Lecture notes, week eight

The role of evidence

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

Jamestown:
   
    The walls of the fort and 750,000 objects found (though most archaeologists thought the fort was washed away)

    Structures more sophisticated than assumed

    Pieces of glass not in keeping with location of windows; discovery of glass making location

El Dorado

    Assuming that a plateau in the distance would be a good ceremonial platform for Inca rituals

    Leads to the discovery of building foundations, aqueduct, and looted tombs

    Carbon dating indicates an advanced population around 5000 years ago

"Isolationism" as a paradigm of American archaeology

    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

Bootstrapping: to get around the problem of circularity in confirmation

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