ABSTRACT
Philosophy in Great Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia is largely analytic. Philosophical analysis, rigorous reduction to elements, must precede whatever positive thesis philosophers may propose on a given topic. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a conception of rationality as ahistoric in being necessarily prior to all intellectual inquiry and as transcending disciplinary, temporal, and cultural contexts. Archaeology is a critical investigation of disciplinary systems of knowledge with the goal of understanding the discursive practices that produced those systems of knowledge. The archaeologist's interest is in disciplinary discourse, in expert pronouncements and idioms. Archaeology has a diversifying effect in that its objective is to fracture the smooth totality of a disciplinary tradition's picture of itself or of one of its constitutive elements. The diversifying effect of archaeological investigation is not limited to particular disciplinary practices. To do archaeology is precisely to understand how something like a discursive structure comes to be considered an underlying reality.
