ABSTRACT
Archaeologists intuitively believe that they ‘discover’ knowledge more directly than scientists in other fields. In the constructivist view, however, science is not about discovery but about creativity and construction, about making order out of disorder, about the fabrication of statements that reduce noise in data, about chains of decisions and negotiations and selections that can only be made on the basis of previous selections. A constructivist view of science with its internal observations of scientific practice has yet to be applied in archaeology. Male archaeologists interact with lithics, and appear in lithic research, in profoundly and significantly different ways from female archaeologists. Palaeoethnobotany, widely recognized as a women’s research area, is given as a research speciality in the American Anthropological Association Guide to Departments by an almost equal number of women and men, 12 compared to 14, although women represent only 20 percent of the population of archaeologists.
