ARTICLE Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2017

Vol. 50, No. 2, 101–115, https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2017.1367031

The Two Cultures and a World Apart:

Archaeology and Science at a New
Crossroads
TIM FLOHR SØRENSEN
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Within the past decade or so, archaeology has increasingly utilised and con-
tributed to major advances in scientific methods when exploring the past. This
progress is frequently celebrated as a quantum leap in the possibilities for
understanding the archaeological record, opening up hitherto inaccessible
dimensions of the past. This article represents a critique of the current con-
sumption of science in archaeology, arguing that the discipline’s grounding in
the humanities is at stake, and that the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is becom-
ing distorted with the increasing fetishisation of ‘data’, ‘facts’ and quantitative
methods. It is argued that if archaeology is to break free of its self-induced
inferiority to and dependence on science, it must revitalise its methodology for
asking questions pertinent to the humanities.

conditions of the Scientific Turn nevertheless

INTRODUCTION
After witnessing and participating in the
Linguistic Turn, the Spatial Turn, the
Practice Turn, the Material Turn, the
Affective Turn, the Ontological Turn and
what have you, archaeology is now at the
crossroads of what I want to describe as a
‘Scientific Turn’. This may be termed as a
‘new empiricism’ marked by a positivist incli-
nation that celebrates quantitative data and
absolute facts as the constitution of archaeolo-
gical knowledge. Of course, the use of science
is nothing new to archaeology (Trigger 2006,
pp. 23–24, Lidén and Eriksson 2013, pp.
12–13, Killick 2015b), but I hold it to be rela-
tively uncontroversial to observe that the dis-
cipline today increasingly relies on methods
deriving from the realm of science.
While achievements developed through
scientific methods are undeniable, the
pose a number of crucial questions with
regards to the fundamentals of archaeologi-
cal epistemology. These challenges are only
slowly beginning to be addressed explicitly in
current debates within archaeology (see, e.g.,
Kristiansen 2014, Sørensen 2014, Hillerdal
and Siapkas 2015, Chapman and Wylie
2016, Sørensen 2016b, in addition to the spe-
cial issue of Current Swedish Archaeology
(vol. 21) on archaeology and archaeological
science). This lack of critique, or ‘resistance’
(Killick 2015a, p. 243), perhaps results from
the current optimism connected with expand-
ing possibilities within scientific research
methods. In turn, however, this science opti-
mism triggers a mistrust of methods and
interpretations grounded in the humanities.
Thus archaeological ‘knowledge’ is increas-
ingly perceived as depending on observations
that have been quantified or ‘proven’ by

Tim Flohr Sørensen, The Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: klq302@hum.ku.dk

© 2017 Norwegian Archaeological Review

 102 Tim Flohr Sørensen
scientific methods, while non-testable inter-
pretations and deductions are circumscribed
by suspicion or considered hypothetical. This
scepticism about humanities’ epistemology
effectively means that archaeology’s identity
as a discipline within the humanities is chal-
lenged at a very fundamental level.
Voicing this concern is not a criticism of the
natural sciences, but rather cause for a delib-
eration on the ways in which science and
scientific data are consumed within the huma-
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nities, in this case archaeology, including the
partly self-induced and partly structurally
imposed lack of confidence in knowledge
obtained through methods grounded in the
humanities. As such, I am sceptical of
Kristian Kristiansen’s (2014, p. 17) conviction
that the Scientific Turn will trigger a new
mode of theorisation within archaeology as a
result of advances in ‘Big Data’, new quanti-
tative modelling, aDNA studies, strontium
isotopic analyses and so on.
I thereby also question the perception that
processual and postprocessual archaeologies
have vanished (Kristiansen 2014, p. 14). On
the contrary, I think that these agendas are
very much alive and influential today, and
have co-existed for many years. This implies
that the so-called postmodern attitude
towards the local and the particular never
replaced, but only supplemented, a more
positivist concern with large-scale and uni-
versalist explanations. In fact, even the clas-
sics of postprocessual archaeology (e.g.
Hodder 1990, Tilley 1996, Thomas 1999)
did not abstain ‘from the big questions’,
such as human-nature interaction and culture
(as argued by Kristiansen 2011, p. 77), yet
such phenomena were approached through
local contexts (Sørensen 2015, p. 111).
However, it is precisely the longevity of the
processualist disposition in parts of the
archaeological environment that opens the
door for the Scientific Turn (see also Killick
2015b, p. 159). Accordingly, I am not con-
vinced that we can speak of a ‘third science
revolution’ marking ‘a new paradigm’ as sug-
gested by Kristiansen (2014). Rather, I
consider the Scientific Turn to be in direct
continuity with and a reinforcement of the
scientific undercurrents that have followed
the ‘second science revolution’ (i.e. ‘the
radiocarbon revolution’, Kristiansen 2014,
p. 20) and processual archaeology. In other
words, I hold the Scientific Turn to be synon-
ymous with a ‘Scientific Return’, a ‘New
Empiricism’ or a ‘New New Archaeology’.
Even though I regard the Scientific Turn to
be an intensification of the science agenda in
the humanities, rather than something genu-
inely new, I do identify at least three chal-
lenges associated with the extended
archaeological reliance on science, and with
the largely unquestioned primacy of ‘data’
and the authority of ‘facts’ associated with
the Scientific Turn. First, I contend that the
Scientific Turn in archaeology comes with a
price that remains largely overlooked,
namely that archaeology’s approximation to
science has produced a growing suspicion
towards interpretations that cannot be scien-
tifically proven or quantified objectively.
Second, I believe that the increasing suspi-
cion of unquantifiable occurrences in archae-
ology generates an unhelpful return to the
ethos of letting ‘data speak for itself’
(Gramsch 2011, p. 52, Johnson 2011),
because – as the popular legend goes –
‘facts do not lie’ and thus become associated
with ‘truth’ (Prescott 2013b, p. 50, Gattiglia
2015, p. 116). Third, I argue that the
Scientific Turn has resulted in a perceived
need to force scientific methods onto other-
wise ambiguous archaeological research
topics, quite often leading to a liberal, even
careless, use of scientific data and, more
importantly, a distorted notion of
interdisciplinarity.
The purpose if this critique is not simply to
revive the hopelessly tiresome processual/
post-processual collision of two forms of aca-
demic idealism. Rather, the aim of this article
is to discuss epistemological challenges that
currently emerge in archaeology at the cross-
roads of science and the humanities. While
some would say that science and archaeology

