Archaeology and scientific explanation: Naturalism, interpretivism and “A third way”

Abstract

The explanation-understanding controversy has been a main topic of archaeological methodology since the mid 19thcentury. The arguments for explanation were dominant throughout much of the 20thcentury within the empiricist and post-empiricist approaches. However, towards the end, understanding approaches were widely adopted by archaeologists, due to the prevalence gained by the interpretive turn in both hermeneutics and post-modern radical version. The aim of this paper is to review the less radical positions within the interpretive turn, that is, the hermeneutical thesis about understanding, and to examine the possibility of convergence between them and post-empiricist approaches on explanation. This paper has been written thanks to the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation research project FFI2009-09483. I am very grateful to Wenceslao J. Gonzalez for his insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.