9 - Communication and the importance of disciplinary communities: who owns the past?

Summary

Since the 1960s archaeology has become more disputatious than at any other time in its history. Practitioners openly debate conceptual and epistemological issues which lie at the core of the discipline. Archaeology exhibits such internal dissension that we are entitled to ask whether there are any disciplinary cultural norms left, whether there are any bedrock goals and understandings that can survive such disputation, and whether these norms of disciplinary behavior are necessary for there to be a productive future for the discipline. By extension, if what has served in the past as a basis for discourse is outmoded, can we replace it with a new account of disciplinary approach and purpose which facilitates communication and recognizes the diversity of the community of producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge?

Ironically, the prime cause of dissension, a positivist move to establish firmly that archaeology could be both scientific and relevant to the analysis of human affairs, was seen by its proponents as having the clear potential to reduce dispute by providing a generally agreed–upon basis for archaeological logic, archaeological epistemology, and archaeological ontology. Instead of this, our contemporary experience is of debates where archaeological logic is contextual, where archaeological epistemology veers wildly between varieties of positivism and relativism, and where archaeological ontology is a quicksand of mutually exclusive “commonsense” propositions about human behavior and the nature and significance of the archaeological record (see for example Patrik 1985; Sabloff etal. 1987).