Good Will Ranting

In the 1960s, Lewis Binford was at the forefront of a movement known as processualism. Two writers, Willey and Phillips, who some say began the movement, Stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958: 2).  Some expect that the nature of an anthropological problem will fall into our hands through narrative. Others rely purely on scientific reasoning and hypothesis testing. I would suggest that a combination of these two methods is ideal. Many have argued for the nullification of narrative, and that to gain more respect as a discipline, we need to rely more on hard sciences like physics, biology, and chemistry. However how hard are these sciences? They may be presented to peers in a manner that would suggest that they are relying only on the scientific method alone, but when documents such as this are presented to the general public, either through magazine, news release or otherwise, the dialect is changed to better suit the audience. I would argue that this usage of language, and the more than likely addition of the necessary aspects of a narrative would then make it soft. The reason archaeology is viewed as a soft science is that much of the hard data is left to human interpretation, and that the “individual” cited by post-processualists is bounded by the story created by the inferences of the individual studying them. They lack representative power because they are not vocally present, and as such the burden of accurately representing the construct of our humanity lies with the archaeologist. We have an immense amount of responsibility in the accurate representations of the past. This makes it extremely important that our inferences remain unbiased and free of political rhetoric. 








References:


Willey, G. R., Phillips, P., (1958) Method and Theory in American Archaeology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.