awylie paper

8/3/2019 AWylie Paper

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PHILOSOPHY FROM THE GROUND UP:

EVIDENTIAL REASONING IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Alison Wylie

Barnard College, Columbia University

Making Society, Knowing Society

University of California, San Diego

DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE OR CIRCULATE

We know a great deal about the human cultural past: about its time depth, about the trajectories by which

humans dispersed across the globe, about the processes by which they responded to and transformed the

environments in which they found themselves, and about the dynamics of interaction and internal

evolution by which social and cultural forms have proliferated. And for the vast majority of human life on

earth this body of knowledge is based entirely on archaeological data. This is something of a paradox

when you consider how tenuous the archaeological database is, and how epistemically fraught the

enterprise of archaeological inquiry. As one philosophically minded practitioner recently put it:

archaeology is at once the hardest as well as the most important study of all (a modest advocate for his

field), not just because of the inherent complexity of the human systems it studies, but because it uses

evidence that is remote from and uncertainly coupled to the systems it seeks to study (Chippindale 2002:

606).

The questions I address here and elsewhere arise directly from this conundrum: how do we come to know

(anything) about the cultural past?; what confidence should we have in our best available methods for

producing and adjudicating archaeological knowledge claims? I begin with some background on how

these questions have been addressed, by philosophers and by archaeologists, and then outline my answer

to them in the form of a model of evidential reasoning. What I present here is an overview of the analysis

developed in a series of case and issue-specific essays that appear together in Thinking from Things:

Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology (2002): the historical analysis that follows is elaborated in

Section II, How New is the New Archaeology; the analysis of the interpretive dilemma is developed in

Section III, Interpretive Dilemmas: Crisis Arguments in the New Archaeology; and details of the model

of evidential reasoning are to be found in chapters 13, 14, and 15, in Section III (Bootstrapping in the

Un-Natural Sciences; The Constitution of Archaeological Evidence; Rethinking Unity as a Working

Hypothesis for Philosophy of Science: How Archaeologists Exploit the Disunities of Science).

Philosophical Questions in and about Archaeology

Periodically epistemic questions raised by and about archaeology have attracted the attention of

philosophers. Hempel considers the tacit dependence of archaeological inference on laws in dating

archaeological materials at the end of The Function of General Laws in History (1942: 48) and

philosophers of the life and earth sciencesspecially those concerned with evolutionary

theorizingperiodically consider the structure and limitations of historical inference based on the

archaeological record: e.g., Toulmin and Goodfield on the formation of contemporary horizons of

geological and historical time inDiscovery of Time (1965); Wimsatts recent work on models of

generative systems; Tuckers consideration of biological and historical patterns of inference in Our

Knowledge of the Past(2004). Examples of more systematic analysis of archaeological inquiry include, in


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the 19th century, Whewells treatment of the strategies of inference typical of comparative archaeology,

which he took to be an example of the palaetiological sciences: the sciences which deal with objects

that are descended from a more ancient condition, from which the present is derived by intelligible

causes (Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 1967 [1840]: 637). And in the interwar period, mid-20th

century, Collingwood frequently relied on examples of archaeological inference in analysis of the logic of

historical (question-and-answer) reasoning in The Idea of History (1946: Epilogomena), and he makes

explicit a number of philosophical lessons that he attributes to archaeological field experience inAnAutobiography (1939). Most dramatically, since the 1970s, analytic philosophy of archaeology (M.

Salmon) or meta-archaeology (Embree) has become something of a cottage industry, spurred by the

philosophical provocations of the New Archaeology. More of this shortly.

For archaeologists, anxiety about the proxy status of material evidencequestions about how

archaeological data can (best) be used as evidence of a cultural pasthas been a matter of intense and

perennial concern from the time the field began to professionalize and take root in museums and

universities in the late 19th century. The underlying issues here are manifestly philosophical and, indeed,

archaeologists have periodically turned to philosophy for epistemic insight and reassuranceespecially

when engaged in crisis debates that have erupted, by my estimation, every 20 to 30 years since the early

20th century. At the core of these recurrent debates is a worry that the fragmentary, enigmatic nature of the

material record generates an interpretive dilemma that imposes absolute limits on archaeologicalinquiry. This dilemma arises from the pessimistic appraisal that interesting claims about the cultural past

inevitably extend beyond what can be securely established on the basis of the archaeological record. If

this premise is accepted, so the argument goes, archaeologists have just two options. If they are

committed to ideals of epistemic responsibility, they must confine themselves to the pursuit of narrowly

descriptive goals, documenting the contents of the archaeological record: this is the narrow empiricist

horn of the dilemma. But if they are committed to anthropological, historical goals, they must be prepared

to embrace the speculative horn of the dilemma; archaeological narratives may be captivating and richly

grounded in archaeological data but they are, at best, forms of aesthetic appreciation and, at worst,

projections of our own expectations and preoccupations in the form of just-so stories. Those who treat

these options as mutually exclusive and exhaustiveas genuinely dilemmictypically rely on two further

presuppositions: that the connections between surviving material evidence and antecedent events or

conditions are (all equally / extremely) tenuous; and that the bar for epistemic responsibility in a field likearchaeology should be set extremely high.

