Mayan civilization:
That the Maya civilization began reaching cultural
complexity hundreds of years earlier than thought
Complex iconography, kings, ceramics,
writing
A queen's tomb that is not in a pyramid, and suggests
blended gender roles
A gradualist and linear trajectory of cultural development
Lack of relationships to cultures outside of American
Pragmatic and epistemic consequences of paradigms:
what research gets funded, who gets promoted, which new Ph.D.'s get jobs,
what gets published
Anomalies in the archaeological record for isolationism
Archaeological data as fragmentary and enigmatic: does their identification/interpretation
as cultural run the risk of "large-scale cultural mind reading", in which
the past is reconstructed in the image of the familiar present or in the
image of entrenched beliefs about the past?
Using Glymour's notion of "bootstrapping": how evidence can bear on a
theory in a non-circular way even when the theory is itself used to establish
the inferential link between evidence and test hypotheses:
Model has three components:
T (a general theory)
H (a specific hypothesis)
E (evidence)
The formula: E "bootstrap-confirms" T if using T,
we can deduce E an instance of H, and the deduction is such
that it does guarantee that we would have gotten an instance of H
regardless of what the evidence might have been.
In the case of theory development (more apt in the case of archaeology):
Testing is not strictly theory contained
The theory-mediated inference from evidence to test hypothesis
is not exclusively deductive
Structural considerations (relations among T, H, and E)
does not take precedence over substantive considerations
New Archaeology: treat human behavior and its material remains as the
outcome of systemwide adaptive responses to material conditions of life
Paradigm: Ecosystem commitments inform the design and interpretation of
empirical tests of local explanatory hypotheses.
Hill and Longrace: studying two 12-13th century pueblos in the U.S. southwest
The problem: how to explain the widespread phenomena
of population decrease and aggregation immediately before and after
the time the pueblos were occupied and that resulted in the abandonment of
most of the region.
Hypothesis: ecological collapse
Evidence:
Paleoenvironmental
Restriction of maize production
Ceramics evidence
Regional trade routes
Faunal data and plant remains