Introduction to experimental archaeology

If one takes a scientific and ‘positivist’ view (Popper 1959), then experimentation is part of a ‘hypothetico-deductive’ process. A hypothesis is formulated and then tested to see if it can be ‘falsified’. If falsified then that hypothesis must be discarded and replaced with a new, hopefully better one, which will, itself, then be tested. If a hypothesis resists falsification, and is supported by experimentation, it can be regarded as valid. ‘Valid’, in this sense, does not mean ‘true’, but merely that the principles behind the hypothesis can continue to be used until falsified and replaced by a better set of principles. An experimental, positivist approach can escape the shackles of simple historicism and empiricism, because it allows one to move beyond the limited range of options made available by records of the currently known world. It allows investigation of the counterintuitive and for the possibility of deductive leaps, rather than simply relying upon probabilistic and inductive extrapolations of existing knowledge. Positivism is still the underlying philosophy of modern science. While Kuhn (1962) very clearly outlined his view of how science really works in the fallible and often prejudiced world of human scientists, his critique was not so much a direct challenge to Popper’s ideals, but more of a reality check. Experimentation remains a method that clearly sits within the realms of science. The postmodernist attack on science and method (e.g. Feyerabend 1975) presented instead a philosophy of ‘anything goes’, and gave no special place to testing hypotheses though experimentation. This is not the place to debate, in depth, the nature of the postmodern or post-processual challenge to science, but the reader should note that this volume presents experimental archaeology as a scientific research method. As such, while it is accepted that other theoretical viewpoints will interpret the experiences of experimenters differently, this volume does not take an ‘anything goes’ approach to the topic, but it does investigate a range of styles and approaches to experimental archaeology as science. Having put forward a definition of experimentation, however, it is still not entirely clear what ‘experimental archaeology’ exactly means. If experiment is the mainstay of modern science, then, strictly speaking, is there really any difference between ‘experimental archaeology’ and ‘archaeological science’? Readers of key works dating to when the term ‘experimental archaeology’ was first coming into common parlance (e.g. Coles 1973, 1979;