are becoming more integrated (e.g. Jørgensen
2015, p. 136, Torrence et al. 2015, pp. 6–7), I
make the case that the two areas of research
in fact find themselves together at a cross-
roads where epistemological directions and
destinations still remain different.
Fundamentally, at the confluence of science
and the humanities, I suggest that we need to
explore how archaeologists ask questions and
not least why they ask questions.
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WORLDS APART
More than half a century ago, CP Snow
(1959) argued in his seminal volume ‘The
Two Cultures’ that Western academia was
split into two distinct and largely incompatible
cultures: the sciences and the humanities.
Snow’s work has had tremendous effects on
intellectual life in Western society, especially
in the Anglophone world, and is widely con-
sidered one of the most influential texts on the
public discourse on academia in the latter half
of the 20th century. As the title suggests,
Snow argued that Western academia was
divided into two separate ‘cultures’ – the
science culture and the humanities culture –
marked by a division so deep that knowledge
and communication across them were failing
to a degree where academics had become
ignorant of the merits and logics of the other
‘culture’. This resulted in an intellectual envir-
onment divided into what Snow termed two
‘polar groups’, separated by ‘a gulf of incom-
prehension, sometimes hostility and dislike,
but most of all lack of understanding’ (p. 4).
Obviously discontent with this polarity,
Snow’s critique aimed to show how the
British educational system had produced gen-
erations of young people, who were, on the
one hand, fully conversant with key virtues of
the humanities, such as literature, philoso-
phy, history and art, while, on the other,
not proficient in science and engineering. In
particular, Snow was concerned that scholars
within the humanities were ‘ignorant’ of the
most basic terms of science. In an often-cited
passage, he exemplifies this inadequacy by
The Two Cultures and a World Apart 103
referring to one of the daily or weekly formal
dinners at a Cambridge college:
A good many times I have been present at gather-
ings of people who, by the standards of the tradi-
tional culture, are thought highly educated and
who have with considerable gusto been expressing
their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once
or twice I have been provoked and have asked the
company how many of them could describe the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response
was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking
something which is the scientific equivalent of:
Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? (Snow
1959, pp. 15–16, emphasis in original)
Snow then concludes: ‘I now believe that if I
had asked an even simpler question – such as,
What do you mean by mass, or acceleration,
which is the scientific equivalent of saying,
Can you read? – not more than 1 in 10 of
the highly educated would have felt that I
was speaking the same language’ (Snow
1959, pp. 16, emphasis in original).
A number of archaeologists refer to
Snow’s argument in their discussion of the
relationship between archaeology and
science (Jones 2002, pp. 1–2, Pollard and
Heron 2008, p. 408, Prescott 2013a, p. 42,
2013b, p. 51, Kristiansen 2014, p. 26).
Emphasis is often on Snows observation
of the distance between the two ‘cultures’,
while I believe that this is to be appreciated
not so much an observation of a relation-
ship than as a critique of the humanities. In
fact, I argue that Snow’s argument has
become so influential that it has turned
the tables between the humanities and
science since the 1950s. While Snow was
provoked by the unchallenged cultural
capital of the arts over science in Britain
at the middle of the previous century, we
are today confronted with a research poli-
tics that gives priority to scientific methods
and scientific results. In Denmark, for
instance, this may be exemplified by the
inability of the humanities to produce
Centres of Excellence granted by the
National Research Foundation
 104 Tim Flohr Sørensen
(Grundforskningscentre in Danish, literally
‘centres of basic research’, i.e. in principle
non-applied research, albeit centres for
applied research are also supported nowa-
days). The programme for Centres of
Excellence was initiated in 1993 and has
resulted in 100 centres so far, of which 39
are active today (as of March 20171). Of
the total of 100 centres, 11 have been
grounded in the humanities and theology,
while the majority – by far – has been
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based in natural science and technical dis-
ciplines. Since 2005, out of a total of 56
new centres, 4 humanities centres have
opened, but only 2 of the 4 are grounded
in a research strategy independent of
science, namely a centre for medieval litera-
ture studies and a centre for socio-linguistic
research. The remaining active centres
based in the humanities rest on the premise
that science is imperative to improving the
insights of the humanities.
This leads me to ask what consequences the
recent escalation of the political capital of
science has for archaeology. If science is per-
ceived to be the main provider of ‘knowledge’
– as indicated by the failure of the humanities
to produce Centres of Excellence in Denmark
– it seems that the discipline is compelled to
assume the science path. For Danish archae-
ology this will not be a revolutionising step,
but simply fall in line with already strong
positivist leanings, where being ‘empirical’
acts as a measure against ‘speculation’. It is
perhaps no coincidence that the only two dis-
tinctly archaeological Centres of Excellence
(the Centre for Textile Research, 2005–2016,
and the Centre for Urban Network
Evolutions, 2015–) both have been grounded
in scientific methods and based in pronounced
empirically oriented methodologies, while a
historical and archaeological centre (the
Centre for Black Sea Studies, 2002–2010)
included science as one amongst a variety of
research strategies.
However, this condition is not restricted to
archaeological research in Denmark. Despite
the common notion that archaeological
theory gradually or rapidly is replaced by
new paradigms (but see Lucas 2016), the
longevity of ‘science-assisted empiricism’ has
remained an undercurrent in archaeology
internationally (Killick 2015b, p. 159).
Being ‘empirical’ is thus commonly taken as
a token of sound research. Some tendencies
in archaeology furthermore imply a per-
ceived equation between being ‘empirical’
and being ‘scientific’, which effectively sug-
gests that the humanities are somehow ‘less
empirical’ than science, or working through
methods that are less stringent, rigid and
reliable. The notion of ‘scientific facts’ is
even sometimes posed as the opposite of
‘speculation’, while ‘subjectivity’ is taken as
synonymous with ‘impressionism’. For
instance, Lawrence G. Straus argues that:
It is indeed telling that, with the latest wave of
non-scientific archaeology, concern for the record
and how it was formed has waned. It is as if, once
they learned how hard it was to obtain informa-
tion from the record, many archaeologists simply
gave up and began to speculate on prehistoric
belief systems, worldviews, and societal relations,
drawing more on empathy, subjective impressions,
and preconceived notions than on analyses of
facts. (Straus 2004, p. S104)
There is little doubt that this critique taps
into the classic schism between processual
and post-processual archaeologies, yet I
believe it also represents a widespread persis-
tence of positivist ideals in the current
archaeological climate, even after the proces-
sual/post-processual collisions lost momen-
tum. Straus’ caricature of ‘speculations’ on
belief systems, worldviews and social rela-
tions through ‘empathy’ and ‘subjectivity’
implies that Snow’s aim to underscore the
prominence of science has in many respects
been successful; that which is testable, quan-
tifiable and falsifiable is reliable, and the
alternative is a capricious and unsubstan-
tiated ‘impressionism’.
But consider also how the quote above
presumes that it is more difficult to work
along the lines of a scientific programme

