"DES-CONSTRUCCIÓN" Y ARQUEOLOGÍA: LA REPRESENTACIÓN CIENTÍFICA DE FENÓMENOS DEL PASADO Y LA FORMACIÓN DE ARQUEÓLOGOS

Abstract

I want to suggest that archaeology challenges undergraduates not just to categorize the past, but, moreover, to represent it in terms of contemporary meaningfulness. I maintain that arguments drawn from social philosophy fa11 down because they hardly begin to get to grips with problems of how change and diversity emerge. The optimistic neopositivism of such
arguments is incommensurable with, and inappropriate to, interpretation of material remains. Archaeologists, often unwittingly, carry out not only primary but also secondary transformations of their observations. Archaeological data resulting therefrom may be incommensurable with ostensibly similar observations documented by historical or ethnographical records. I shall argue that a healthy scepticism, based on critical realism and refutationist strategies, offers a more sure way to create genuinely archaeological knowledge than do interpretations drawn from other disciplines. We urgently need to improve the performance criteria for probing
archaeological observations in order to construct strictly archaeological knowledge. If this implies distrust in ethnographical or historical actualism for interpreting archaeological observations, it opens the way to consdiering them as echoes of music from the past which has been decomposed into fragments of different length, tone, pitch, amplitude, and wavelength. The challenge of archaeology is to clear our minds of actualistic preconceptions -«to deconstruct archaeology»- ant to re-present the echoes from the past inw ays which have meaning for contemporary research. I shall argue that the material character of the archaeological record requires that scientific research be given pride of place here. The challenge for teaching archaeology is how to redress an imbalance which has long favoured uncritical realism over
critical realism. Put another way, I shall argue that a prescriptive methodology for a normative epistemology is a fundamental prerequisite if archaeology is ever to be regarded by students as an autonomous discipline.