ABSTRACT

Pollard, Handbook of archaeological sciences 2001;

Pollard, New developments in archaeological science

Chapter 1 outlined the growth of archaeology as

a distinctive discipline; a parallel account of the

history of science would be necessary for a full

discussion of the relationship between them. It is

easy to recognise archaeological science when it draws upon laboratory procedures that take

place in institutions whose main activities are

not archaeological. However, many museums and

universities possess their own scientific labora-

tories, which use identical methods for entirely

archaeological purposes. Scientific archaeology is quite another matter, for like archaeologists,

scientists do not possess a uniform philosophical

and theoretical outlook. One part of the agenda of

the New Archaeology, which developed in the

United States in the 1960s, was to make archae-

ology more scientific (chapter 6: 244); however, it

took a rather narrow view of science which

demanded that the subject should be conducted

in a manner that allowed everything to be hypoth-

esised, tested and used to generate explanatory

laws. Other approaches that emerged in the 1980s

and 1990s shared the New Archaeology’s links

with anthropology, but rejected rigid scientism and directed attention towards human experience

of society and the world rather than general

processes that governed them (chapter 6: 251).