Old Dogs and New Tricks: Paradigmatic Continuity and Change in Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology
Old Dogs and New Tricks: Paradigmatic Continuity and Change in Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology

Summary/Abstract: Aegean Prehistory is a distinct and revolutionary field of archaeological research which has always attempted to balance between paradigmatic and methodological revolutionism and conservatism. Its practitioners were quick to adopt evolutionism and empiricism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to follow the advances of the processual and postprocessual paradigms in the 1970s onwards, and to consider the posthumanist or neomaterialist tendencies that are currently trending. At the same time, Aegean prehistoric archaeology has retained connections with Altertumswissenschaft and culture-historical approaches, while the contribution of post-processual and post-humanist approaches has been tangential. As a result, Aegean research may be understood as a “traditional plus” empiricist version of processualism with occasional overtones from other paradigms. The above epistemological tendencies may be related to the historical development of Aegean Prehistory as a sub-disciplinary field, the complex nature of the archaeological record in Greece, the sensitive place of archaeology within Greek national identity, and the academic orientation and institutional infrastructure of many of the so-called “foreign schools of archaeology.” It is argued that a renewed relation on the one hand with Classics and on the other hand with Mediterranean and Balkan archaeology may help in order to refresh its interpretative tendencies, while open data policies in archaeological resource management may reframe the empiricism that is still prevalent.

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