ABSTRACT
The practice of archaeology is not as objective as fieldworkers would like to believe; nor is it as subjective as theorists often suppose. Its procedures employ a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity, and it is the business of anyone examining the intellectual development of the discipline to decide where those boundaries were set at different times. The observations made in the field depend on a whole series of assumptions that are not discussed because they are taken for granted. It is only when those ideas are challenged that archaeologists can recognise their own vulnerability. All their primary observations are influenced by their knowledge and experience, but what they accept as knowledge, and what they think of as relevant experience, will change when the assumptions behind them are questioned. The methods used in the field constrain the interpretations formed at the time, and those techniques may not be the best ones for investigating different problems.
