ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the value to archaeology of one of the most important branches of philosophy, epistemology. Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is concerned with understanding the nature and validity of human knowledge. The chapter considers why archaeologists have a difficult time trying to understand philosophical arguments and how they can overcome these problems and use epistemological concepts more critically and productively to interpret their data. Archaeological interpretation is therefore heavily influenced by intellectual fashions and all understandings of the past are eventually undermined by new data and new explanatory fads. To adopt a biological evolutionary perspective is to accept the proposition that selection is a process that enables individual organisms that are better adapted to their environment to reproduce more successfully than competitors and hence avoid the extinction of their lineages. Human behavior, however special it may be and however determined in its specificity by learning, is the outcome of natural selection acting upon a particular primate lineage.
