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Four problems for archaeological refitting studies : discussion from the Taï Site and its neolithic pottery material (France)In Anna Sörman, Astrid A. Noterman & Markus Fjellström (eds.), Broken bodies, places and objects: new perspectives on fragmentation in archaeology, Routledge. 2023.
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191What Makes the Identity of a Scientific Method? A History of the “Structural and Analytical Typology” in the Growth of Evolutionary and Digital Archaeology in Southwestern Europe (1950s–2000s)Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 5 (1). 2022.Usual narratives among prehistoric archaeologists consider typological approaches as part of a past and outdated episode in the history of research, subsequently replaced by technological, functional, chemical, and cognitive approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, this paper addresses several limits of these narratives, which (1) assume a linear, exclusive, and additive conception of scientific change, neglecting the persistence of typological problems; (2) reduce collective de…Read more
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197Assyrian Merchants meet Nuclear Physicists: History of the Early Contributions from Social Sciences to Computer Science. The Case of Automatic Pattern Detection in Graphs (1950s-1970s)Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46 (4): 547-568. 2021.Community detection is a major issue in network analysis. This paper combines a socio-historical approach with an experimental reconstruction of programs to investigate the early automation of clique detection algorithms, which remains one of the unsolved NP-complete problems today. The research led by the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin from the 1950s on non-numerical information and graph analysis is retraced to demonstrate the early contributions of social sciences and humanities. The limite…Read more
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268Abstraction in Archaeological Stratigraphy: a Pyrenean Lineage of Innovation (late 19th-early 21th century)In Sophie de Beaune, Alessandro Guidi, Oscar Moro Abadía & Massimo Tarantini (eds.), New Advances in the History of Archaeology, Archaeopress. pp. 78-92. 2021.Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on arch…Read more
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163The Effects of Publishing Processes on Scientific Thought. Typography and Typology in Prehistoric Archaeology (1950s–1990s)Science in Context 33 (3): 273-297. 2020.In the last decades, many changes have occurred in scientific publishing, including online publication, data repositories, file formats and standards. The role played by computers in this process rekindled the argument on forms of technical determinism. This paper addresses this old debate by exploring the case of publishing processes in prehistoric archaeology during the second part of the twentieth century, prior to the wide-scale adoption of computers. It investigates the case of a collective…Read more
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285À distances raisonnables des structuralismes : logique, langage, formalisation et sciences de l’homme. Une dispute du 20e siècle finissantZilsel. Science, Technique, Société 6 70-115. 2019.1. Une dispute épistémologique 1.1 Quatre itinéraires à proximité puis à distance des structuralismes 1.2 Un différend sur les « usages réglés du rationalisme » en sciences de l’homme 2. Les mots et les descriptions en sciences de l’homme 2.1 Une commune limitation du déterminisme linguistique 2.2 Un problème philosophique implicite : descriptions définies et noms propres 2.3 L’usage des descriptions définies en sciences de l’homme 2.4 Les (semi-)noms propres des sciences historiques 2.5 …Read more
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11This paper addresses two disciplinary expansion trends in social sciences: in sociology, by denying the distinction between human and non-human; in archaeology, relying on the objet-mémoire concept, which associates the ideas of social interaction and memory processes. We discuss them from an ethnographic study of the ordinary containers in a biology laboratory. The signs, drawn or engraved on their surface, are a proxy for a joint analysis of artifacts, textuality, institutionalization processe…Read more
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439History and Sociology of ScienceIn Sandra L. López Varela (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, . 2018.The relationship between archaeology and other sciences has only recently become a research topic for sociologists and historians of science. From the 1950s to the present day, different approaches have been taken and the aims of research studies have changed considerably. Besides methodological textbooks, which aim at advancing archaeological knowledge, historians of archaeology have tackled this question by exploring the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline. More recently, col…Read more
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164Refrain from Standards? French, Cavemen and Computers. A (short) Story of Multidimensional Analysis in French Prehistoric ArchaeologyIn Oliver Schlaudt & Lara Huber (eds.), Standardization in Measurement. Philosophical and Sociological Issues, . pp. 39-52. 2015.Focusing on the history of prehistoric archaeology in the 20th century, this papers shows (1) that statistical multidimensional analyses were carried out by a new kind of actors who challenged the previous common language shared by prehistorians. This fundamental change was important, considering that (2) language is a fundamental point for the epistemology of archaeology. However, a comparison of multidimensional analyses applications over time shall make clear that (3) the differences are most…Read more
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12During the second half of the 20th century, attempts were made to operationally redefine various social activities, including those related to science, the military, administration and industry. These attempts were aided by scientific and technical innovations developed in the Second World War, and subsequently by the increase in use of automation in various domains. This Ph.D. thesis addresses these attempts from a sociohistorical perspective, focusing on the specific case of archaeology. Durin…Read more
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543The majority of analyses investigating the professionalisation of scientific domains tend to assume the linear and general features of this transformation. These studies focus on the shift from a non-professionalised state to a professionalised state. This dual approach, however, crucially lacks some other aspects of the process of professionalisation. This issue is discussed within the context of the growth of prehistoric archaeology in France from the 1940s, by observing scientific societies, …Read more
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317The issue of the definition and position of archaeology as a discipline is examined in relation to the dispute which took place from 1980 to 2009 between the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin and the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron. This case study enables us to explore the actual conceptual relationships between archaeology and the other sciences (as opposed to those wished for or prescribed). The contrasts between the positions declared by the two researchers and the rooting of their arguments…Read more
Sébastien Plutniak
École Française De Rome
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École Française De RomePost-doctoral Fellow
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Epistemology |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |
Sociology of Science |
Sociology of Knowledge |
History |
History of Science |
History of Science, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Mereology |
Quantification and Ontology |