Alison Wylie

Internal debates over the status and aims of archaeology—between processualists and post or anti-processualists—have been so sharply adversarial, and have generated such sharply polarized positions, that they obscure much common ground. Despite strong rhetorical opposition, in practice, all employ a range of strategies for building and assessing the empirical credibility of their claims that reveals a common commitment to some form of mitigated objectivism. To articulate what this comes to, an account is given of how archaeological data may be ‘laden with theory’ constructed as evidence—and yet still function as an independent constraint on interpretation.

Insofar as the material residues of interest to archaeologists are cultural and, as such, have specifically symbolic significance, it is argued that archaeology must employ some form of structuralist analysis (i.e. as specifically concerned with this aspect of the material). Wylie examines the prevalent notion that such analysis is inevitably 'unscientific' because it deals with a dimension of material culture which is inaccessible of any direct, empirical investigation, and argues that this rests on an entrenched misconception of science; it assumes that scientific enquiry must be restricted to observables. It is clear, as realist critics of this view have argued, that scientific (explanatory) understanding depends fundamentally on theoretical extensions beyond observables; extensions which bring into view underlying and inaccessible causal structures or mechanisms responsible for the mani- fest phenomena through a procedure of analogical model construc- tion. In consideration of realist models of these procedures and of the potential of linguistic modes of analysis for archaeology, it is pro- posed that archaeologists might (and, in fact, often do) effectively grasp the symbolic, structural order of surviving material culture through analysis governed by a rigorous and controlled use of ethno- graphic analogy. It is claimed, moreover, that the archaeological record can provide empirical bases for evaluating these theoretical constructs if a procedure of recursive and systematic testing is adopted in research, but the standard hypothetico-deductive model is seriously flawed as an account of an ideal for this procedure. Glassie's analysis of Middle Virginian folk housing is an example of research along these lines which illustrates the potential for a rigorous structuralist alternative.

The contributions to Testing Scientific Theories are unified by an in-terest in responding to criticisms directed by Glymour against existing models of confirmation—chiefly H-D and Bayesian schemas—and in assessing and correcting the "bootstrap" model of confirmation that he proposed as an alternative in Theory and Evidence (1980). As such, they provide a representative sample of objections to Glymour's model and of the wide range of new initiatives in thinking about scientific confirmation that it has influenced. The effect is a sense of engagement and focus, and of significant advance at least in articulation of the problems that require solution; as Earman observes, "it is... heartening to report that the various opposing camps learned from each other" (p. vi).' In what follows I am concerned to assess what has been learned both critically, about Glymour's model, and constructively about the resources of the alternatives he challenges. My thesis is that while the theories emerging in this debate do deal with a wider range of scientific practice than before, their remaining limitations raise important questions about the ambitions and criteria of adequacy that have traditionally governed philosophical inquiry in this area.

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.

In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a broader context, addressing them as they arise in connection with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, both past and present.

The vagaries of evidential reasoning in archaeology are notorious: the material traces that comprise the archaeological record are fragmentary and profoundly enigmatic, and the inferential gap that archaeologists must cross to constitute them as evidence of the cultural past is a peren­nial source of epistemic anxiety. And yet we know a great deal about the cultural past, including vast reaches of the past for which this material record is our only source of evidence. The contents of this record stand as evidence only under interpretation, but however much a construct it is, archaeological evidence has a striking capacity to disrupt settled assump­tions, redirecting inquiry and expanding interpretive horizons in direc­tions no one could have anticipated. It is this capacity for constraining inference and interpretation that I am concerned to understand. I outline a model of evidential reasoning based on archaeological practice that integrates insights drawn from philosophical theories of confirmation, model building and hypothesis testing. Given growing interest in the uses of material evidence in fields that had been resolutely text-based, the archaeological principles of evidential reasoning may have much wider reach than this particular social/historical discipline.

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence is a collection of 19 essays that take a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring key instances of exemplary practice, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. -/- Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. -/- Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material "things" as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer practitioners within archaeology and well beyond.

In organizing a plenary session to mark the Quincentennial at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, our aim was not to provide a summary or review of archaeological research bearing on our understanding of "Columbian consequences." Rather, we sought speakers who could raise forward-looking questions about the sociopolitical entanglements and consequences of archaeology considered as, itself, part of the legacy of contact. The papers that follow, by Vine Deloria, Jalil Sued-Badillo, and Brackette F. Williams, all take up these issues and draw out implications for future practice; this introduction provides something of a rationale for the session that brought these authors together.

Solomon has made the case, in Social Empicism (2001) for socially naturalized analysis of the dynamics of scientific inquiry that takes seriously two critical insights: that scientific rationality is contingent, disunified, and socially emergent; and that scientific progress is often fostered by factors traditionally regarded as compromising sources of bias. While elements of this framework are widely shared, Solomon intends it to be more resolutely social, more thoroughly naturalizing, and more ambitiously normative than other contextualizing epistemologies currently on offer. Four focal issues are addressed in the commentaries that follow: Solomon's characterization of empirical success as a goal of science (Clough); her distinction between empirical and non-empirical decision vectors and the viability of the multivariate analysis she proposes for assessing epistemic fairness in their distribution (Clough; Richardson); the plausibility of her thesis that normatively appropriate consensus is a (rare) limiting case rather than an intrinsically desirable outcome of inquiry (Oreskes; Richardson); and her conviction that a socially naturalized analysis of science can ground norms of scientific rationality (Longino; Oreskes).

In this wide-ranging interview with three members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sao Paolo (Brazil) Wylie explains how she came to work on philosophical issues raised in and by archaeology, describes the contextualist challenges to ‘received view’ models of confirmation and explanation in archaeology that inform her work on the status of evidence and contextual ideals of objectivity, and discusses the role of non-cognitive values in science. She also is pressed to explain what’s feminist about feminist research and in that connection outlines her account of feminist standpoint theory and the relevance of feminist analysis to science.