The locus classicus for such an argument is a widely cited discussion note published in the British

Archaeological Newsletter in 1955 by a field archaeologist, M.A. Smith. She insisted that there is no

logical relation between the social, cultural past and its surviving record, by which she seems to mean no

relation of deductive entailment; archaeological interpretation incorporates an irreducible element of

conjecture which cannot be tested (e.g., Smith 1955: 4-5). Consequently, the Diogenes problem, as she

describes it, is inescapable: archaeologists may find the tub but altogether miss Diogenes (1955: 1-2),

and may have no way of ever knowing what theyre missing. What begins as a problem of contingent

underdetermination is thus generalized; the potential for pervasive and undetectable error is inferred from

specific instances of error fortuitously detected or counterfactually projected. A domain-wide (if not

wholesale) skepticism is thus inescapable; the only alternative to irresponsible speculation is anarchaeology defined by severely curtailed ambitions.


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Archaeological Responses to the Interpretive Dilemma

This interpretive dilemma has generated three recurrent strategies of response, three methodological

stances that have taken shape in response to crisis debate within archaeology: sequent stage,

constructivist, and integrationist approaches to inquiry.

Sequent stage approaches. These were embraced by optimistic conservatives who insist that epistemicallyresponsible archaeologists must eschew any form of (premature) theoretical speculation about the cultural

past. Their first priority should be to explore the archaeological record, to collect and systematize

archaeological data which they see, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary first stepa matter of

establishing a secure empirical foundation before venturing historical or anthropological hypotheses. As

one sardonic pair of commentators observed, theorizing is thus deferred until a future Darwin of

Anthropology appears on the scene who can interpret the great historical scheme that will have been

erected(Steward and Setlzer 1938: 3)

Initially, in the WWI era, advocates of this epistemic stance argued that that archaeologists should just get

on with the discovery and documentation of the archaeological record. Systematic empirical research and

theorizing are starkly opposed. Indeed, a preoccupation with the latter (which includes interpretive

inference about the cultural past as well as reflexive debate about archaeological practice), threatens toinduce a methodological paralysis: a Hamletic state of mind not wholesome in pushing on active

research work as Dixon put it in 1913 (p. 577). The epistemic rationale for this deferral of theory was

articulated a decade later, when Taylor (from whom I get the term sequent stage) argued that

archaeology is no more than a method or set of specialized techniques for the gathering of cultural

information; its purpose is to establish the foundation for a roughly...sequential series of stages,

beginning with data collection, analysis and chronological synthesis, then moving on to chronological

and ethnographic reconstruction, finally culminating in the anthropological study of culture as such (its

dynamics and statics, nature and workings; Taylor 1948).

Constructivism. From the early 20th century (1908-1917) critics of sequent stage approaches have

objected that no interpretively or theoretically innocent investigation of the record is possible, either as a

necessary preliminary or as an end in itself. Inevitably, the identification of material as archaeological,much less the construction of chronological sequences and regional/cultural typological schemes, requires

substantial interpretive inference beyond description of the material contents of the record. And even if

interpretively neutral description of the contents of the archaeological record was possible, it could not be

counted on to yield the kinds of data base that archaeologists will require when they turn to

anthropological and historical questions about the cultural past.

One response to such arguments was to circumscribe this threat of insecurity. British contemporaries of

Smiths argued that the intractable ambiguities she notes chiefly afflict inferences concerning belief

systems, religious convictions, abstract social norms. In fact, archaeologists can quite reliably reconstruct

technology and physical environment, some aspects of subsistence practice, perhaps some limited

dimensions of social organization (as necessary conditions for technology/subsistence); they should focus

on these dimensions of the cultural past and eschew speculation about the rest. The result was a schematicladder of inference advocated in the 1950s by Hawkes and Piggott (1954).

A quite different, explicitly pragmatist and in some cases subjectivist response took the form of

arguments that archaeologists should give up the quest for interest and problem-neutral empirical

foundations, acknowledge the inherent limitations of archaeological inquiry and make explicit its


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presuppositions. In this spirit archaeologists working the U.S. American southeast argued (initially with

reference to ceramic typologies) that classificatory systems are merely tools, tools of analysis,

manufactured and employed by students (Brew 1946); they do not capture culturally meaningful reality

but rather serve specific purposes, e.g., establishing chronological control (Ford 1954). In a more

explicitly subjectivist version of this argument, an archaeologist working in the U.S. southwest (evidently

influenced by Dewey) argued that ascriptions of function to archaeological material depend on analogical

comparisons that incorporate an irreducibly subjective element. Ultimately, assessments of theepistemic credibility of interpretive inference depends on judgements of professional competence;

archaeologists have no alternative but to invoke a convergence of trained and expert intuition (e.g.,

Thompson 1956).

