Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Perhaps the easiest way to think about this is to ask yourself the question
How would you know if you are wrong? (Smith 2015). When you give some
kind of explanation or interpretation to some data, do you have some way to
tell whether your ideas are right or wrong? Or, at a more basic level, when you
classify a sherd using a typology, when you label a soil layer as a floor, or
when you claim that a feature was a hearth or a temple or a latrinedo you
have a way to judge (and for others to judge) whether your idea is correct or
not? If not, then you may very well be guilty of confirmation bias.
If you havent read much in the other social sciences, you may be surprised at
how much attention is devoted to epistemology and methods, topics like
evidence and argument, explanation and causality, models and data. Check
out some of these textbooks; you might be surprised at how relevant they are
for archaeology: (6 and Bellamy 2012; Gerring 2007, 2012; Luker 2008; Ragin
and Amoroso 2011). Postmodernism hit disciplines like sociology and political
science, like it hit anthropology and archaeology. But these other disciplines
weathered the storm, and soon got back to (scientific) work, whereas
anthropology and archaeology are still wallowing in the mire of post-
postmodernism. Yes there are few poststructuralist sociologists out there, but
they are much rarer than mainstream scientific sociologists.
What are the social sciences all about? This is a big issue with a big literature,
but consider just one account. Daniel Little is a philosopher of science who
focuses on social science. His work is interesting, insightful, and very relevant
to archaeology. His blog, Understanding Society, is incredibly good. When I
taught a class on theory in archaeology, I had students read a bunch of his
posts. So here is a quote from one post, called Social scienceand social
problems Feb 16, 2008):
Does archaeology have a role to play here? Id argue that discovering the
causes of persistent social problems can benefit from our knowledge of
ancient societies. I agree with the literature on transdisciplinary research that
holds that many, if not all, of the traditional approaches, as well as many
heterodox tactics, fail to answer the most pressing issues plaguing the world
(Polimeni 2006:2); see also Baerwald (2010) or Wallerstein (2003). That is,
most of the major social problems today need the insights, methods, and
results of a number of scholarly disciplines, with scholars working together, to
understand and solve. The deep time perspective of archaeology should put us
into the mix, but only if we follow a scientific epistemology. I explore these
issues, with respect to the topic of cities and urbanism, in Smith (2012).
References
Baerwald, Thomas J.
2010 Presidential Address: Prospects for Geography as an Interdisciplinary
Discipline. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100: 493-01.
Bunge, Mario
2004 How Does It Work?: The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms. Philosophy of the
Social Sciences 34 (2): 182-210.
Gerring, John
2007 Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge University Press,
New York.
Nickerson, Raymond S.
1998 Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of
General Psychology 2 (2): 175-220.
Polimeni, John M.
2006 Transdisciplinary Research: Moving Forward. International Journal of
Transdisciplinary Research 1 (1): 1-3.
Smith, Michael E.
2007 Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban
Planning. Journal of Planning History 6 (1): 3-47.
2015 How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological
Record 15 (4): 18-23.
Tilly, Charles
2001 Relational Origins of Inequality. Anthropological Theory 1 (3): 355-372.
Wallerstein, Immanuel
2003 Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines. Current Anthropology
44: 453-465.