them. This common ground shapes a third way for archaeology, characterised by a pluralism that could accommodate both, resources from interpretative and post-empiricist approaches. Research into this common ground is making possible that the opposite monolithic positions are starting to lose ground in favour of other more integrating stances. Work has gone in two directions: a) to show that post-processual archaeology can accommodate certain post-empiricist criteria, and b) to show convergence in the archaeological research. Concerning convergent criteria, VanPool and VanPool argue that given the evolution of the philosophy of science and the post-empiricist reformulation of the
20 See for example: Christopher Tilley, Interpretation and a Poetics of the Past, in: Tilley (Ed.), Interpretative Archaeology. London: Berg 1993, pp. 1-26, and Bintliff, Postmodernism, Rhetoric and Scholasticism at TAG: The Current State of British Archaeology, pp. 274-278.

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criteria of scientificity, post-processual research satisfies many of such criteria;21 they claim:
we suggest that much of the discussion of the relationship between processual and postprocessual archaeology is based on subtle, yet important, misconceptions () we will discuss seven recognized characteristics of science and demonstrate that processualism and postprocessualism both possess most of these characteristics. We therefore suggest that the conflict between the practitioners of processual and post-processual archaeological approaches is largely unnecessary, not because of the social implications of the conflict, but because of their substantive intellectual similarities.22

Hutson and Wylie have argued in the same direction;23 and Fogelin believes that despite the epistemological and theoretical debate that has divided the two archaeological approaches, those with more interpretive leanings are actively engaging in field work and re-embracing many of the scientific methodologies pioneered by the New Archaeology.24 Fogelin, is also representative of the second point indicated above, the convergence in the archaeological research. He considers that in the meantime, both sides borrow data from one another and continue to rely on the work of archaeologists from the early twentieth century.25 Thus, despite the different approaches, in practice, there is sufficient proximity in the research and techniques to share the data and to trust the results of the research. In fact, archaeologists share a fairly general agreement regarding the techniques they use, irrespective of which epistemological approach they sustain. On the other hand, it is fairly widely accepted that, despite different points of view, archaeologists have offered a series of powerful explanations of the past. It does not mean that all research was good research, but a set of explanations that are accepted as correct have been established. In fact, as Fogelin notes, many archaeologists consider they are working in a middle ground between the processual and the post-processual perspective.26

21 In their articles, Christine S. VanPool and Todd L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, in: American Antiquity 64, 1999, pp. 33-53; and, T. L. VanPool and C. S. VanPool, Postprocessualism and the Nature of Science: A Response to Comments by Hutson and Arnold and Wilkens, in: American Antiquity 66, 2001, pp. 367-375. 22 C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, in: American Antiquity 64, 1, 1999, p. 34. 23 See Scott R. Hutson, Synergy through Disunity, Science as Social Practice: Comments on VanPool and VanPool, in: American Antiquity 66, 2001, pp. 349-369. Wylie, Thinking from Things, Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, op. cit. 24 Lars Fogelin, Inference to the Best Explanation: A Common and Effective form of Archaeological Reasoning, in: American Antiquity 72, 2007, p. 604. 25 Ibid., p. 604. 26 Ibid., p. 604.

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3.1 Convergences of Explanation and Understanding Despite the convergences abovementioned, very little analysis has been conducted from this point of view on explanation-understanding debate in archaeology. But, in this area is possible to establish interesting points of convergence. A first convergence is related to the admission by processual archaeologists that explanation involves auxiliary interpretive hypotheses. They ended up acknowledging that the connection (deductive or inductive) between explanans and explanandum assumed some level of interpretation (and the test of the hypothesis too). Processual archaeologists admitted the importance of the theory laden nature of observation and that all facts implied theoretical-dependent interpretation. The question was pointed out by Binford when he acknowledged that the data talks but they do not talk by themselves of the cultural processes or ways of life unless we ask them the right questions.27 Archaeologists are not confined to understand, also try to explain facts. But the facts they try to explain have previously been interpreted, either in the context of a paradigm, a theory or a background of knowledge.28 Interpretation allows understanding the facts of the past which are made intelligible and so explainable. Without understanding the meaning of these facts (to which the archaeologists access from the remains of the present), their explanation is not feasible. The explanation may rely on the insides of past actions, on contextual aspects of material cultures or on constraints to which people were subjected, whose meaning has been established through interpretation. Explanations can be of different kinds, but are possible once the meaning of facts to be explained has been understood. This can be deemed in terms of Webers proposal, who maintained that social researchers should not be content with interpreting meanings renouncing to explanation. But, in opposition to positivists, he also considered that explanation needs to take in consideration the meaning and sense connections. Thus, in social sciences, understanding is not in opposition to explanation, but rather it constitutes a necessary moment of explanation. 3.2 The Role of the Evaluation Another important area of convergence between processualism and post-processualism is related to the acceptance by some post-processualist arqueologists of the evaluation of interpretive propositions. Processual archaeologists understand
27 Binford, Archaeological Perspectives, in: L. R. Binford, and S. R. Binford (Eds.), New Perspectives in Archaeology, op. cit., p. 13. Hodder later admits that both processual and hermeneutic approaches accept that every assertion can be understood in relation to a question, Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., p. 12. 28 Meanings can be from individuals or contextual elements; as C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool note, Social meaning can be given to material objects, people, societies, and places through interpretation. C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, op. cit., p. 38.