Integrationist approaches. A third strategy of response is evident in recurrent demands for a new

departure, for a New Archaeology, motivated by concern that sequent stage and constructivist options

typically revert to one or the other horn of the original interpetive dilemma. By mid-century (1930s-

1950s) anthropological archaeologists had accumulated enormous stores of data and were constructing an

elaborate edifice of chronological sequences and typological schemes but, impatient critics objected, this

increasingly rich and finely systematized empirical foundation showed little promise of delivering any

significant historical or anthropological understanding of the cultural past. The constructivist and

pragmatist responses of the 1950s offer little more than capitulation to the speculative horn of thedilemma; all that constrains speculation is a reliance on convention, on now made explicit in procedures

that critics vilified as a matter of pooling practitioners.

Although the underlying epistemological argument is almost never explicit, the conviction that there must

be a third way, an alternative that escapes the dilemma, derives from an intuition that it should be possible

to integrate in archaeological inquiry the theorizing necessary to identify and interpret archaeological

data as evidence, and to make it empirically and conceptually accountable. The earliest call for a New

Archaeology, in 1907-1918, was intended to displace the woefully haphazard and uncoordinated

practices of antequarianism (Dixon 1913). For these advocates of a newly professional archaeology, the

chief characteristic of self-consciously anthropological and scientific practice is an interest not in

specimens but rather in the relations of things, with the whens and the whys and the hows (Dixon

1913: 565). Most important, they insisted that these ambitious goals could not be deferred if they wereever to be realized: the mere collecting of curious and expensive objects once used by man is impotent

to answer the...questions we are all interested in, viz., anthropological, historical questions proper to the

science of man (Wissler 1917: 100). What is required, Wissler declared in 1917, is a real, new

archaeology: an archaeology informed by a reasoned formulation of definite problems and predicated

on commitment to saner more truly scientific methods (1913: 563). These Dixon described in quite

generic terms, invoking Chamberlins (1890) discussion of the method of multiple working hypotheses:

If there are gaps in the evidence, why not make a systematic attempt to fill them? On the basis of

evidence at hand a working hypothesis or several alternative hypotheses may be framed, and

material sought which shall either prove or disprove them. (Dixon 1913: 564)

By the 1930s-1940s the target of criticism was not so much non-archaeological (antequarian) forms ofpractice, but an established tradition of professional archaeology characterized by commitment to a

sequent stage approach. In the era of the WPA, anthropological archaeologists were chiefly concerned

with bringing some order to the immense body of data generated by large scale, multi-year excavation

projects on some of the richest sites in North America. At this point a philosophical rationale was

articulated for insisting that historical and anthropological theorizing could not be deferred, as a series of

epistemic arguments for problem-oriented research, as it was later described. In an article that appeared in


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Philosophy of Science in 1939, Kluckhohn objected to the influence in archaeology of what he identifies

as a narrow empiricism: a simpliste mechanistic-positivistic philosophy (1940: 46) according to

which some form of empirical datum is presumed to be the source and foundation of all legitimate

knowledge, to exhaust its cognitive content. This, he argues, makes a mockery of physics and other

theoretically sophisticated forms of natural science, and cannot be a reasonable guide to archaeological

practice. Anticipating Kuhn and Hanson by two decades, Kluckhohn argues that archaeologists do not

have the option of establishing the archaeological facts first, before they venture interpretive/explanatoryhypotheses: no fact has meaning except in the context of a conceptual scheme (1940: 47), a theme

elaborated a few years later by Bennett in the context of an archaeological debate about typological

schemes. No sense can be made of the notion of 'fact' [as] a phenomenological datum, Bennett argued

(1946: 198); what constitutes a fact or a classification is a relative affair determined entirely by the

problem at hand (1946: 200). Consequently, attempts at systematization that purport to be empirically

driven and interpretively neutral should be viewed with suspicion. They are abstractions...really bundles

of testable hypotheses about the nature of correspondence of cultural objects to the dynamic

culture-historical pattern which bore them (Bennett 1946: 200); as such, they depend on rich, problem-

specific presuppositions that are simply unacknowledged. As Kluckhohn put this point,

The alternative is not...between theory and no theory or a minimum of theory, but between adequate

and inadequate theories, and, even more important, between theories, the postulates and propositions

of which are conscious and hence lend themselves to systematic criticism, and theories the premisesof which have not been examined even by their formulators. (1939: 330)

In the same period, in the context of British archaeology/philosophy of history, Collingwood made

parallel case for problem-oriented, theoretically informed research:

Long practice in excavation had taught me that one conditionindeed the most important

conditionof success was that the person responsible for any piece of digging, however small

and however large, should know exactly what he wants to find out, and then decide what kind

of digging will show it to him. This was the central principle of my logic of question and

answer as applied to archaeology. (1978 [1946]: 121-122)

The most strident and ambitious of these New Archaeologies burst on the scene in 1960s and 1970s, its

advocates arguing strenuously against the bankruptcy, not just of an antequarian preoccupation with

collecting archaeological material, or a typological preoccupation with systematizing archaeological data,but of culture history: a preoccupation with reconstructive goals in the form of covert systematization,

or cautious interpretive reconstruction of the material aspects of the cultural past (in the spirit of the

