4714
Accession Number
32841
Author
Oestigaard, Terje
Title Of Article Chaper
Approaching material culture: A history of changing epistemologies
Title Of Journal Book
Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science
Volume
14
Pages
79-87
Collation
9 p. : ills.
Reference Bibliography
Includes bibliographic references
Language Of Text
English
Literature Type
Serial
Literature Level
Analytic
Abstract
The relationship between archaeology and anthropology has been debated and it is still controversial. Materiality matters, but the role material cultures plays in the construction and constitution of humans and societies is blurred in the current archaeological debate. Processual archaeology stressed a methodological collectivist approach representing vulgar materialism in which human behavior was more or less shaped by non-human constraints. The post-processual counter-reaction favoured a methodological individualism stressing the acting individual, from which evidence regarding society or social units could be deduced. Both these approaches are, in their extreme forms, misleading, because the former advocates only determinism and the latter only free will. By defining archaeology as material culture studies one may incorporate the structuring principles which both create and restrain human agency. Material culture studies as a post-disciplinary science incorporate both methodological collectivism and methodological individualism in their approaches, and as such bridge the processual and post-processual archaeologies, not on these paradigms’ own premises but as an acknowledgement of the role that materiality has in both constraining and creating human behavior.
Keywords
ethnoarchaeology;archaeology;epistemology;material;culture;method
pub_id
4714