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A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good” (1924). The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial to the humanizing mission he advocated. These elements of Sarton’s program are more relevant than ever as philosophers of science articulate research programs that take seriously the contextual factors, situated interests, and historical contingencies that shape the sciences we study. I trace the trajectory of a long-term philosophical engagement with archaeology that illustrates a succession of ways in which social, cultural, and political values configure inquiry, culminating in a program of collaborative research that raises the question of what role philosophers can usefully play when the challenges of humanizing scientific practice have centrally to do with navigating entrenched asymmetries of power.

If collaborative archaeology is crossing a threshold, as several contributors to this special issue attest, nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the kinds of critical scrutiny it is attracting from those who are sceptical about its aims, its ethical/political integrity and its practical efficacy. There is a striking difference between the overtly hostile critiques that early advocates of collaborative practice faced and the kinds of challenges they now address. Rather than anxiety that community-based collaborations pose an existential threat to archaeology as a discipline, current critics object that they have failed to make any significant break with a conservative status quo and the extractive modes of inquiry it perpetuates. I trace the trajectory of critical responses to collaborative archaeology since the early 1990s and use this as a frame for thinking with contributors about the nature of the threshold marked by this special issue.

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (south-west British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions.

The emergence of the New Archaeology is usually cited as instituting an optimistic age of self-consciously scientific practice, dedicated to the pursuit of internally defined, anthropological goals the significance of which was marked by their generality: the understanding of long-term cultural processes operating on a scale well beyond the lifeworld interests of individual agents and localized cultural traditions. The vision of archaeology that was so compelling for the author's graduate classmate-a research discipline driven by its own internal cognitive values, uncompromised by the demands of accountability to external interest groups-was still a powerful force in the archaeological community. Archaeologists have established their professional, disciplinary identity by exploiting a series of contrasts with nonanthropological, nonscientific interests in the archaeological record: initially nineteenth-century antiquarian and twentieth-century commercial interests and subsequently a range of (merely) descriptive, particularistic interests.

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of14C dating has been, it has had a long and tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology.

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. They are notoriously incomplete and fragmentary, and the sedimented layers of interpretive scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence carry the risk that they will recognize only those data that conform to expectation. These epistemic anxieties further suggest that, once recovered, there is little prospect for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet the “data imprints” of past lives are a rich evidential resource; archaeologists successfully mine old data sets for new insights that redirect inquiry, often calling into question assumptions embedded in the scaffolding that made their recovery possible in the first place. I characterize three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data: secondary retrieval and recontextualization of primary data, and the use old data in experimental simulations of the cultural past under study. By these means, archaeologists establish evidential claims of varying degrees of credibility, not by securing empirical bedrock but through a process of continuously building and rebuilding provisional empirical foundations.

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the possible exception of Collingwood, however, there was little systematic exploration of the bearing of philosophical literature on these questions until the advent, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the New Archaeology, a self-consciously positivist research programme. The New Archaeology originated in North America but has been widely influential, especially in giving prominence to philosophical and theoretical issues. The New Archaeologists’ advocacy of a positivist (Hempelian) conception of scientific goals and practice provoked intense debate which involved philosophers of science as well as archaeologists from the early 1970s. Although the positivist commitments of the programme were widely repudiated a decade later, philosophical exchange has continued and expanded to include consideration of a range of post-positivist models of scientific inference that emphasize the theory-ladeness of archaeological evidence, as well as hermeneutic and post-structuralist models of archaeological interpretation. The analysis of epistemological issues is also closely tied to foundational questions about how the cultural subject of archaeological inquiry should be conceptualized and has led, increasingly, to a consideration of normative questions about the values and interests that shape archaeological research and the ethical responsibilities of practitioners. In 1992 Embree argued that work in this area had achieved sufficient maturity to be recognized as a subfield which he designated ‘meta-archaeology’.

I distinguish, by specificity and representational function, several different types of archaeological models: phenomenological, scaffolding, and explanatory models. These take the form of concrete, mathematical, and computational models (following Weisberg’s taxonomy), and they exemplify what Morgan describes as the double life of models; they vary significantly in the degree to which they are intended to accurately represent a particular target, or are media for experimental manipulation of idealized cultural processes. At the phenomenological end of the spectrum, representational models of data include typological constructs that selectively represent variability in archaeological data on several dimensions: formal (material), spatial, and temporal. Archaeologists also build phenomenological models of data drawn from nonarchaeological sources – cultural and natural – that are relevant for interpreting archaeological data as evidence. Assemblages of these target and source models provide the necessary scaffolding for building and evaluating more ambitious explanatory and experimental models of cultural systems and processes, actual and hypothetical.