than its non-scientific counterpart. I am not
sure why doing science is considered more
difficult than doing humanities research, and
this preconception could easily be turned on
its head, allowing me to rephrase Straus thus:
It is indeed telling that, with the latest wave of
scientific archaeology, concern for archaeological
interpretation and how it is formed has waned. It
is as if, once they learned how hard it is to obtain
an understanding of the past, many archaeologists
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simply gave up and began to measure strontium,
ancient DNA, and radio carbon, drawing more on
description, quantification, and the illusion of
objectivity than on the theorisation of traces of
the past.
Caricatures such as Straus’ and my para-
phrase are of course entirely unhelpful, and
they may illustrate the underlying ‘gulf of
incomprehension’ between science and
humanities, as coined by Snow. This ‘incom-
prehension’ is synonymous with what Lidén
and Eriksson (2013, p. 12) describe as ‘the
filter’: a mental barrier, separating some
archaeologists and some scientist. They
relate, for the archaeological part, how
some archaeologists claim themselves not to
understand science or that scientists do not
understand archaeology. On the other hand,
they argue, the ‘filter’ can be applied by
scientists, arguing that archaeologists compli-
cate things unnecessarily by requiring context
and cultural aspects to be factored into the
scientific study of archaeological material. I,
no doubt, belong to the first category, with a
limited proficiency in scientific methods, yet
my intention is not to argue for a disentan-
glement of humanities from science through
a ‘gulf of incomprehension’ or a ‘filter’, nor
am I interested in passing accusations or ridi-
cule towards the ‘other side’.
I do remain critical, nevertheless, of the
role science currently assumes in archaeol-
ogy. We may presume that scientific methods
can be used simply to supply knowledge that
is inaccessible through other archaeological
methods, merely as a neutral provider of
objective facts. The challenge is that the
The Two Cultures and a World Apart 105
science agenda is currently so strong that it
leaves not only facts but also a significant
epistemological impact on the ways in
which knowledge is defined in archaeology,
compelling us to consider how science is con-
sumed and applied in archaeology.
EVERYTHING FROM ALMOST
NOTHING
Let me exemplify this mode of consumption,
illustrating the problems with the reception
and conclusions based on scientific data as
opposed to the interpretations made on the
basis of the humanities. First, it is important
for me to stress that the problem does not
have to do with science itself, but rather with
the perceived need to apply scientific data in
order to resolve humanities research issues.
One such research issue has been a theme in
Scandinavian archaeology for more than a
century, and concerns the movement of peo-
ple and the exchange of material culture
across Europe in the Bronze Age, and more
specifically the origins of metal in Southern
Scandinavia during this period. This topic
has been subject to intense studies at least
over the past decades, but has in fact been a
staple since the very beginning of systematic
Bronze Age research in the 19th century
(Müller 1897, pp. 280–282, Montelius 1903).
Recently, Johan Ling and a team of
researchers published the findings of a project
on the provenances of the copper used in the
production of bronze in the Scandinavian
Bronze Age (Ling et al. 2013, 2014). Ling
and his team conducted isotopic and chemi-
cal analyses of initially 33 (2013) and later a
total of 71 (2014) artefacts from Sweden
dated to the period between 2000 and
700BC, relating the analyses to samples
from European copper ores. They conclude
that the copper cannot derive from ores in
Norway and Sweden, and instead trace the
provenance to ores on the Iberian Peninsula
and Sardinia, and to some extent from
Austria. Ling and his team first argued that
they could scientifically prove that the copper
 106 Tim Flohr Sørensen
