ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the suggestion that empathy underlies much of the power of (historical) fiction to engage readers with the lives of past people, and that it may therefore offer useful insights for archaeological researchers as well. By imagining oneself in someone else’s shoes, empathy yields potential understanding of others’ motivations, actions and even emotions. But while the general scholarly literature on empathy is extensive, the subject is much less well covered in archaeological publications; where it is discussed, it is often quickly discounted as either too complex to define or work with, impossible to achieve or simply undesirable. At the same time, others have argued that empathetic thinking is core to all archaeological interpretation. Rather than the outright rejection of the role of empathy in the study of the past, which risks leaving its pervasive influence unaddressed, we argue for the need for more substantial research. Drawing on the broader empathy literature, and concentrating on the works of Collingwood and Gadamer, we argue that, while there are ethical and epistemological questions about the use of empathy to understand the past, there is also potential. Empathy does not offer a direct or instantaneous connection with someone else’s mind. Rather it is both process and outcome, motivation and solution; its use requires the constant tacking back and forth between past and present, self and other. Fictive techniques offer one way of making this imaginative process explicit and more rigorous.
