Abstract
It used to be believed — and many still do — that archaeology is about the distant past of human societies, basing its reasonings on presently available material sources of evidence. While history draws from written sources, archaeology endeavours to get access to the prehistoric past by studying the archaeological record, by inferring from the material finds — as well as from premises of a theoretical kind — to the past process in human societies. The archaeological method is supposed to lead from the record to the process, from the empirical finds in the present to theoretical accounts of the past. The past process really occurred, and the archaeologists seek to acquire true hypotheses about it.
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Mäki, U. (2003). The Archaeological Construction of the Past: Some Realist Moderations. In: Sintonen, M., Ylikoski, P., Miller, K. (eds) Realism in Action. Synthese Library, vol 321. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1046-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1046-7_3
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