for production of the initially 33 specimens
‘undoubtedly’ must have derived from else-
where (Ling et al. 2013, p. 303), but later
went on to argue to have ‘proved without
doubt that the metals dated to the Nordic
Bronze Age found in Sweden were not
smelted from the local copper ores’ (Ling
et al. 2014, p. 106, emphasis added, also,
Ling and Stos-Gale 2015b, pp. 191–192).
I do not doubt the correctness of the scien-
tific investigations, but I believe that it is
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worth considering the rhetoric weight with
which the results are used to confidently
reject the possibility of local copper mining
in Scandinavia in the Bronze Age. Cross-
European exchange networks and patterns
of mobility and contact have been discussed
for more than a century, and most of these
studies suggest, on the basis of culture histor-
ical deduction, typology and stylistic analyses
of a vast body of archaeological artefacts
(Sørensen 2015, p. 157), that metals derived
from outside of Scandinavia. These conclu-
sions, however, seem only to be considered
correct once backed by archaeological
science (compare with Prescott 2013a, p.
41). Humanistic methodology based on ‘simi-
larity in forms, decorations and designs’ is
thus considered to lead merely to ‘interesting
proposals’ (Ling and Stos-Gale 2015a, p.
222) rather than knowledge as such (see also
Pollard and Bray 2015, p. 126).
In contrast to the extensive body of arte-
facts examined through non-scientific
research principles for more than a century,
the most recent publication by Ling and his
team accounts for an examination of 71 arte-
facts (Ling et al. 2014). These artefacts are
distributed over a period of 1300 years, giv-
ing roughly 18 artefacts per century. If zoom-
ing in on the sample from the Late Neolithic
and the earliest Bronze Age (between 2000
and 1500BC), the sample consists of only 10
artefacts from the entire modern Swedish
area. Ironically, the scientific basis for prov-
ing without doubt that copper was not
extracted locally in Scandinavia between
2000 and 1500BC thus rests on a mere 10
artefacts out of a total body of metal objects
that can be counted in the thousands (e.g.
Aner and Kersten 1973, Oldeberg 1974,
1976, Vandkilde 1996, Willroth 1985).
Hence, detailed and absolute, science-based
knowledge about 10 artefacts are projected
on to thousands of other – yet un-sampled –
artefacts, and moreover on to artefacts that
we must presume have vanished or been re-
melted since the Early Bronze Age.
Of course, it might be argued that Ling
and his team offer a modest tentative analy-
sis, and that we have to be careful about the
implications drawn from a limited statistical
material. However, this statistic selection – or
construction – of data, and the use of frag-
mented evidence, deserves a transparent cri-
tical framework (Pearce 2016). First and
foremost the relationship between ‘data’ and
‘knowledge’ becomes somewhat obscured in
the work of Ling and his team of investiga-
tors through a strategy of deducing ‘every-
thing from almost nothing’ (Latour 1988, p.
163). This prompts us to consider how repre-
sentative those 71 artefacts, distributed over
1300 years, are for the extraction of raw
materials and cultural exchange across the
European continent. Does the analysis tell
us anything at all about artefacts that have
not been sampled, or is the ultimate conclu-
sion that all we know now is that these parti-
cular 71 artefacts did not derive from
Scandinavian ores?
I have no quarrels with the validity of the
findings or the methods applied in the work
by Ling and his team, and the results have
indeed been accepted by a number of
researchers (e.g. Bradley and Nimura 2013,
Bunnefeld 2016, Earle et al. 2015,
Kristiansen and Suchowska-Ducke 2015,
Vandkilde 2014, 2016, 2015, Varberg et al.
2015, but see also Knapp 2015). However, I
do believe that unwavering conclusions on
the basis of a limited quantity of data –
regardless how well-illuminated and well-
researched – is problematic. The optimistic
attitude to absolute data, regardless of quan-
tity and representativity, seems, however, to