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that explanatory propositions had to be empirically tested and post-processual archaeologists maintain that interpretive propositions should be empirically evaluated. Many post-processual archaeologists admit the empirical reality of entities, and above all, of the archaeological records.29 As VanPool and VanPool point out: Most post-processual interpretations meet the requirement of empiricism (), post-processualists do accept that the past is real and that they can know something about it.30 Thus, although post-processualists believe that archaeological research is cultural, politically or value-interest basied, many of them accept that the archaeological records limit their interpretations. Archaeological data records constrain interpretations and meanings that can be established, as the same Hodder states, the real world does constrain what we can say about it.31 This enable data to play an important role in the evaluation of interpretative hypothesis; interpretation is not a case of anything goes. Interpretations can be infinite, but archaeologists do not believe that all interpretations are valid. Their evaluation is what makes possible to establish which are considered valid and which are not. Thus, the evaluation criteria are a key resource of archaeological research, and one of the criteria proposed by archaeologists has been consistency with the archaeological records,32 (also the internal coherence and the inference to the best explanation).33 The criterion of consistency with the data has been understood in different ways. VanPool and VanPool, and Preucel have interpreted it as adequacy with the inter-subjectively testable data, which entails objectivity.34 VanPool and VanPool give a strong epistemic meaning to this criterion since they consider that inter-subjectively testable has a clear Popperian label, as Popper (1980: 44)
29 For example, Ericka Engelstad, Images of Power and Contradiction: Feminist Theory and Potprocessual Archaeology, in: Antiquity 65, 1991, pp. 502-514. Leone, Liberation not Replication: Archaeology in Annapolis Analyzed, op. cit., pp. 97-195. Hodder, Reading the Past: Currents Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, op. cit. Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., pp. 7-18. 30 C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, op.cit., p. 42. Hodder, as has been seen above, holds the same thesis; see Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., p. 12. 31 Hodder, Reading the Past: Currents Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, op. cit., p. 16. 32 Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., pp. 7-18. Preucel, The Postprocessual Condition, pp. 147-175. C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, op. cit., pp. 33-53. Wylie, Thinking from Things, Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, op. cit. 33 The first one in Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., pp. 7-18, for example. The second one in Fogelin, Inference to the Best Explanation: A Common and Effective form of Archaeological Reasoning, op. cit., pp. 603-625. 34 C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, op. cit., pp. 44-45. Preucel, The Postprocessual Condition, pp. 161-162. (Italics in quote are mine).

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states, the objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested.35 Hodder argues for a weaker recourse to empirical. He states that, we need to retain from positivist and processual archaeology a guarded objectivity of the material () the organized material remains have an independence that can confront our taken for granted.36 The past is objectively organized and it is different from our contexts, and it is in the experience of this objective and independent difference that we can distinguish among competing hypotheses to see which fits best.37 Of course, pre-existing beliefs inform the interpretations of the past, but, as Fogelin points out, the material remains, however, are not amenable to just any interpretation. Some interpretations will be shown wrong through a failure to account for the diversity of evidence that is structured by people in the past.38 Arnold and Wilkens are critical of these attempts at convergence. They cast doubt on the analysis of VanPool and VanPool and understand that the term adequacy with the inter-subjectively testable data does not mean the same in the scientific method as in the hermeneutic method. They claim that scientific confirmation, as noted above, is commonly assessed as a function of the independence between the hypothesis being evaluated, and the methods/ knowledge claims used to render that evaluation.39 But interpretive hypotheses are not validated by resorting to external resources; they are validated by resorting to internal meanings to the interpretations themselves. VanPool and VanPool respond to this criticism by maintaining their original position, and focussing on the question of objectivity, to demonstrate that interpretive hypotheses are tested in independent evidence as much as the descriptive or explanatory hypotheses. They reply that:
we find this claim startling given the relatively large number of post-processual studies that contradict it (e.g., Hodder 1984, 1992:216-228, 2000:28-30; Marciniak 1999; Pauketat and Emerson 1999; Prestvold 1996; Thomas 1996:98-233). For example, Meskell (1998:229233) uses spatial analysis, ethno-historical evidence, evidence from other sites, architectural analysis, and contextual analysis to evaluate her contention that certain rooms from Deir el Medina, a New Kingdom settlement in Egypt, were used predominantly by males.40

