Back to top: Principles of archaeological epistemics
Definitions
As a system of knowledge, archaeological epistemics deals with data that belong to broken traditions and are tied to place. This means that their current context is not the one in which these elements “lived” when they part of their own tradition. The pertinent epistemic system accounts for this bivalent situation, where data are found in a disaggregate state but are witnesses of an original meaningful aggregation.
Back to top: Principles of archaeological epistemics
Presuppositions
There are some guiding principles that undergird the functioning of the system: they help us understand how we can approach the core issue of bridging the gap between the two contexts, that of the current disaggregation and that of their original live setting.
Back to top: Principles of archaeological epistemics
Procedures
Archaeological data have a different status than in any other discipline in the social sciences or the humanities: they have a tie to place. Recovery is the procedure though which elements are extracted from the ground or are found in extraneous contexts; they are seen statically in this singularity. Clustering, on the other hand, sees these elements dynamically rhough a vareity of types of affinity.
Back to top: Principles of archaeological epistemics