Science, Data, and Case-Studies under the Third Science Revolution: Some Theoretical Considerations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37718/CSA.2019.06Keywords:
Big Data, revolution, theory, case-study, quantitative, qualitativeAbstract
The Third Science Revolution described by Kristian Kristiansen (2014) has been openly embraced and is currently underway in archaeology. It has brought considerable improvement in terms of scientific methods and approaches, but at the same time, it brings with it the risk of transforming archaeology into something that is methodologically uniform, inflexible, and oversimplified, or in other words, a methodologically monistic discipline. This is particularly evident when it comes to Big Data: the Third Science Revolution has inaugurated a new understanding of data, one that reduces archaeological reality exclusively to those elements that are quantifiable.
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that archaeology needs to go beyond Big Data, and the Third Science revolution in general, and embody qualitative research. This can be done by incorporating methods and theories from history and anthropology that contextualize the purposeful character of past human action. This requires (re)embracing case-study research, but also recognizing a meaning of ‘case-study’ that has been largely ignored: as a paradigmatic example of a Zeitgeist - a context where different institutions, power relations, and ideologies are all entwined.
Downloads
References
Anscombe, G.E.M. 2011[1957]. Intention. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bell, C.M. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boudon, R. 1972. On the Underlying Epistemology of some Sociological Theories and on its Scientific Consequences. Synthese. Vol. 24(3) pp. 410-430.
Boyer, P. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Boyer, P. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Boyd, D. & Crawford, K. 2012. Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society. Vol. 15(5) pp. 662-679.
Braidwood, R.J. 1959. Archaeology and the Evolutionary Theory. In: Meggers, B.J. (ed). Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal, pp. 76-89. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington.
Calude, C.S., and Longo, G. 2017. The Deluge of Spurious Correlations in Big Data. Foundations of Science. Vol. 22(3) pp. 595-612.
Castoriadis, C. 1984. Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Chartier, R. 1982. Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories. In: LaCapra, D. and Kaplan, S.L. (eds). Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, pp. 13-46, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chilton, E.S. 2014. Plus ça change: From Postprocessualism to “Big Data”. Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 22 pp. 35-40.
Cunningham, J.J. & MacEachern, S. 2016. Ethnoarchaeology as Slow Science. World Archaeology. Vol. 48(5) pp. 628-641.
Descombes, V. 2001. The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dobres, M.A. & Robb, J. 2005. “Doing” Agency: Introductory Remarks on Methodology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 12(3) pp. 159-166.
Flannery, K.V. 1973. Archeology with a Capital S. In: Redman, C.L. (ed). Research and Theory in Current Archeology, pp. 47–53. John Wiley: New York.
Flyvbjerg, B. 2006. Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research. Qualitative inquiry. Vol. 12(2) pp. 219-245.
Furholt, M. 2017. Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe. European Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 21(2) pp. 159-191.
Gardner, A. & Cochrane, E. 2011. Evolutionary and Interpretive Archaeologies: A Dialogue. In: Cochrane, E. and Gardner, A. (eds). Evolutionary and Interpretive Archaeologies: A Dialogue, pp. 11-29. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Gattiglia, G. 2015. Think Big about Data: Archaeology and the Big Data Challenge. Archäologische Informationen. Vol. 38 pp. 1-12.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Ginzburg, C. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ginzburg, C. 1993. Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 20(1) pp. 10-35.
Ginzburg, C. 2012. Threads and Traces: True False Fictive. Berkeley: University of California Press.
González-Ruibal, A. 2014. Archaeological Revolution(s). Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 22 pp. 41-45.
Graeber, D. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Gregory, B.S. 1999. Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life. History and Theory. Vol. 38(1) pp. 100-110.
Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., [...]Alt, K.W. & Reich, D. 2015. Massive Migration from the Steppe was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe. Nature. Vol. 522(7555) pp. 207–211.
Hakenbeck, S.E. 2019. Genetics, Archaeology and the Far Right: an Unholy Trinity. World Archaeology, pp. 1-11 [online first].
Helms, M.W. 1998. Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Hempel, C.G. 1942. The Function of General Laws in History. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 39(2) pp. 35-48.
Ion, A. 2017. How Interdisciplinary is Interdisciplinarity? Revisiting the Impact of aDNA Research for the Archaeology of Human Remains. Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 25 pp. 177-198.
Ion, A. 2019. Beyond Determinism. A Case for Complex Explanations and Human Scale in Framing Archaeological Causal Explanations. Archaeological Dialogues. Vol. 26(1) pp. 10-12.
Johnson, M.H. 2006. On the Nature of Theoretical Archaeology and Archaeological Theory. Archaeological Dialogues. Vol. 13(2) pp. 117-132.
Kaniewski, D., Van Campo, E. & Weiss, H. 2012. Drought is a Recurring Challenge in the Middle East. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 109 (10) pp. 3862-3867.
Kappler, K., Schrape, J.F., Ulbricht, L. & Weyer, J. 2018. Societal Implications of Big Data. Künstliche Intelligenz. Vol. 32(1) 55-60.
Kelley, J.H. & Hanen, M.P. 1988. Archaeology and the Methodology of Science. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Killick, D. 2015. The Awkward Adolescence of Archaeological Science. Journal of Archaeological Science. Vol. 56 pp. 242-247.
Kopytoff, I. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process. In: Appadurai, A. (ed). The Social Life of Things, pp.64-91, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kristiansen, K. 2014. Towards a New Paradigm: the Third Science Revolution and its Possible Consequences in Archaeology. Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 22 pp. 11-34.
