ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that phenomenology can contribute to method in archaeology since it provides access to contemporary dwelling. Dwelling emphasises embedded and embodied action and agency in worlds of pragmatic concern. The chapter also argues that integrating phenomenology and archaeology will result in the production of the best available accounts of past 'ways of thought and action' to be revealed and hermeneutically reconstructed on the basis of the archaeological record and phenomenological accounts of experience in the present. As a result of archaeology becoming critically self-conscious, a number of questions can now be posed by archaeologists. The chapter describes the engagement with Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition is central to becoming a theoretically reflexive archaeologist. A revised Heideggerian position takes into consideration contemporary insights from both phenomenology and the cognitive sciences may be deployed when thinking about the beings whose activities make up the archaeological record. For Heidegger, finite mortality enables originary meaning-making in the present and in the past.
