Introduction
Over the past 25 years, the dual nature of archaeology has been widely recognized and accepted by scholars working within the field. On the one hand, archaeology is a rigorous search for truth about the ancient past. On the other, it is a political dialogue with the present. This accepted fact has been accompanied by a sea change in philosophy and theory. A number of important critiques by scholars located worldwide have moved archaeology away from empiricist and positivist epistemologies to various “realist” alternatives. These alternatives (1) appreciate that knowledge is constructed and produced from particular social standpoints; (2) support, because of standpoint sensitivity, theoretical inquiries into gender, race, class, and other structuring relationships in human life; (3) recognize that, even though empirical reality constrains what we can say about the past, there is still lots of room for interpretation; and (4) incorporate, because of theory’s inevitable...
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Saitta, D. (2014). Pragmatism in Archaeological Theory. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_271
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