Theme:
6. A Decade after the ‘Third Science Revolution in Archaeology’
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Macroarchaeology - Definition, Objectives and Applications of a New Archaeological Paradigm
Content:
Three years ago Charles Perreault published the “The Quality of the Archaeological Record”, where he systematically deconstructs archaeology as a field frequently operating outside what it can verify “beyond reasonable doubt”: “If juries were allowed to use the same test of consistency that archaeologists use, jails would be filled with innocent individuals and people would have no trust in the justice system.” (Perreault 2019, p.21)
He justifies his withering critique with the following argument: In the last decades archaeology has fully internalized originally sociological or ethnological microscale research questions, focussing on individual-level agency, social organisation or even religion. That is ineffective, because the archaeological record is not sufficient for that in sampling interval, resolution and dimensionality. The mismatch of research questions and data – the "underdetermination problem" – causes archaeologists to publish narratives that can neither be verified nor falsified.
Founded on Perreault’s analysis, this session seeks to explore the value in, barriers to, and arguments against a paradigm-shift towards what he introduces as “macroarchaeology”: a data-focussed search for long-term, large-scale patterns of human behaviour, which emerge through extrinsic environmental drivers as well as intrinsic cultural evolutionary dynamics. It entails setting aside microscale processes in favour of evaluating the archaeological record itself — just like palaeontology did with the fossil record — and a focus on a small number of universal research questions surrounding measurable population parameters (e.g. rates of change in artefact categories or correlations among group structure properties).
To engage a diverse set of speakers who scrutinize theoretical and technical challenges of macroarchaeology, we invite contributions that...
propose definitions and objectives for this field of research
critically engage with its theoretical foundations
argue for or against the paradigm
discuss how it could complement previous work
present research and datasets that fit a macroarchaeological frame of reference
Keywords:
Macroarchaeology, Quantitative archaeology, Archaeological theory, Spatio-temporal data analysis
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Clemens Schmid (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
David Matzig (Denmark) 2
Affiliations:
1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
2. Aarhus University
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT