With the emergence of modern techniques of environmental analysis and widespread availability of accessible tools and quantitative data, the question of environmental determinism is once again on the agenda. This paper is theoretical in character, attempting, for the benefit of drawing up research designs, to understand and evaluate the character of environmental determinism. We reach three main conclusions: (1) in a typical pattern of research design, studies seek to detect simultaneous shifts in the environmental and archaeological records, variously positing the former to have influenced, triggered or caused the latter; (2) the question of determinism involves uncertainty about the justification for the above research design in particular in what comes to biologism and the concept of environmental thresholds on the one hand and the externality of the drivers of transformation in human groups and societies on the other; (3) adapting the concepts of the social production of vulnerability and the social basis of hazards from anthropology may help to clarify the available research design choices at hand.
This paper commends some ideas that Torill Christine Lindstrøm presented in this journal on the subject of ‘object agency’ (2015) and contends, against Tim Flohr Sørensen's reaction paper (2016), that object agency subsists on philosophically questionable premises. I argue that Sørensen relies on a definition of ‘agency’ which is too labile and virtually indistinguishable from ‘cause’. Moreover, certain premises that Sørensen supports lead to some contradictions with regard to social responsibility. Finally, I argue that object agency is part of a larger intellectual trend which perceives agency as a dynamic global force – and that a return to a more constrained understanding of agency would be of more benefit to archaeology.
The past few decades have witnessed a growing realisation that marketbased measures of human well-being-measures that centre on income and consumption distributions-miss some other perhaps even more essential elements of human well-being. This insight has found a prominent expression in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen's so-called capability approach. At the same time, the market-based measure of inequality as a function of the distribution of material remains in graves and other locations remain dominant in archaeology. In this paper, we explore the significance of the capability approach, and the associated concept of human well-being based on the idea of capabilities, to the archaeology of social J Archaeol Method Theory (2016) Institute for Pre-and Protohistoric Archaeology, University of Kiel, Johanna-Mestorf-Strasse 2-6, 24118 Kiel, Germany inequality and social malintegration. We discuss these notions using the case study of the Late Neolithic Bosnian tell site Okolište and argue that there, in c. 5200-4600 BCE, the monopolisation of certain critical goods led to a critical capability inequality, malintegration and to a prolonged period of social unrest and decline.23:541-560 DOI 10.1007/s10816-015-9252-
Many archaeologists are currently stuck in a mindset in which attention is paid exclusively to ideas that are ‘new’ and ‘revolutionary’. This fetishization of the ‘new’ leads us down a dangerous road as it promotes uncritical disdain of old ideas which remain valid and it advocates fads from neighbouring disciplines which are methodologically vapid and philosophically dubious. The objective of this paper is to question whether archaeology requires constant ‘paradigmatic change’ and my answer to this question is no. By constantly altering the status quo, archaeologists are promoting a culture in which theoretical ‘newness’ is given the spotlight and ideas are considered valid as long as they are original. Against this, I recommend a more critical view of new ideas and a revision of old ones – a culture which prioritizes the quality of archaeological theories regardless of whether they are new or old.
Prominent voices in archeology have expressed deep skepticism about the role of theory in archeology, while with new, exciting methods at its disposal, archeological science is occasionally perceived as not needing theory at all. This article reflects upon the debate about theory in archeology to arrive at a robust but critical middle-range concept of the role and character of theory in socio-environmental archeology. It is argued that archeology is a data-based science and, consequently, in order for theory to be meaningful in socio-environmental archeology, theory ought explicitly aim to make its qualitative concepts quantitative to establish a clear relation to data and its interpretation. On the turn side, theory plays an important role critically reflecting upon the use of concepts in archeological understanding and explanation, as well as their origins in particular paradigms, as examples of which certain debates in scientific archeology are discussed (aDNA and migration, evolutionism). We argue that such a model would serve archeology far more than the dismissal of theory on the one hand and the continued production of ‘high’ theory in absence of operationalization on the other.
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