35 C. S. VanPool and T. L. VanPool, The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism, op. cit., p. 44. 36 Hodder, Interpretative Archaeology and Its Role, op. cit., p. 12. 37 Hodder, Ibid., p. 13. 38 Fogelin, Inference to the Best Explanation: A Common and Effective form of Archaeological Reasoning, p. 613. 39 Philip J. Arnold III and Brian S. Wilkens, On the Van Pools Scientific Postprocessualism, in: American Antiquity 66, 2001, p. 363; (their italics). 40 T. L. VanPool and C. S. VanPool, Postprocessualism and the Nature of Science: A Response to Comments by Hutson and Arnold and Wilkens, op. cit., p. 369.

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4.Concluding remarks: A third way for explanation

What the arguments in favour of a convergence between processual and post-processual archaeology show is that the differences between the two approaches, which initially seemed abysmal, are reduced insofar that the positions of the two parties become more flexible. As it has been seen, the evolution followed by the former and the moderate considerations of the latter make possible to build bridges at key points between the two perspectives. This does not mean that there do not remain radical postures, fundamentally by the archaeologists of the post-modern thought, or by more scientificist positions, such as those of Arnold and Wilkens who make a radical distinction between scientific method and hermeneutic method. Furthermore, it is interesting to point out that the debate between Arnold and Wilkens, and VanPool and VanPool about scientific and hermeneutic method has its counterpart in the philosophy of science, although concerning two ways of understanding scientific proof. The discussion about to what extent the scientific proof is internal (given that what is postulated as evidence is determined by theories/hypotheses being tested) or to what extent it is external (insofar evidence is independent from the theories/hypotheses being tested) continues open in philosophy of science. On the other hand, the arguments in favour of a convergence between processual and post-processual archaeology are interesting for the general philosophical debate between explanation and understanding. What the arguments examined bring to this debate can be synthesised in the following points: 1. Explanation shares with understanding the fact that what is explained or understood means something because it is first interpreted. It is does not mean that the data have no role in the interpretation or in establishing whether an interpretation is more correct or better than any other. The interpretations can be infinite, but archaeologists do not believe that any interpretation is valid (except the postmodern ones). Processual archaeologists understood that interpretive propositions had to be empirically tested and post-processual archaeologists maintain that interpretive propositions should be empirically evaluated. 2. Insofar as explanation in social sciences refers, in one way or another, to actors and their actions (as is widely admitted), the understanding of the actions is prior to their explanation, and constitutes a necessary moment of the explanation. Without understanding the reasons at stake in actions, one cannot proceed to their explanation. This can be understood as a proposal that affects not only to social sciences, but also to sciences of culture, which can include some kinds of explanation for which understanding would be a necessary condition what would be in accordance with Wrights thesis that understanding is a fundamental condition that comes prior to the teleological explanation of social actions. 3. Explanations that appeal to causes co-exist in social sciences with those that resort to reasons or intentions. It is true, as has been pointed out by Gonzalez,

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that the question for the causes and the question for the reasons are different; the causal explanation is formulated to human behaviour, while the question for the reasons is formulated to the actions as activity characterised by its historicity.41 But, it is also true that to identify something as a cause involves interpretation and understanding in a relevant sense. This does not mean that both forms of explanation are equal since they respond to distinct objectives. Social sciences include both behaviour and its causes, and actions and their reasons.42 Some social processes and mechanisms have shown to be interesting to explain certain kinds of behaviour, and therefore social facts, but human activity and its insides form part of most explanations in social sciences. On the other hand, as Gonzalez maintains, combining causal explanations and interpretive perspectives can be seen as an example of the unity and diversity of science: the social sciences can share common ground with the natural sciences and, at the same time, they can also present some differences.43

University of La Laguna Campus de Guajara s/n 38207 La Laguna, Sta Cruz de Tenerife Spain agomez@ull.es

41 Wenceslao J. Gonzalez, Sobre la prediccin en Ciencias Sociales: Anlisis de la propuesta de Merrilee Salmon, in: Enrahonar 37, 2005, p. 193. 42 Amparo Gmez, Mechanisms, Tendencies and Capacities, in: Peruvian Journal of Epistemology, v. 2, forthcoming. 43 Gonzalez, Sobre la prediccin en Ciencias Sociales: Anlisis de la propuesta de Merrilee Salmon, p. 188.