be reproduced in the current mainstream
archaeological consumption of science. The
reason may be, as MA Smith argued long
ago, that ‘the very precision of scientific ana-
lyses … do[es] tend to have a rather hypnotic
effect on the mind’ (Smith 1955, p. 3). The
critique of the recalcitrance of empirical evi-
dence (Wylie 2008, p. 186) could thus be
directed towards numerous studies that cate-
gorically reduce or eliminate the role of
absent data and the potential vagueness or
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ambiguity of data in the scientific pursuit of
the human past (Sørensen 2016b). Gero
(2007) criticises this archaeological desire
for certainty despite de facto fragmented
and limited data resolutions. She argues that
archaeologists tend to stage a rhetoric of
‘unambiguous certainty’ in their conclusions,
even though the archaeological evidence is
most often fragmented, partial or elusive.
She contends that the most respected and
successful archaeological literature manages
to disguise ambiguities in a rhetorical ‘certi-
tude’ of understated and implicit uncertain-
ties (Gero 2007, p. 313).
Furthermore, recent advances in archaeo-
logical science somehow leads to the percep-
tion that older, non-scientific observations
and interpretations are less reliable than
those based on or backed up by a scientific
research design, where a research question
leads to a hypothesis, explored in tangible
data through well-defined methods, leading
to quantifiable and testable results. Science
has thus, as Mark Pollard and Peter Bray
(2015, p. 126) argue, ‘come to be regarded
as a superior form of knowledge’.
Accordingly, isotopic analyses, aDNA ana-
lyses, high-precision dating methods and
accurate taphonomy are in parts of the
archaeological environment perceived as cap-
able of answering archaeological problems
that were previously considered ‘metaphysi-
cal’ (Thomas 2015, p. 11). While it is possible
to obtain an exhausting (yet not exhaustive)
amount of data from each individual archae-
ological artefact through scientific methods,
the challenge is to know whether this yields
The Two Cultures and a World Apart 107
information about anything other than that
particular artefact.
It appears that deducing ‘everything from
almost nothing’ sometimes means that scien-
tific ‘data’ becomes a ‘fetish’: it is attributed
with an immanent absolute power, whereby
even the faintest piece of absolute data can
overcome interpretations, ‘speculation’ and
subjective reasoning. This is achieved by
first elevating a statistically limited data sam-
ple to constitute authoritative ‘evidence’ and
then by claiming that ‘data’ are more trust-
worthy than interpretations. However, this
fetishisation of data disregards some basic
premises of archaeological material, for
instance, as Robert Chapman and Alison
Wylie argue, that ‘archaeological evidence is
inherently unstable’, depending on ‘the vag-
aries of survival of material traces’ and the
resources (technical as well as intellectual) at
the archaeologists’ disposition (Chapman
and Wylie 2016, p. 19). They continue,
‘archaeological evidence is not an autono-
mous, self-warranting empirical “founda-
tion”, different in kind from the theoretical
claims it supports or is used to test; it is,
itself, an interpretative construct’ (Chapman
and Wylie 2016, p. 19). This problem relates
to science just as much as the humanities,
and both cultures need to address it and to
make it transparent in relation to the empiri-
cal and theoretical conditions of their
research questions.
WHAT IS IN A QUESTION?
This leads to a fundamental question, then,
which regards the methodology for making
inquiries in the humanities and science: are
these inquiries based on similar conditions?
What is the measure of success for inquiries
in the humanities and science? Do humanities
researchers and science researchers ask ques-
tions in comparable ways? As indicated
above, the discipline of archaeology rests on
the fragmentary, the partial, the corrupted;
that which is given to us only by chance. This
condition cannot be resolved through ‘data’
 108 Tim Flohr Sørensen
offering us ‘exact’ or ‘objective’ knowledge:
we can only make sense of it through a super-
structure of disciplined and critical specula-
tion, no matter how much absolute and
objective data we collect. In the humanities,
data can never resolve the research question,
and the same question can be phrased and
rephrased over and over again, which means
that we are in fact unlikely ever to reach a
conclusive ‘result’ as such.
To me, this illustrates that the challenge we
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are facing at the crossroads of science and the
humanities is not resolved merely by becom-
ing more conversant with the nature of
research across the disciplines, as suggested
by Snow. Rather, we need to consider the
potential that a question, an observation, an
object, a fact, are not synonymous concepts
in science and in the humanities. Why else
would we apply different methods and theo-
retical perspectives? But – most importantly –
this difference calls us to consider how we are
phrasing our research questions: what we are
pursuing? What do we want to know, and
how do we want to know it?
Take for instance the well-know and
entirely trivial archaeological example of a
grave. The grave lends itself to a variety of
questions that may differ fundamentally from
those arising from the sophisticated techni-
ques of recent advances in science. We may
be interested in the sex of the buried indivi-
dual, so we examine the osteological evidence
and look at the objects associated with the
skeletal remains to see whether they fall
within a known gender pattern. The answer
to the question ‘Is this a man or a woman?’ is
‘Female’, ‘Male’ or ‘Undetermined’. From a
humanities perspective, this answer is of
course not enough, because what did
‘Female’ or ‘Male’ mean to the buried indi-
vidual and to her or his society? Did these
categories exist, and if so, were they binary
and as static as in contemporary Western
society, or were they complemented by
further gender categories or the mobility of
gender categories? If the grave is from the
Early Bronze Age of Southern Scandinavia,
we may find objects associated with the