Hawkes/Piggott ladder of inference). They argued that the limitations of traditional archaeology lie, not

in the archaeological record, but in what archaeologists bring to inquiry by way of interpretive resources,

and they rejected the presupposition, underlying both sequent stage and constructivist approaches, that

archaeologists can only proceed inductively, generating interpretive hypotheses after the fact, as

(speculative) conclusions. The alternative they proposed was that archaeologists should make the most

ambitious anthropological problems the primary and immediate focus of their research, and the problems

to which they gave prioritythe problems appropriate to a properly scientific archaeologywere broadly

processual: cultural systems should be understood in adaptationist, eco-materialist terms, with the aim

of establishing universal (nomological) laws of cultural process (the interdependence of system

components; patterns of response to environmental conditions; dynamics of internal evolution).

To realize these processual goals, the New Archaeologists argued for a rigorously problem-oriented

form of practice: theorizing about culture process should be the point of departure for inquiry, rather than

a deferred later stage, and all aspects of archaeological inquiry should be designed as a matter of testing

explanatory, interpretive hypotheses against the archaeological record. They invoked Hempels

hypothetico-deductive (H-D) of confirmation and insisted that the insecurity of venturing claims about the


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cultural past could be eliminated only if their credibility was assessed, not in terms of inductive support

generated in the process of their formulation (in a context of discovery) but, rather, in terms of their

success surviving rigorous archaeological testing (in a context of verification). They particularly objected

to reliance on analogical reasoning and were confident, more generally, that a systematic process of

deductive testing could supplant reliance on all forms of inductive speculation. When they considered the

vagaries of establishing what Fritz refers to as observations of the past (1972)the empirical basis for

testing presumptive laws and hypothesesthey turn again to Hempel for inspiration. The significance ofarchaeological data as material traces of specific past conditions was to be established by law-governed

retrodiction, on the model of covering-law (D-N) explanation.

The reaction against this self-consciously positivist rhetoric and research program was swift and deeply

factionalizing. Both internal archaeological critics and external philosophical commentators invoked

arguments from postpositivist philosophy of scienceunderdetermination, holism and, most prominently,

the theory-ladenness of evidenceto make the case that the insecurities of inference that gave rise to

worries about post-hoc reconstructive inference equally afflict the use of archaeological data as test

evidence; deductive certainty is almost never realized in drawing test implications, let alone in the

confirming or disconfirming inferences by which archaeological data are brought to bear on a test

hypothesis. Biconditional laws establish secure linkages in a vanishingly few cases: although Peircean

references never figure in these debates, the point here is that archaeological inference is a matter ofabduction (not induction in the narrow sense, and certainly not deduction)

The most outspoken post- or anti-processual critics of the New Archaeology advocated a stance of ironic

dissociation from the enterprise as a whole. Some insisted that an uncrompomising constructivism is

inescapable, now reframed in explicitly social (and political) terms. In this spirit, Hodder argues that the

ascription of significance to archaeological data depends on interpretive principles that are nothing but

disciplinary conventions. Archaeologists must therefore be understood to "create facts" (1983b: 6; see

also 1984a); there is "literally nothing independent of theory or propositions to test against" (Shanks and

Tilley 1987: 111). By extension of such arguments, some post-processual archaeologists have been

prepared to embrace what they idenitify as a radical pluralism according to which "any interpretation of

the past is multiple and constantly open to change, to re-evaluation, as stance described by one

sympathetic critic as a self-defeating hyperrelativism (Trigger 1989). In elaborating these arguments,post-processuals have turned to philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, the frank ethnocentrism of

Rorty-style pragmatism, and the deconstructive, postmodern descendants of these traditions for

inspiration in articulating a resolutely humanistic, anti-scientific counter-tradition of interpretive

archaeology (Hodder 1991, 1999).

This broadly pluralist, constructivist epistemic stance was reinforced by challenges to the explanatory

commitments of the new Archaeology. Post-processual critics rallied compelling ethnohistoric and

archaeological evidence that the most inscrutable dimensions of the pastthe cultural lifeworld and all

the beliefs and intentions, power dynamics and exercises of agency that make it upcannot be set aside as

causally, explanatorily irrelevant, in preference for analysis of eco-system dynamics. Hodder was

particularly influential in arguing that it is imperative for archaeologists to attend to the insides of

action (invoking Collingwood; Hodder 1982a,b; 1983a); these less tangible dimensions of cultural lifecan be consequential in shaping the large-scale structure of cultural systems and the long-term processes

by which they adapt to or transform their material environments. Post-processuals also add to these joint

epistemic and ontological considerations a further normative, political argument: that, in a world riven by

increasingly stark inequalities and structured by deeply entrenched systems of oppression, in a world in

which strategic manipulation of the past frequently serves the purpose of legitimating the claims of the

elites that benefit from these conditions, archaeologists should tell the stories (about the past) that need to


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be told (e.g., Hodder 1983b). With the formulation of this antithesis to the positivism of the New

Archaeologya position which struck even sympathetic their critics as a reductio of post-

processualismthe dynamic of the interpretive dilemma reasserted itself in particularly stark terms.

