An Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking (2017)

An Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking (2017)
smithsonianmag.com

What this article should focus on is the work of Lauriane Bourgeon, who went back to the material and tested it under revised methods that were specifically oriented to meet these criteria. Archaeological knowledge does not just result from one-man discoveries, but accretes over time as new ideas become pervasive and we develop new ways of recognizing archaeological phenomena.

All that stuff about monteverde and other similarly controversial work is just red herring that distracts from the claims that the article is supposedly all about. It says 'archaeologists are stuck in their ways! They are such extreme orthodoxy gatekeeper morons!" But archaeology is actually one of the most interdisciplinary domains of science and is most open to alternative perspectives, based on my varied experiences at least. If the article wanted to seriously tackle knowledge production in archaeology then it would actually address how archaeologists think about and use evidence to draw narratives about the past, which involves discursive knowledge and values, which could be very well represented by Bourgeon's work as a case study. Or you can write a thrilling blockbuster about the lone outsider who tore down the temple of doom with his own two fists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgs9zJdJctw

>>> Evidence had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age.

Talk to the Inuit about that one, the assumption that 'primitive' people were only ever able to walk over a land bridge rather than migrate along the ice coast in boats. Many longstanding ideas, especially those most convenient to questionable ethnographic ideas, need to be challenged. Frankly, I look very closely at any idea that appeared in 1950s/60s highschool textbooks, such as the above land bridge concept. The clovis/pre-clovis debate is so tied into US politics (ie the challenge to the "first" in "first nations") that everyone should be very careful.

What he and other pseudoarchaeologists claim to be orthodoxy in the discipline is actually a representation of how archaeology was in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropology, which archaeology became a sub discipline of in the 1960s, was firmly structuralist at the time. Structuralism is the theoretical paradigm that sees culture as comprising two intertwined components: intangible conceptual constructs, and expressions of those constructs such as language, symbols and myths. Dualities in myth in particular were latched onto as the scaffolding that uphold the underlying cultural constructs; if you could identify these pillars of culture then it was though that you could truly understand it. This was later recognized to be total garbage since it completely ignores the lived experiences of actual people, it pretends to be omniscient, it considers cultures as pure entities that live in isolation relative to one another, it flattens culture as a single way of life with no possibility for multiplicity to exist. Post-structuralism noted that there are blatant disconnects between so-called cultural norms and the actual experiences of individual people.

Structuralism was dismissed during the 1970s and being overly prescriptive, and rightly so. Graham Hancock criticizes the prescriptive terms that archaeologists in the 1960s devised, but simply replaces them with a different, much more arbitrary, completely unverifiable, utterly wacko, and much more prescriptive cultural framework, rather than consider that the whole notion of thinking in such a way is just plain wrong. He is stuck in the 1970s, subscribing to an outdated ideology that no archaeologist or anthropologist today would accept (though some aspects do creep in, especially in introductory pedagogical settings, and when similarly-minded systems theory approaches are uncritically applies, especially by theoretical physicists who claim to know everything).

It's sad really, because this perspective is so common, largely due to completely outdated representations of archaeology in the media. For instance, in Stargate the show has an hour for the crew to land on a planet, identify the conflict, and resolve it based on an off-hand remark made by a local that is strategically written into the show to express the cultural structure of the week. Why do all the planets they visit have only a single culture? Because it needs to be monolithic in order to meet the basic formula of the show. This is the reddit version of culture, which happens to be completely wrong, completely outdated, and persists largely to legitimize nationalist policies (it meshes very well with the implicit notion that nations have only one culture, expressed through famous cultural landmarks, and that 'lesser' cultures deserved to be displaced due to the fact that they did not meet the arbitrary criteria that distinguish so-called 'civilizations' from those miscellaneous 'simple tribes').