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SUMMARY:How archaeological evidence bites back: putting old data to work i
 n new ways - Alison Wylie (University of Washington)
DTSTART:20151022T153000Z
DTEND:20151022T170000Z
UID:TALK61103@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Marta Halina
DESCRIPTION:A passion for things has taken hold in the social sciences and
  humanities in the form of an enthusiasm for the capacity of material evid
 ence to bear witness to dimensions of social\, cultural life that are othe
 rwise inaccessible. As Daston puts it\, the 'bony materiality' of physical
  traces of human action sustains a certain epistemic optimism but\, at the
  same time\, she reports considerable ambivalence about their status as ev
 idence. To make sense of how trace evidence constrains interpretative infe
 rence despite being\, itself\, a heavily interpreted construct I consider 
 three strategies by which archaeologists elicit new evidence from old data
 . The first two – secondary retrieval and recontextualization – are a 
 matter of reconfiguring the scaffolding that underpins evidential reasonin
 g. The third turns on redeploying old data in the context of computational
  models that make possible the experimental simulation of the cultural sys
 tems and contexts under study.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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