Frustrated by seemingly intractable and increasingly polarized debate, and fed up with philosophy-heavy

programmatic arguments that had little bearing on the actual doing of archaeology, a great many

practitioners backed away from both extremes, declaring a plague on both houses and sometimes a plagueon philosophy. In the early to mid-1980s, when the lines of debate were most sharply drawn, a number of

ironic, sharply critical commentaries appeared with titles like Is a Little Philosophy (Science?) a

Dangerous Thing? (Plog 1982) and Plumbing, Philosophy, and Poetry (Fitting 1973). One especially

influential example of the genre, Flannerys Golden Marshalltown (1982), offered a sharply satirical

caricature in which the philosophizing classes in archaeology are vilified as a species of self-satisfied

sports commentator who has long since lost touch with the gritty realities of the play.

In the last ten to fifteen years, however, most archaeological practitioners have been quietly exploring

hybrid modes of inquiry that embody the most promising, practicable aspects of processual testing

procedures, now applied to the range of interpretive problems endorsed by postprocessuals; Hegmon

describes them as a loose-knit cluster of research programs that she characterizes as processual+

archaeology (2003). Although disengaged from theoretical, philosophical debate, these archaeologists aremindful of the uncertainties of the forms of inference on which they rely but are unconvinced that this

entails anything like the scope or degree of disabling circularity required to establish that the speculative

horn of the dilemma is inescapable. This stance seems informed by a practical appreciation that the

archaeological record routinely demonstrates a capacity to subvert expectations, to impose empirical

constraints on archaeological theorizing, despite being thoroughly a construct. And, in fact, archaeologists

of all philosophical stripesprocessual and postprocessual alikevery effectively deploy these constraints,

relying on localized strategies for building and adjudicating evidential claims that warrant epistemic

confidence even if they rarely deliver the kinds of certainty for which archaeological skeptics and

reformers have periodically hankered. In this, I would argue, archaeologists often escape the horns of the

interpretive dilemma even if epistemic insights embodied in the know-how that makes this possible are

rarely explicit.

Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology

My aim has been to develop a model of evidential reasoning that captures the principles implicit in the

hybrid strategies of inference that taken shape in archaeological practice below the threshold of

philosophical debate. That is to say, I am concerned to articulate the epistemic rationale for a discerning

confidence in judgements of evidential significance that reduce neither to an untenable narrow

empiricism nor to mere speculation. The central intuition embodied in this practice is that evidential

reasoning in archaeology is differentially insecure. More specifically, the types and degrees of insecurity

with which archaeologists grapple are a function of characteristics of the inferences linking surviving

traces to antecedent conditions; they are not determined by characteristics of the target domain; they do

not necessarily track the domain-specific categories of epistemic risk set out in inference schemes like theHawkes/Piggott ladder.

The key to understanding nuanced judgements of differential security/insecurity in archaeological

inference is, first, to disambiguate what counts as the theory (or theorizing) that is said to laden,

overreach, or render insecure any use of archaeological data as evidence. Virtually any belief or


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knowledge claim can mediate archaeological inference, from the most narrowly specified empirical fact

through to the most expansive explanatory schema, from the convictions of common sense to esoteric

insights of nuclear physics, from claims established within archaeology to those supplied not only by its

closest neighbor disciplines but also by an expansive range of social, life, and natural sciences. Whether a

given claim is theory in the sense of theorizing about the cultural past, or theory in the mediating

sense of middle range theory (which is to say, linking principles, auxiliary hypotheses, gap-crossers), is

determined not by its content or its target but by the role it plays in the specific inference at hand.

Second, the threat of vicious circularity arises only if an implausibly seamless holism is assumed. In

practice, the many different kinds of theory that play functionally different roles in archaeological

inference are often disjoint in epistemically consequential ways.

Third is a point I will not develop here but that informs my analysis of evidential reasoning; I recommend

a shift in the focus of philosophical analysis from theorizing to modeling, along lines of that proposed

more generally by Morgan and Morrison (1999). What archaeologists build and test are typically models,

not isolated factual claims or systems of logically interdependent laws/law-like propositions. In some

cases these are models of particular past activities or events that could have produced, or likely did

produce, specific elements of the archaeological record; in other cases they are models of large-scale and

long-term socio-cultural dynamics. Archaeologists use models at one scale, or models of one dimensionof a cultural system, to test models pitched at other scales/other dimensions. Claims about evidential

significance are typically claims about the credibility of a model component, itself a narrowly specified

model of some aspect of the past cultural context or process or system under study.

Focusing on the first two points, here are three sets of principles that underpin the ways in which

archaeologists exploit disjunctions between the various kinds of theory they deploy, to good epistemic

effect.

