In the last few years, conference programs and publications have begun to appear that reflect a growing interest, among North American archaeologists, in research initiatives that focus on women and gender as subjects of investigation. One of the central questions raised by these developments has to do with their "objectivity" and that of archaeology as a whole. To the extent that they are inspired by or aligned with explicitly political (feminist) commitments, the question arises of whether they do not themselves represent an inherently partial and interest-specific standpoint, and whether their acceptance does not undermine the commitment to value neutrality and empirical rigor associated with scientific approaches to archaeology. I will argue that, in fact, a feminist perspective, among other critical, explicitly political perspectives, may well enhance the conceptual integrity and empirical adequacy of archaeological knowledge claims, where this is centrally a matter of deploying evidential constraints.
I As in many social sciences, archaeologists have set enormous store in establishing the scientific credibility and authority of their discipline and its products in the last thirty years. In North America this took the form of widespread commitment to the prescience, explicitly positivist goals of the New Archaeology, which embody objectivist ideals in an especially stringent form. Reconstructive hypotheses were to be treated as the starting point, not the end point, of research, and any investigation of the archaeological record was to be designed (on a hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation) as an empirical test of these hypotheses; whatever their sources, they were to be confronted with evidence from the surviving record of the pasts they purport to describe and accepted or rejected on this basis. The expectation was that a rigorously scientific methodology would preserve archaeologists from the pernicious influence of standpoint-specific interests and power relations as they either operate within the field or impinge on it from outside; they would ensure that archaeology is "selfcleansing" of intrusive bias and therefore produces genuine (i.e., objective) knowledge of the cultural past. These developments are discussed in more detail in Alison Wylie, "The Constitution of Archae
Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for "doing science as a feminist" that have taken shape in the context of the long running "feminist method debate" in the social sciences.
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