ARCHAEOLOGY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY & INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN ARCHAEOLOGY
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 01/10/2020

The question of interdisciplinarity occurs historically at the moment when Positivism and the methodological advances of the sciences and disciplines lead to an ever greater specialization. What on the one hand has been a great advantage to advance quickly in knowledge has also had another side: that of disconnecting more and more other knowledge and epistemological tools that were closer to the pioneers of the world of archaeology.
Interdisciplinarity has come to fill those gaps that high specialization has been causing in the second half of the 20th century. One of the issues that we raised in this session is to see if this has been true. That is, how this double phenomenon has been produced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first of a progressive selection of methodological tools, to focus the effort in a certain direction, and, in the second round, of an attempt to recover that “lost” through unsuspected connections and exchanges of experiences with other professionals. One thing is clear, from this increasingly interdisciplinary changes are emerging not only quantitative but also qualitative, the most interesting thing to analyze.
Being the time to present and discuss the diversity of this interdisciplinaruty, debating the achievements and problems associated with it, the session tries to underline its relevance in the development and improvement of archaeological science. We would also like this historical reflection on the evolution of the discipline of archaeology to help understand the possible mechanisms and future trends that other disciplines are opening dramatically to archaeological activity. Particularities that we intend to expose in the introduction, while at the same time we will try to delineate a model of approach of the topic that can be adopted in the session itself and in future similar scientific meetings.


Author(s): Ordieres Díez, Isabel (Escuela de Arquitectura-Universidad de Alcalá; InterArq Project) - Martins, Ana Cristina (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia / Instituto de História Contemporânea-CEHFCi-UÉ-FCSH-Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; UNIARQ-Centro de
Arqueologia da Universidade de Lisboa; InterArq Project)