17th August 2009, 04:15 PM
Great blog post diggingthedirt, and one with which I fully agree.
My joke about the engineer, the scientist and the philosopher was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
As someone that has been formally educated in the post-processual school of theoretical archaeology, as well as in the processual side, I'm aware of the subjective-objective debate etc. The main gripe I have is that theoretical archaeology is cheap to teach- one seminar and one lecture a week (if you're lucky) with the rest of the time dedicated to reading up on those key texts and papers. Science is harder and more expensive to teach- more labs, more materials and more face-time mean more money.
Post-processual archaeology is very self-referential- knowledge of one's subjective point of view in analysing data is very important. In my opinion I'd like post-processual archaeologists to acknowledge that part of the success of post-processualism lies in its appeal to university accountants as much as to university undergraduates.
The product of low investment in students at undergraduate level is a lower standard of graduates. There are plenty of archaeology graduates who don't "do" science, or statistics. But knowledge of basic scientific and statistical techniques should be at least as important as knowledge of post-structuralism (or pots, for that matter). Knowledge of these sorts of things is important as a general life skill (autism and the MMR jab anybody?) as well as being appealing to employers outside of the heritage industry.
My joke about the engineer, the scientist and the philosopher was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
As someone that has been formally educated in the post-processual school of theoretical archaeology, as well as in the processual side, I'm aware of the subjective-objective debate etc. The main gripe I have is that theoretical archaeology is cheap to teach- one seminar and one lecture a week (if you're lucky) with the rest of the time dedicated to reading up on those key texts and papers. Science is harder and more expensive to teach- more labs, more materials and more face-time mean more money.
Post-processual archaeology is very self-referential- knowledge of one's subjective point of view in analysing data is very important. In my opinion I'd like post-processual archaeologists to acknowledge that part of the success of post-processualism lies in its appeal to university accountants as much as to university undergraduates.
The product of low investment in students at undergraduate level is a lower standard of graduates. There are plenty of archaeology graduates who don't "do" science, or statistics. But knowledge of basic scientific and statistical techniques should be at least as important as knowledge of post-structuralism (or pots, for that matter). Knowledge of these sorts of things is important as a general life skill (autism and the MMR jab anybody?) as well as being appealing to employers outside of the heritage industry.