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The Nature of Archaeological Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John M. Fritz  and
Fred T. Plog
John M. Fritz
Affiliation:
Department of AnthropologyUniversity of California, Santa Cruz
Fred T. Plog
Affiliation:
Department of AnthropologyUniversity of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

We argue that the development and use of law-like statements by archaeologists to explain characteristics of the archaeological record has been and should continue to be one of the most important goals of archaeological research. Using a model for explanation developed by the philosophers of science, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, we indicate the role of such statements in archaeological classification. However, in archaeology such statements are found to be implicit, untested, and extremely general in referent.

We further argue that the testing of potential laws requires a shift from an inductive procedure, or from one in which undirected data collection forms the first and the "abstraction" of laws from data forms the last research step, to a deductive procedure in which the explicit formulation of potential laws and their empirical consequences precedes and directs the collection of data.

Type
Articles
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 405 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1970

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References

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