Vertical independence. The worry informing constructivist challenges, from Thompsons subjectivism to

the hyperrelativism associated with post-processual critics of the New Archaeology, is that the middle

range theory on which archaeologists rely to interpret their data as evidence simply mediates an

imposition on these data of the expectations of their test hypotheses. Under what conditions is such athreat of circularity realized? The classic case, considered in some detail by Glymour in connection with

his bootstrapping account of confirmation, is one in which the target hyptheses and the mediating

auxiliary hypotheses are integrated into a single coherent theoretical framework. But even in this case, he

argues, vicious circularity is not inevitable. Evidence can bootstrap-confirm a theory if, using the theory,

we can deduce from the evidence an instance of hypothesis...and the deduction is such that it does not

guarantee that we would have gotten an instance of the hypothesis regardless of what the evidence might

have been (1980:127). What distinguishes virtuous from vicious circularity is the structure of relations

that hold between the components of the encompassing theory, not the fact that they are both components

of this theory. If the internal structure of the theory is such that the mediating hypothesis provides an

algorithm for interpreting experimental results but does not determine that they will confirm to the

expectations of the test hypothesisit may well be possible to use one component of an overarching

theory to interpret data as evidence that provides a genuine test of another component of the theory.

In practice, however, archaeologists rarely have available to them a theory so comprehensive that it

provides all the resources they need both to generate and to test hypotheses about the cultural past.

Typically they draw interpretive resources from widely disparate fields, many of which have little to do

with the sources that inform their thinking about the social structures and cultural dynamics of the past

cultures they investigate. In short, the theory that ladens their data is very often unconnected to the


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theory that informs the reconstructive/explanatory hypotheses they are intent on testing. Consider a

hypothetical example that figured in the debate between New Archaeologists and their imagined

adversaries, traditional archaeologists: a case in which an archaeologist posits an hypothesis about trade

between two distant and otherwise distinct cultural groups, separated by a wide geographical margin in

which no evidence of a common record has been found (Binfords Allchin hypothesis; 1968: 18-19).

Perhaps this hypothesis is inspired by structuralist analysis of the grammar of design traditions evident in

the burial goods and elite ceramics characteristic of these two prehistoric communities. An archaeologistmight rely on radiocarbon dating and various types of materials analysis to determine whether it is

possible that the artifacts thought to have been traded into one context could have originated in the other:

whether it is contemporaneous and whether it is made of materials or by means of technologies possessed

by the source culture. Although each of these lines of evidence is liable to error of various kinds, these are

not likely to be a function of nepotism; there is no obvious (or likely) interdependence between the

chemistry and the physics required to establish the source and the dates of the archaeological material, on

one hand, and the linguistics and socio-cultural anthropology presupposed by the test hypothesis, on the

other.

Security. These lines of evidence vary greatly in degree of security and are each individually subject to

empirical and conceptual constraint. Contra Hodders most extreme constructivist claims (or, indeed,

Thompsons subjectivism), the linking principles on which archaeologists typically rely are by no meansstrictly conventional (subjective) heuristics. In fact, archaeologists put a great deal of emphasis on

adjudicating the credibility and the relevance of the linking principles on which they rely, and they do this

on several dimensions: the credibility of these principles in their source contexts; the degree to which they

establish deterministic linkages between surviving archaeological traces and the past conditions or events

of which they are taken to be evidence; and the overall length and complexity of the inferential chains in

which specific inferential links are embedded (Kosso 2001). Because external sources do not offer the

requisite linking principles in many key areas, archaeologists have developed research programs designed

to identify the kinds of archaeological signature associated with specific human activities or social

arrangements (ethnoarchaeology), to establish the forms of practice, technical knowledge, and resources

required to produce specific kinds of archaeological material (experimental archaeology), and to

characterize the patterns of differential survival and/or disturbance that can be expected under specific

kinds of geological and other conditions of preservation.

The New Archaeologists have been especially strong advocates of systematic, empirical source-side

research along these lines, but with the aim of establishing a body of middle range theory that

approximates the Hempelian ideal of covering laws, capable of supporting deductive retrodictions from

the surviving record to past events and conditions. This requires not only nomological but biconditional

laws (absolute security in the first and second sense), applicable without recourse to any other auxiliary

assumptions (minimizing the length and complexity of inferential chains)a standard that is almost never

met in practice. The most promising examples are methods of absolute dating (e.g., radiocarbon dating),

geological sourcing, the use of non-radioactive isotope analysis to determine lifetime dietary profile. But

even in these best cases, of which radiocarbon dating was expected to be the paradigm, the vagaries of

confounding factors are legendary. The linking principles drawn from the physics may be unimpeachable

and may meet the requirement of determinism, establishing a unique causal event that must have obtainedfor the trace to have been produced. But the causal chains are long and complex, as reflected in the risks

of contamination in the preservation and recovery of samples, the complications introduced by carbon

sinks and differential rates of carbon fixing that establish proportion of radioactive C14 to stable C12 and

