Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

DiogenesKynikos

While it's interesting to learn how indigenous cultures interpret archaeological sites, this article blurs the distinction between scientific and pre-scientific understanding of archaeology. It presents "Western science" (which should be referred to as "science," an international pursuit that happens to have begun in the West) as just another means of interpreting archaeological sites, alongside myths, folk beliefs, etc.

Reading this article (and looking at some of the other articles on the site) reminds me of what I've heard elsewhere about the deep rift in anthropology between the physical and the cultural anthropologists. It appears to me to be a conflict between a scientific worldview and an increasingly subjective, politically influenced worldview. One manifestation of this is the decision by the American Anthropological Association to remove the word "science" from its mission statement.[1-2]

1. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_a...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.ht...

Your links are 10 years old. The current website of the American Anthropological Association seems to have reconciled (compromised on) both views:

https://www.americananthro.org/

Their subtitle is "Advancing Knowledge, Solving Human Problems"

Their About page (https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...) says:

"The Association is dedicated to advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems. While 75 percent of our members are employed in higher education or are students of anthropology, about 25 percent of our members work in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors, beyond the academy."

The Statement of Purpose page (https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...) says:

"The purposes of the Association shall be

- to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research;

- and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems."

The very fact that they fought over whether or not to call their discipline a "science" shows that there's a rift in the field. I know this same issue has led to the breakup of some anthropology departments, including at Stanford (forced to merge again later), Duke and Harvard.

Although archaeology is certainly informed by scientific theory and uses the work of scientific fields like geology, it’s not truly a science. Crucially, archaeological excavations are not reproducible, and archaeological theories are not experimentally falsifiable. The same is true of cultural anthropology.

Many sciences are not reproducible, in that they don't have reproducible experiments. The key is the integrity of the data and clear explanation of the analysis methods.

But archaeology most definitely does have experimentally falsifiable theories, and it is undoubtedly a science.

What's a scientific field with non-reproducible experiments? I'm hard-pressed to think of any field with the kind of no-do-overs issues that archaeological excavations have.

Much of astronomy and astrophysics, for one, doesn’t even have the concept of experiments. They observe past behavior and predict future behavior, but they can’t do anything like the causal trials that define other sciences. Same with geology, the study of weather (sorry I’m blanking on the term), and some fields of biology. Anything that it is impossible to causally affect in a lab.

Paleontology.

You can't dig up the same fossil twice. But you're not going to claim that the study of ancient species using the fossil record is unscientific, I hope.

Paleontology is very similar to archaeology, but because humans aren't the object of study, it's less affected by politics, and I haven't heard of any fights within paleontology over whether to call the field a "science."

I don't think the term "science" has ever had a single unified definition. When people say "Physics is a science" and "Archaeology is a science", I'm not convinced those two sentences are using the word "science" in exactly the same sense (although of course they are using it in somewhat related senses).

Wittgenstein famously argued that there is nothing that all "games" have in common – there is no single common element to board games, card games, ball games – there is a "family resemblance" (Familienähnlichkeit) in which every "game" has some things in common with other "games", but there is no one thing that all games have in common.

Maybe something similar is true for sciences as well.

Archeology is what's called a historical science. One of the features of that designation is exactly the lack of general reproducibility you've identified. Geology (specifically subfields like geomorphology) has many of the same issues even though you've identified it as a scientific field.

That said, as someone who's been a practicing archaeologist, I would agree that it's not entirely scientific, but only because the interesting questions in it often aren't answerable in a scientific framework.

I don't see the problem. The questions anthropology seeks to answer are heavily influenced by politics and subjectivity; attempting to erase the imprecision with which humanity engages with reality paints an imprecise picture of humanity itself. As scientific inquiry is limited by the range of conceivable hypotheses (where that range is limited by experience, dogma, even bias) and available methods of observation, it seems imprudent to proclaim a "scientific worldview" (which is used inappropriately here, though not always elsewhere, as a synonym for "reason") as the be-all-end-all of interest. Especially in a society that has seen no small amount of reckless regard towards physical evidence of indigenous history. I see no reason to begrudge people the right to fill the vacuum left with whatever they like as long as it doesn't contradict physical evidence; they weren't the ones asking for developers to pave over grave sites. It's a bit of a, "lying in the bed you made," situation.

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