Foundational histories and power

Abstract

Matthew Johnson's essay is somewhat more conservative than I had anticipated and I am happy about that. He promotes a scientific archaeology in the sense that he promotes the kind of knowledge that can be established through verifiability. Then he takes what I see to be an increasingly frequent approach to the use of the phenomenological and hermeneutic position in archaeology. His positions are relatively gentle on these matters and are an attempt to seek out a way to utilize archaeology as a superior political tool when it is needed, as it most assuredly is, from place to place in the world. He remains attuned to the established fact that the definitions of many facts are themselves a function of political contexts. I am not sure yet that Matthew Johnson's brief essay succeeds with all the links he intends to make, but I think that a number of scholars are headed in this direction.