Material Evidence

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach, exploring key instances of exemplary practice, critical turning points, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. In doing so, it identifies norms of evidential reasoning that underpin judgments of epistemic credibility in archaeology. Archaeologists have made compelling use of enormously diverse types of material evidence from garbage dumps to monuments, from the physical traces of single events to the palimpsest of evidence that bears witness to large scale cultural transformations, from finely crafted artefacts rich with cultural significance to the inadvertent transformation of ecologies and landscapes over the long term. Chapters identify a particular aspect of evidential reasoning with which to grapple and to consider, with reference to concrete examples of exemplary or transformative practice in their area of specialization, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. The result is the contextualization and assessment of these cases in ways that make it possible to articulate constructive guidelines for practice One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice has much to offer practitioners within archaeology and well beyond. The book is therefore addressed to two broad constituencies of interest in material culture as evidence: archaeologists who have been thinking critically about evidential reasoning; and historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars who are increasingly taking up the challenges of working with the kinds of material "things" that have long engaged archaeologists.