Introduction to Method and Theory in Archaeological Science

As I have mentioned before, I quit a master’s degree program in archaeology over a year ago. I do not regret having entered the program, however. I did get to work on Easter Island for six weeks—one of the most amazing of my experiences. I also got to take a course called “Method and Theory in Archaeological Science”. This course gave me the key that unlocks endless doors; it taught me how to think more powerfully. Way more powerfully.

You can think of Method and Theory as a Philosophy of Science course. My favorite former professor, Dr. Method and Theory, has made the course the keystone of both his research and instruction, because his quest in life is to turn archaeology into a science. Archaeology, he explained, on our first day of class, was never a science, and—despite the anthropological paradigm that holds otherwise—is not a science now.

“What do you think ‘science’ is, anyway?” he demanded.
Read more. . .

We knew Dr. Method and Theory well enough to know that it wasn’t an artistic response he wanted. Most suggestions were feeble, and many of us lapsed into thoughtful silence.

“We’ll come to that,” he reassured. “Before we can, however, you need to understand what this class is about. This class is a two-part class. The first part is about formal theory. The second part is about explanatory theory.”

Everyone scribbled or typed in notebooks.

“Formal theory should be distinguished from explanatory theory. The formal deals with nouns, and the explanatory with grammar.”

This sounded intriguing but weird. Luckily, Dr. Method and Theory explains himself well. (Whenever he doesn’t let his enthusiasm for and understanding of the topic carry him far, far away into the stratosphere, that is.) In science, he said, we need to appreciate the utility of words as concepts. In everyday life, we use words—like “tiger” and “arrowhead”—that enable us to describe objects to each other well enough. We trust that these words elicit the same ideas of the objects in the minds of everyone discussing them. In general, they do.

The key term is “in general”. Not everyone thinks of the same tiger when they use the word “tiger”. Likewise, not everyone thinks of the same arrowhead. This is true of all words that arise from our culture. So our everyday words don’t represent precise descriptions of the world. (For now, I, Juniper, am going to use the word “precise” to explain what I mean, even though I know it is potentially misleading.) In every language, we have organically generated these words out of our common sense.

Dr. Method and Theory paused to refer us to our handouts. Several comprised a glossary, in which he had provided a definition for common sense:

the culture bound sense-making system, including both units and rules for manipulation, that is acquired by every individual as part of being human and as a member of a society.

Well, what was wrong with that?

Nothing, our professor said. Until you try to do science.

When it comes to science, the problem with common sense is that it’s cryptic. We all know what we mean by common sense, but if you, say, went to the mall, arbitrarily chose a hundred shoppers and made each of them define “common sense”, you would get a hundred different answers. Moreover—outside of this class—you would have no right answer. You’d have an unpredictable amount of answers that made sense to most people, and maybe an assortment of nonsensical ones. All expressed in words that have the same problem.

After all, we can think of common sense as a survival mechanism. Philosophers have understood for some time that the physical world isn’t constrained by our perspective. We can only experience the physical world through our perspective, but we can also understand that the physical world exists apart from our perspective. Then, we can describe the world at different levels and scales. A tiger, for example, immediately appears to us as an organism—an object. If we wanted to, though, we could describe the same tiger in terms of particle physics.

Why does the tiger immediately appear to us as an object? Well, think of it this way. At the dawn of human evolution, when humans didn’t have highly specialized professions, and when everyone was focused on basic needs, who was more likely to live? The human who remained still and contemplated the nature of “tigerness” as it rushed toward her, or the human who thought, “Tiger! RUN!”

(Okay, okay. So Dr. Method and Theory, who, when asked to summarize Origin of Species, shrugged and said, “Darwin’s point was that there are no such things as species” while several biologists sputtered in their vain efforts to say something fancy, and whose cat and home I will take care of while he and his wife take their Christmas vacation this year, doesn’t really use phrases like “at the dawn of human evolution”. That’s just me employing my license as an English major. Which I have now done several times. Ahem.)

Therefore, common sense has helped people to stay alive and reproduce. What do we use, though, when we want to understand the world beyond “good” and “bad”? When we want to take measurements of the world in units other than “objects”, or in units that aren’t arbitrary?