Kristiansen, K. 2017. The Nature of Archaeological Knowledge and Its Ontological Turns. Norwegian Archaeological Review. Vol. 50(2) pp. 120-123.
Kristiansen, K. & Larsson, T.B. (2005). The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LaCapra, D. 1985. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1980. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Leonelli, S. 2014. What Difference does Quantity Make? On the Epistemology of Big Data in Biology. Big Data & Society. Vol. 1 pp. 1-11.
Levi, A.S. 2013. Humanities ‘Big Data’: Myths, Challenges, and Lessons. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Silicon Valley, CA, pp. 33-36. 10.1109/BigData.2013.6691667.
Lidén, K. and Eriksson, G. 2013. Archaeology vs. Archaeological Science: Do we have a Case? Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 21 pp. 11-20.
Lull, V., Micó, R., Rihuete Herrada, C. & Risch, R. (2015). Transition and Conflict at the end of the 3rd Millennium BC in South Iberia. In: Risch, R., Arz, H.W., Jung, R. & Meller, H. (eds). 2200 BC – A Climatic Breakdown as a Cause for the Collapse of the Old World?, pp. 365-407, Halle (Salle): Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt /Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte.
Marila, M. 2017. Vagueness and Archaeological Interpretation: A Sensuous Approach to Archaeological Knowledge Formation through Finds Analysis. Norwegian Archaeological Review. Vol. 50(1) pp. 66-88.
Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum.
Meyer, C., Brandt, G., Haak, W., Gansimier, R.A., Meller, H. & Alt, K.W. 2009. The Eulau Eulogy: Bio-archaeological Interpretation of Lethal Violence in Corded Ware Multiple Burials from Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Vol. 28 pp. 412–423.
Mills, B.J., Clark, J.J., […] Clauset, A. & Shackley, M.S. 2013. Transformation of Social Networks in the Late Pre-Hispanic US Southwest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 110(15) 5785–5790.
Mills, B.J., Peeples, M.A., Haas Jr. W.R & Brock, L.. 2015. Multiscalar Perspectives on Social Networks in the Late Prehispanic Southwest. American Antiquity. 80(1) pp. 3–24.
Mímisson, K. & Magnússon, S.G. 2014. Singularizing the Past: The History and Archaeology of the Small and Ordinary. Journal of Social Archaeology. Vol. 14(2) pp. 131-156.
Moro Abadía, O. 2017. Bridging the Gap in Archaeological Theory: An Alternative Account of Scientific ‘Progress’ in Archaeology. World Archaeology. Vol. 49 (2) pp. 271-280.
Olalde, I., Brace, S., [...] Lalueza-Fox, C. & Reich, D. 2018. The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe. Nature. Vol. 555(7695) pp. 190–196.
Olalde, I., Mallick, S., [...] Lalueza-Fox, C. & Reich, D. 2019. The Genomic History of the Iberian Peninsula over the pPast 8000 Years. Science. Vol. 363 (6432) pp. 1230-1234.
O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. Largo, MD: Crown Books.
Popper, K.R. 2002[1935]. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge.
Ribeiro, A. 2018. Death of the Passive Subject: Intentional Action and Narrative Explanation in Archaeological Studies. History of the Human Sciences. Vol. 31(3) pp. 105-121.
Riede, F. 2019. Environmental Determinism and Archaeology: Red Flag, Red Herring. Archaeological Dialogues. Vol. 26(1) pp. 17-19.
Russell, L. 2004. Drinking from the Penholder: Intentionality and Archaeological Theory. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Vol. 14(1) 64-67.
Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind. New York: Hutchinson.
Sahlins, M.D. 1972. Stone Age Economics. London: Routledge.
Shennan, S. 2013. Demographic Continuities and Discontinuities in Neolithic Europe: Evidence, Methods and Implications. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 20(2) pp. 300-311.
Snijders, C., Matzat, U., & Reips, U.-D. 2012. "Big Data": Big Gaps of Knowledge in the Field of Internet Science. International Journal of Internet Science. Vol. 7 pp. 1-5.
Snow, C. P. 1998 [1959]. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sørensen, T.F. 2016. In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 23(2) pp. 741-763.
Sørensen, T.F. 2017. The Two Cultures and a World Apart: Archaeology and Science at a New Crossroads. Norwegian Archaeological Review. Vol. 50(2) pp. 101-115.
Sørensen, T.F. 2019. The Triviality of the New: Innovation and Impact in Archaeology and Beyond. Current Swedish Archaeology. Vol. 26 pp. 93-117.
Stone, L. 1979. The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History. Past & Present. Vol. 85 pp. 3-24.
Stutz, L.N. 2018. A Future for Archaeology: In Defense of an Intellectually Engaged, Collaborative and Confident Archaeology. Norwegian Archaeological Review. Vol. 51(1-2) pp. 48-56.
Tallis, R. 2014. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. London: Routledge
Taylor, C. 1964. The Explanation of Behaviour. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Vanpool, C.S., and Vanpool, T.L. 1999. The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism. American antiquity. Vol. 64(1) pp. 33-53.
Von Wright, G.H. 1971. Explanation and Understanding. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Winch, P. 2008[1958]. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors contributing to Current Swedish Archaeology retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to the Swedish Archaeological Society. Read the journal's full Copyright- and Licensing Policy.