human remains, such as a bronze belt plate
and a neck collar, and thus face the rather
comfortable task of determining that this is
the grave of a female individual, because belt
plates and neck collars have so far never been
found in graves that have been sexed osteo-
logically as ‘male’ (Fig. 1). Then we might
wonder, ‘why were some women buried with
belt plates and neck collars?’, and point to
‘elites’, ‘high status individuals’, ‘power’ or
‘wealth’ as the (rather clichéd) explanation.
However, to my mind the appropriate ques-
tion would be: ‘What does this bronze belt
plate and neck collar tell us about percep-
tions of gender among certain members of
Early Bronze Age societies of Southern
Scandinavia?’ And here is no concise answer,
regardless how closely we examine the belt
plate or how fine-tuned strontium isotope
analyses we conduct on the buried individual.
So the question is whether issues of percep-
tion of gender have to be relegated to the
realm of conjecture, alongside ‘belief systems,
worldviews and societal relations’, as indi-
cated by Straus, because such phenomena
depend on empathy and subjectivity rather
than the factuality of the archaeological
record, examined though an empiricist, falsi-
fiable research design. I find it difficult, how-
ever, to see any point in archaeology –
whatsoever – if it does not address topics
like ‘belief systems, worldviews, and societal
relations’, which must eventually be recon-
structed and understood through an interpre-
tative methodology within which the
researcher is necessarily grounded subjec-
tively. If the aim of archaeology is to arrive
at some form of understanding of people and
societies in the past and the present, I find it
difficult to imagine how this might be possi-
ble without some degree of empathy and
subjectivity. Empathy, firstly, is not the
same as sympathy: empathy is a conscious
approach that a researcher can assume, and
not an untethered flow of involuntary emo-
tions between researcher and Other
(Sørensen 2016a, p. 125). Empathy, rather,
 The Two Cultures and a World Apart 109
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Fig. 1. Objects from burial mound at Ølby, Højelse parish, Denmark (after Boye 1896, plate XXVI;
illustration by Andreas Peter Madsen).
 110 Tim Flohr Sørensen
is the strategic capacity to be able to imagine
another person’s perspective (Hollan and
Throop 2011).
Subjectivity, secondly, is methodologically
grounded, and requires as much stringency
and transparency as any idealised notion of
objectivity. We may recall how phenomenol-
ogy – a deeply subjectivist methodology –
rests on the fundamental ‘bracketing’ or sus-
pension of established preconceptions. The
purpose of bracketing, or the epoché, is to
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suspend the ‘usual ontological, epistemologi-
cal, and axiological baggage’ (Sheets-
Johnstone 1999, p. 189) without returning
to some idealist illusion of objectivity.
Through the epoché, ‘the familiar becomes
strange’, allowing us to examine phenomena
anew (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, p. 265).
I furthermore propose that ‘speculation’
can be a sound and productive – perhaps
even necessary – mode of inquiry if carried
out critically and methodically (Sørensen
2016b, pp. 758–759). If the aim of archaeol-
ogy is to understand past (and present) socie-
ties, the discipline cannot rest on objective
facts alone, but needs to make connections
between objective facts and elusive occur-
rences in the social realm. This construction
of context can only be achieved through
some degree of methodical speculation, and
the challenge is to own up to the mandate
given to us by lacunae and fragmentation in
the archaeological record. Results from
archaeological science can help feed many
of these speculations, yet while science can
provide data, we need to acknowledge that
the nature of inquiry within the humanities is
endless: any answer we arrive at only
unleashes a host of new questions.
THIRD CULTURE OR
ACCULTURATION?
I would like to return to Snow’s anecdote
about the humanities scholar who failed to
account for the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, which for Snow is the
same as not knowing the works of
Shakespeare. We also saw how Snow argues
that asking the question, ‘What do you mean
by mass or acceleration?’, is the scientific
equivalent of saying ‘Can you read?’ These
provocations, formulated in the middle of the
20th century, are calls for a greater knowl-
edge of disciplines outside of one’s own.
However, I believe that we now stand at
another crossroads in academia, challenging
us in new ways. We are required no-longer
simply to know about the principles, methods
or facts of other fields of research, but even
more we are challenged to be able to com-
prehend and respect different modes of ask-
ing questions and different incitements for
asking these questions without claiming our
own academic culture as the measure of all
academia, and without rejecting methodolo-
gies from other fields when they do not cor-
respond to ours.
It may be suggested that the resolution to
the problem of ‘two cultures’ lies in a ‘third
culture’, bridging the cultural differences. In
his second edition of The Two Cultures,
Snow (1963) did in fact consider a ‘third
culture’ to mediate science and the huma-
nities (Snow 1963, pp. 70–71). Today,
‘cross-disciplinary’ or ‘interdisciplinary’
research is encouraged by universities and
various research funding bodies, and this
goes for archaeology as well as other disci-
plines. To me, however, the question remains
whether such ‘genuine collaboration’ and
‘integration’ (Lidén and Eriksson 2013, p. 8)
really resolve the polarity between the huma-
nities and sciences, or whether they galvanise
the politically strongest academic agenda at
any given time. We keep hearing about the
benefits of interdisciplinary work and about
the promises of integrating disciplinary
knowledge, but I wonder why we so rarely
address the associated challenges and conse-
quences for the humanities.
Today, interdisciplinarity is considered an
unquestionable benefit for archaeology, but
we need to be aware of the potential down-
sides to this interdisciplinarity paradigm. Do
interdisciplinary engagements not come with

