How Are Archaeological Narratives about the Past Constructed? – Analysing Argumentation in Archaeology

Computer Application and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference 2023 (CAA 2023)

Amsterdam. Países baixos
Congreso. 2023

Background

How can data identified as a record of the cultural past be presented as evidence? How can these data support claims about the past that cannot always be verified? The elaboration of good and strong arguments is one of the key points to addressing this type of question. However, scientific publications often focus on showing how data has been obtained and analysed rather than arguing convincingly on a relatively small number of claims or points to be communicated. Especially, in the field of archaeological knowledge, arguing is particularly challenging due to its unique nature: claims about the past that cannot be indubitably verified (Lucas, 2019). Is it possible to analyse several lines of argumentation from the archaeological data to the conclusions and assess how well founded these conclusions are?

The main aim of this session is to generate some cross-fertilization between argumentation theory and archaeological reason. Instead of treating the elaboration of arguments as a secondary step in the creation of archaeological knowledge, we should start considering it as an essential step, and enhance it with all the theoretical support that other studies in argumentation can provide.

Current Research

The most recent work studying argumentation of archaeological knowledge (Chapman and Wylie, 2016; Lucas, 2019; Smith, 2015) has developed proposals specifically focused on how good arguments can be elaborated. They are inspired by Toulmin’s (Toulmin, 2008) model of argumentation, having several limitations related to the variety and richness of the different ways in which people build different types of arguments in the field.

We argue in favour of applying state-of-the-art contributions in argumentation theory to archaeological knowledge. For instance, annotated text corpora (Fort, 2016) and Argument Analytics (Lawrence et al., 2016) can be applied as an alternative to the Toulmin model. These techniques can be used to improve the outputs generated by research work, such as reports, fieldwork diaries, or scientific publications.

On the other hand, we acknowledge that different texts can provide alternative views of the same underlying data, thus developing alternative lines of reasoning. Texts sharing similar views or defending the same claims can be put together into a corpus to be annotated and studies which allows us to explore inter-textual relationships (Visser et al., 2018; Gonzalez-Perez, 2020), that is, discover how texts and authors are interconnected and how the content of various texts cross-references and relies on the meaning of others.

Lastly, the computational treatment of archaeological arguments is a field to be explored. The current explosion in the development of Argument Mining (Lawrence and Reed, 2020), together with the automated reconstruction of the argumentative structure of texts, opens up the possibility of massive treatment of argumentative texts in archaeology.

Expected Contributions

Research is necessary to generate cross-fertilisation between argumentation theory and archaeological knowledge. We need to provide a good conceptualisation of the argumentation concepts (premises, conclusions, argument schemes, supports, attacks, etc.) tuned to the specific characteristics of archaeological knowledge. Only when a solid theoretical basis has been established, we will be able to refine existing computational models of argumentation to deal with archaeological texts as appropriate.

Expected Themes

Papers are welcome in this session about the following topics, among others:

• Philosophical accounts of argumentation

• Relationships between discourse makers and argumentation in archaeology

• Methodologies of discourse analysis applied to argumentation in archaeology

• Theories, ontologies and conceptual models of arguments in archaeology

• Uses of argument mining techniques for specific tasks in archaeological reasoning

• Annotation of archaeological texts

• Argument schemes for archaeological reasoning

• Argument analytics for archaeological arguments

• Argument analysis to question major archaeological paradigms (hunter-gatherers, gender stereotypes, state nations, complex societies, etc.)

• Visualisation of argument analytics for archaeological reasoning

Audience

The session will be of interest to:

• Archaeologists concerned with a richer and more nuanced representation of archaeological reasoning

• Students working on how to better defend a claim

• Cultural heritage managers that use archaeological information for decision making

• Developers of information systems aiming to capture and represent argumentation structures

• Publishers or archaeological texts interested in improving the soundness and cogency of their materials

Discourse. Argumentation. Archaeology.