The Philosophies Of Archeology

The philosophies of archaeology can be a source for some major confusion in the field of study. We use philosophy to explain to not only others but to ourselves about why we do what we do. In archaeological research, epistemology and ontological seem to be our core philosophies for understanding, but both have caused problems in the way of their usage. Without a clear understanding of these two philosophies, the reason for what we do falls apart and effect how we study archeology as a whole. We as student must understand these philosophies in order to better see how to perceive and understand our fields. To put it simply, Epistemology is the study and understanding of the ways of knowing and thinking. It allows us to comprehending how we know the things we know. Depending on the type of epistemology we can change the way we think about things. On the American campus, archelogy in is in some way still considered as one the social science. Dunnell tells about archelogy has holdovers from the social cultural anthropology that keeps it this way and one of the failure that stops it from becoming a true science. (Dunnell 1982) One these holdovers is the Social-cultural epistemology that limits our thinking in archeology. A student

Time is our greatest asset for study. When we observe time we can see change and evolution. Despite its importance to us there is an ontological perspective that has archeologists rejecting the concept of time in flavor of understand with the change through space. Ontology is the study of the nature of reality, and in an essentialist view archeologists care about the snapshot or the moment in time that reality. Essentialists take these snapshots at points in time when things are their purest state, and they can be good for understanding the overall whole picture and the spatial relationships of