C13 in the original production of the trace, and the impact of fossil fuel and bomb effects on the baseline

ratios of C14 to C12 and C13 in the atmosphere. Moreover, even with significant refinements in the

background knowledge of these physical processes, the difficulty remains that the auxiliaries drawn from


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physics and biochemistry typically establish archaeologically relevant facts about the cultural past only

given inferences and assumptions about a number of other aspects of the archaeological context. They

may allow archaeologists to determine the cutting date of a piece of building timber but determining a

construction sequence from a dated sample depends on collateral evidence that rules our (or indicates)

practices of curation or reuse; it may be possible to determine the chemical composition of bone

recovered from a burial, but reconstructing diet from these isotope values requires paleobotanical

information about the resources actually available, and evidence of subsistence practices that specifieswhich resources were exploited by an archaeological population.

Typically assessments of security do not and, indeed, cannot proceed on a trace-by-trace, auxiliary-by-

auxiliary basis. Rather, they depend on a complex process of evaluating multiply connected (relational)

analogical arguments in which insights from diverse sources are integrated into a model (or multiple

models) of the archaeological context. I have argued that the strength of analogical inference can be

assessed on two dimensions (1985; Chapter 9, 2002): in terms of the completeness of fit between source

and subject, or by appeal to the persistence of association between a limited subset of attributes across

sources that differ in other respects. In both cases empirical investigation of the sources of a proposed

analog is required; supporting evidenceof comprehensive similarity or of robust correlationsuggests

that the association between observed and inferred attributes is non-accidental, the consequence of a

determining structure that may be causal, functional, intentional, symbolic (to use terminology fromWeitzenfeld 1984). And in both cases the strength of the analogy requires, as well, subject-side

investigation to determine whether the interdependence between analogically linked attributes could have

obtained, or the mechanism of production posited for a specific trace could have been instantiated, in a

particular archaeological subject.

Ironically, although the New Archaeologists staunchly opposed reliance on analogical inference in any

capacity other than as a creative source of hypotheses, their own practice illustrates with particular clarity

how this process of adjudicating security proceeds with respect to analogical inference, on both the source

and the subject side of the inferential equation. Hills and Longacres research at Carter Ranch and

Broken K pueblos in the 1970s was designed to test hypotheses about the dynamics of population

decrease and aggregation that led to widespread abandonment of pueblos after AD 1300 (Hill 1966, 1970;

Longacre 1964, 1970). They hypothesized that, in the pre-abandonment period, the population offormerly distinct pueblos that aggregated in the few viable pueblos (near reliable water sources) would

have retained their social distinctness, and they suggested that this should be evident in stylistically

distinct ceramic traditions associated with enclaves of affiliated households. They drew on ethnohistoric

accounts of post-contact pueblo social organization for a model of the functions served by four distinct

types of pueblo room they found clustered in what they hypothesized were distinct households, and for a

model of ceramic production by women in generationally stable, matrilocal kin groups that they thought

might be associated with socially distinct groups occupying these spatially segregated clusters of rooms.

The first of thesethe model of room functionsdepends on an argument from completeness of mapping,

and the second on appeal to a binding mechanism of social interaction that, if it obtained, would account

for a persistent association of distinctive design elements. They tested the room function hypothesis by

checking for evidence (not initially considered in distinguishing the room types) that should be present if

the formally distinct rooms were, in fact, used differentially for storage, food processing and generalliving activities, and ritual practice. And they tested the implication that spatially distinct clusters of these

rooms were associated with distinct social groups by analyzing the spatial distribution and correlation of

design elements.

Their tests of the room function hypothesis generated not just corroboration of the posited functions, but

also intriguing points of divergence from the ethnographic model of, for example, storage uses and food


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preparation activities. They found a much greater preponderance of wild plant material relative to

cultigens than had been documented for ethnohistoric pueblos, suggesting a partial reversion to foraging

subsistence practices among still sedentary pueblo communities early in the volatile process of pueblo

aggregation and abandonment. Although the analysis of ceramic design seemed initially to establish the

existence of several socially distinct residential units, subsequent ethnohistoric research on the dynamics

of apprenticeship and diffusion of design in face-to-face communities of producers who use the ceramics

they produce (in the U.S., southwest and in the Philippines) called these results into question. Evidentlythe aspects of ceramic design that diffuse most rapidly and widely are isolated design elements; it is the

integrity of the larger structure, the grammar of the design that is conserved in local working groups. In

this case the posit of a binding mechanism was challenged not archaeologically, but on the basis of

ethnographic and social-psychological (source-side) research designed to evaluate the background

assumptions by which archaeological data was interpreted as evidence.

Cases of this kind make it clear that there is much to be gained from systematic empirical evaluation of

the credibility and scope of linking principles imported from diverse and sometimes distant sources. But

typically security is assessed through a process of building, refining, and testing the credibility of the

analogical inferences by playing constraints elicited from source contexts off against constraints elicited

from the subject. And in this case the source-side considerations that play a role in developing models of

the cultural pastconventionally, the context of discoverydo bear significantly on judgements about theinferential security of the resulting models; evidential support (security) does not arise exclusively (in the

context of verification) from archaeological testing.