a price when we consider the political dom-
inance of the science agenda today? How
does the ‘inter-’ affect archaeological episte-
mology? How does it influence the theoretical
foundation of how we ask questions and how
we critique the nature of our knowledge? In
other words, epistemologies across huma-
nities and science may differ, and they may
hinge on fundamentally disparate ways of
knowing.
The problem, as I identify it, is not scien-
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tific resolutions to scientific problems, but
rather the fundamental epistemological chal-
lenge to archaeology in the wake of the
Scientific Turn: namely, the increasingly
widespread perception that social and cul-
tural topics in archaeology not only can be,
but need to be, addressed and resolved
through scientific methods. This has implied
that phenomena such as belief, cosmology,
social relations, identity, exchange, value,
power, gender, movement, knowledge, tem-
porality, memory, emotion and so on must
be studied through quantifiable data or – if
this is not possible – eschewed entirely. The
result is a new definition of the term ‘inter-
disciplinarity’ in archaeology. Where it once
described collaboration between archaeology
and any other discipline, it is today synon-
ymous with the incorporation of scientific
methods in archaeology, and even with a
marginalisation of a number of central tenets
within the humanities, such as ‘subjective
impressions’ and ‘empathy’, which I hold to
be indispensable to solid humanities research.
So the question is whether archaeology is
capable of adopting scientific methods as a
toolkit for exploring quantifiable aspects of
past and present societies, or whether it auto-
matically integrates the very principles and
epistemologies of science to the extent of
replacing its own.
In defence of interdisciplinary collabora-
tion between archaeology and science, Lidén
and Eriksson (2013, p. 18), Jones (2013, p.
22) and Shennan (2013, p. 48), for instance,
invoke Karl Popper’s (1963) famous dictum
that ‘We are not students of subject matter,
The Two Cultures and a World Apart 111
but students of problems’ (p. 88). In this, they
seem to assume that these problems can be
addressed within a unified epistemological
framework or through ‘a common language’
(Lidén and Eriksson 2013, p. 18). However,
Popper’s deceivingly quotable dictum
deserves to be read in the context of his sub-
sequent confession that ‘many problems,
even if their solution involves the most
diverse disciplines, nevertheless “belong” in
some sense to one or another of the tradi-
tional disciplines’, because ‘theories, as
opposed to subject matter, may constitute a
discipline’ (Popper 1963, p. 89, compare
with, Lucas 2015, p. 27). Accordingly, these
disciplinary theories – or epistemologies –
frame the approach to the problems, which
means that even if the problems are shared
across disciplines, they will be addressed in
different ways. Hence, add a discipline to the
solution of any given problem and the subject
matter will multiply (Mol 2002).
This condition should not deter us from
collaborating between disciplines, but it
indicates to me that if archaeology aims to
expand its capacity to understand past and
present societies it must own up to the chal-
lenge of asking questions pertinent to the
humanities, even if these questions do
not comply with the aims and design of
scientific inquiry. Such a strategy does not
imply the rejection of science from archae-
ology – by no means – nor should it be taken
to alienate different positions and methods
of operation (Pollard and Bray 2015, pp.
125–126). Rather, it is a call for a greater
appreciation of the plurality – rather than
polarity – of archaeology (Kristiansen 2004,
p. 77) and what the discipline can achieve by
being heterogeneous. It may thus be worth
considering the subtle difference between
‘interdisciplinary’/‘cross-disciplinary’ work
and ‘multi-disciplinary’ work; I take the for-
mer to indicate a disciplinary alignment
through interbreeding or crossbreeding,
while the latter describes multivocality, sus-
taining the strengths and principles of each
partner in the collaboration.
 112 Tim Flohr Sørensen

