begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 12:17:17AM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >But in the end, it's all just Just-So stories. May be true, may not, > >but you can't really KNOW. > > Archaeology is no longer a sufficiently monolithic field for you to make > a blanket statement like that.
Anything that requires a time-machine to verify falls in that category. > Yes, there is much about archaeology that attempts to probe sociological > and psychological constructs of the age. That is mostly weak science, > at best, not necessarily because of archaeology but beacause sociology > and psychology are often weak science. Yup. > However, some of the most fascinating and scientific archaeology occurs > when they try to examine the engineering of the day. Finally > understanding Damascus steel, figuring out that the Pyramids are aligned > by the stars, rebuilding triremes, braving the ocean in small > outriggers, examining the DNA of people, etc. I find these > *fascinating*. They are also very much hard science. Not all things fascinating are science. Not all things we know HAVE to come from "science". Scholarship is not to be despised. I want 'science' to be a limited and useful tool, not an ever-growing "discipline". "They looked at the evidence, used a bunch of tools to get more evidence, and then thought hard." is not something I want to consider 'science'. Perhaps, once again, what is considered "science" is changing. -Stewart
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