Mercedes Okumura, Astolfo G. M. AraujoPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
<p>The placement of physical phenomena studied by archaeologists in a sense-making system by means of some sort of arrangement is one of the oldest practices within the profession. Even so, despite the large supply of theoretical models and fashions, and the increasing availability of technological devices and analytical methods, the discipline still suffers from an enormous conceptual confusion regarding the construction of classes, types, and higher taxonomic units such as “cultures” or “technocomplexes”. Although many researchers regard metaphysics as being separated from science, one can argue that, in fact, metaphysics can be considered as a continuum with science, as long as we consider it in terms of the ontological presuppositions of our theories and the language we use to express them. Accordingly, a naturalistic metaphysics can be either descriptive (stating what basic types of things are implied by science) or prescriptive (prescribing how one should conceive the basic sorts of things). We propose in this chapter to use both descriptive and prescriptive metaphysics to present how we can think about categories of artifacts based on the theoretical expectations of Evolutionary Archaeology, as well as include the discussion about classification approaches that are built in two main metaphysical positions (sets or individual based approaches). The role of classification in the perception of cultural change results in entailments about the very nature of cultural change. Any classification will involve two philosophically distinct, albeit closely connected, issues. First, there is a question about what the world is like, which is a metaphysical issue. The second, which is an epistemological issue, refers to how one can choose among the numerous possible ways of classifying items. Archaeology suffers from a constant lack of clarity regarding which aspects classifications are supposed to represent, as well as regarding the meaning of important terms such as “types,” “classes,” or “culture”. Moreover, in any classificatory scheme, we must address the fundamental question related to the nature of the worldly phenomena, or what is presented in the literature as the materialist versus essentialist ontologies. To take an example from Biology, are biological species “real” or just an arbitrary cut in the time–space continuum? The same reasoning can be applied to artifact types, or to the basic question about the meaning of the units derived by means of any classificatory scheme: were these artifact types real entities in the past or are they merely tools for conceiving a reasonable organization and description of the archaeological record? The aim of this chapter is also to explore, even if in a brief manner, the major characteristics of each kind of arrangement (classification, typology, and the grouping of artifacts by means of statistical methods) and the theoretical reasoning underpinning their use in Archaeology. In order to do this, we will complement the general debate about the metaphysics of classification with the discussions developed in the Biological Sciences regarding species classification. This choice is justified because not only the metaphysics of classification in Biology has been the subject of a great discussion, but also because we will emphasize the theme classification in Archaeology using Evolutionary Archaeology as a theoretical approach.</p>