CONCLUSION as epistemologically messy, but as ontologi-

cally messy (Gattiglia 2015, Løvschal 2016):
The heterogenic, multi-disciplinary collabora-
if it is a fact that we cannot comprehend
tion between archaeology and science may thus
enormous amounts of complex data without
need to be advanced through questions of a
the aid of computational logarithms, then
different order than those revolving around
perhaps this is because the world is in fact
quantitative analyses or starting from science-
phenomenologically messy at times (see also
based premises. Archaeology is perhaps most
Sørensen 2016b). This observation may help
fundamentally challenged today by questions
us accept that the archaeological ‘record’ is
that evade epistemological concerns and revolve
always ‘fragmented and incomplete’ (Olsen
more crucially about ontological issues. To me,
2012a, p. 25), or only complete in so far as
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one of the most pressing questions within the

being complete with lacunae.
humanities, and certainly within archaeology,
My aim is not to create an unnecessary oppo-
today – as a consequence of agency theory,
sition between science and the humanities, and I
Actor-Network theory, relative ontologies, per-
want to conclude by emphasising once again
spectivism, the new materialisms, new ecology,
that this article is neither a criticism of science
post-humanist discourse, object-oriented ontol-
nor a critique of the principles of science. I wel-
ogy, Speculative Realism and assemblage theory
come dialogue between academic cultures, in
– is: ‘What is an object?’ This question is just as
particular when it occurs in a multi-disciplinary
important for the sciences as it is for the huma-
– as opposed to an interdisciplinary – setting,
nities broadly, and I believe that recent theore-
where epistemological differences are respect-
tical and philosophical developments force
fully maintained, even when they are seemingly
archaeology to take on this question directly.
contradictory to partner disciplines within the
Within this academic space, formulated by sev-
collaboration. Science and the humanities are
eral disciplines simultaneously, I anticipate that
indeed united by sharing the fundamental capa-
archaeology has something particular to offer
city for curiosity; deliberating sometimes on the
(Olsen 2012, p. 20, Thomas 2015, p. 21), being
same topics, but on different premises and
the very discipline of things (Olsen et al. 2012b)
potentially arriving at different answers that
and not least a most methodological engagement
are, nevertheless, equally valid. So, I do not
with things (Lucas 2015, p. 18). Yet at the same
have a problem with science. If I had a problem
time, I imply that a conclusive and stabilising
with science, I would probably conclude with
answer to the question is neither realistic nor
something along these lines:
desirable due to the open-ended nature of inter-
rogation in the humanities.
The question ‘What is an object?’ may in Absolutely no benefit can be derived from invol-
ving oneself with the natural sciences. One stands
fact also be where science has something spe-
there defenceless, with no control over anything.
cial to offer archaeology, not simply as a The researcher immediately begins to entertain
provider of facts, but as a contributor of with his details: now one is to go to Australia,
different ideas about the complexity of now to the moon; now into an underground
human-thing relations. It seems to me that cave; now, by Satan, up the arse – to look for an
science can help explore in what ways intestinal worm; now the telescope must be used;
humans are not just human (see, e.g., now the microscope: who the devil can endure it?
Fredengren 2014), contributing to a posthu- (Kierkegaard 2011, pp. 72–73)
manist archaeology, adding to the perspec-
tives initiated by symmetrical archaeology.
Also, I suspect that the realm of ‘Big Data’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
might perhaps contribute to the understand-
This article is developed from two lectures
ing of enormous quantities of data not only
given at the Centre for Textile Research at

the University of Copenhagen in 2016. I am
grateful for useful comments and critique at
the events, in particular from Luise Ørsted
Brandt, Jane Malcolm-Davis and Eva
Andersson Strand. Moreover, Mette
Løvschal and Juliane Wammen have contrib-
uted with valuable critique of a draft of this
article in addition to comments from two
peer reviewers. Views and errors in the article
remain my own.
Downloaded by [Indian Institute of Technology Madras] at 23:14 09 January 2018
NOTE
1 Hollan, D.W., and Throop, C.J., 2011. The
http://dg.dk/en/centers-of-excellence-2/list-of-all-
dnrfs-centers-of-excellence/ Accessed May 1, 2017.
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