Horizontal independence. These examples also draw attention to ways in which the fragmentary,

incomplete nature of the material record can be a crucial epistemic resource, although it is typically seen

as a crippling liability for archaeology. Even though no one line of evidence is absolutely secure, when

archaeologists rely on multiple lines of evidence, in combination they can provide more than simply

additive increments in empirical credibility when they converge in support of a particular model or set of

claims about the cultural past. Archaeologists typically deal in cables rather than chains of inference

(1989; Chapter 11, 2002).

The central principles here have been articulated in a number of philosophical contexts: by Wimsatt onvarieties of evidence (1987); by Shapere in reflection on what it means to say we observe events at the

center of the sun (1982, 1985); by Hacking in analysis of why it is that we believe what we see through

microscopes (1983). Take Hackings account as a point of departure. The credibility of indirect systems

for observing entities or events that are otherwise inaccessible depends not only our ability to calibrate

these systems internally (by refining background knowledge about the nature and complexity of the

signal itself, how it is generated, transmitted, and detected), but also on the possibility of exploiting

different causal systemsdifferent processes of signal production, transmission, detectionto produce an

image of the target. The great value of the proliferation of microscopes that Hacking considerse.g.,

acoustic as opposed to optical microscopesis that they allow for a triangulation of signals, correcting and

enhancing the information any one microscope could provide about the entities they allow us to observe.

We believe what we see because it is implausible that images produced by such different means should

converge as a consequence of confounding influences that generate compensating error in each distinctline of evidence. And when multiple lines of evidence fail to converge, they have a capacity to expose

error that might not be detected in assessment of the security of each taken on its own (see Shapere 1982

on error detection).

The closest counterpart in archaeology is, perhaps, the use of multiple dating techniques. Consider the

juxtaposition of tree ring counts and measures of radio-carbon decay, magnetic orientation, and the


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fundamentally different impact on the historians, as opposed to the archaeologists, who study the

operations of various colonial powers in the Americas. Nor is it plausible that historians would have

escaped the influence of the racialist assumptions that Trigger finds deeply influential in archaeological

thinking about contact period interactions between Europeans and First Nations. Trigger is as sharply

critical of the romanticism that renders indigenous people non-strategic agents, bound by static

convention, as he is of explicitly racist assumptions of manifest destiny essentialism that this

romanticism was meant to displace (1980, 1991). Feminist critics draw attention to myriad ways in whichpractitioners across the social and historical sciences reproduce a common stock of gender-normative

assumptions, despite using very different kinds of data bases and research tools; they consistently

overlook or misinterpret aspects of their subject that are incongruous (unpalatable or unrecognizable)

given a conviction that familiar binaries and role conventions capture a natural, universal fact about

human society.

In short, appearances of disciplinary and conceptual independence may be deceiving. Disciplinary

boundaries may not cut the world at its joints where the causal production of apparently distinct traces are

concerned, and may not insulate neighboring disciplines from the influence of assumptions that are

capable of inducing compensatory errors even when causal independence can be assumed. This should

not be taken as a counsel of (epistemic) despair, however. The vagaries of establishing epistemic

independence make it clear that archaeological inference is unavoidably insecure but this does not, initself, return us to the speculative horn of the interpretive dilemma.

Conclusions

My thesis is that strategies for assessing epistemic independence are crucial in making effective use of

limited evidence to establish credible claims about the cultural past that escape the narrow confines of the

interpretive dilemma. And the analysis developed here suggests that two lines of inquiry are necessary

determine whether epistemic independence is realized in any given case. One is a matter of first order

empirical research designed to establish the extent to which the processes that generate different kinds of

trace or, more broadly, lines of evidence are, in fact, causally independentof one another; this is one key

component of appraisals of the security of individual lines of evidence. A second quite different line ofinquiry is required to determine whether the background of technical expertise, empirical and theoretical

knowledge that makes it possible to detect and interpret these traces as evidence are, in fact, conceptually

independent. This is a program of second order, meta-scientific investigation, philosophical and

social/historical, designed to trace confounding interactions between disciplinary traditions,

systematically appraising the proxies for epistemic independence on which practitioners typically rely.

This suggests that the philosophical study of science must be socially and historically naturalized. Even

such a core epistemic concept as that of evidence and how it functions as a contingent platform for

mediating controversy, cannot succeed without attention to the histories of disciplinary practice, their

institutional settings, their patterns of interaction and communication. It also suggests that a jointly

philosophical and historical/social program of science studies has an important on-going role to play

within the sciences; it provides the resources to establish what Harding describes as strong objectivity. Itsvalue is not just that it promises more sophisticated, probative philosophical understanding of the sciences

but that, in the best tradition of American pragmatism, it has the potential to address forward-looking

questions about how to improve our best going practices of empirical inquiry, a task for which the stakes

are much larger than the purely philosophical.

awylie paper

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