Beyond Human Archaeology to Post-Human Archaeology
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is human archaeology really so important that, as John Lehman once claimed, “We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans”? (TE 2018) This positive view on human archaeology can be contrasted with an opposing one by David George Hogarth, who thus warned us: “The limitations of archaeology are galling. It collects phenomena, but hardly ever can isolate them so as to interpret scientifically; it can frame any number of hypotheses, but rarely, if ever, scientifically prove.” (AZ 2018)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human archaeology (in relation to bias and non-bias—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no bias without non-bias (and vice versa), to be explained by the “fiction-reality principle,” the “valuation-devaluation principle,” the “simpleness-complicatedness principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” the “functionality-nonfunctionality principle,” and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human archaeology, as a field of study, is not important, or that those diverse fields (related to human archaeology)—such as anthropology, history, art, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, literary studies, linguistics, semiology, textual criticism, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleography, paleontology, paleozoology, and paleobotany. and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human archaeology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between bias and non-bias (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the bias-nonbias theory of archaeology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human archaeology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between bias and non-bias—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.