Speical Events Management

The Reaction against AnalogyAuthor(s): Alison WylieSource: Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 8 (1985), pp. 63-111Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20170187 .Accessed: 30/04/2011 20:36Your

To confine our studies to mere antiquities is like reading by candle-light at noonday. (Daniel Wilson 1861, as quoted by Orme, 1974:200).

However much analogical inference has broadened interpretive horizons and however indispensible it has seemed in the struggle to make archaeological data serve as evidence of the cultural past, inference by analogy has long been an object of uneasy mistrust among archaeologists.

Orme (1973, 1974, 1981) shows analogical appeals to an expanding repertoire of ethnographic sources to have played in shaping our contemporary conceptions of prehistory.

It became a persistent, even dominant, theme in the methodological literature of contemporary archaeology.

Various attempts were made to salvage analogical inference as a respectable methodological tool and a parallel series of criticisms were produced stressing its inherent and insuperable in

Ascher's seminal paper on analogy (1961) in which he optimistically counters the security existing challenges with a series of proposals for ' 'placing analogy on a firmer foundation" (1961:323).

these constructive suggestions were rejected out of hand on the ground that no amount of reformulation or restriction of analogical inference could establish its conclusions with the security appropriate to properly scientific research.

What has ensued is a reaction against analogy in which historical mistrust of its inconclusiveness has taken on entirely new proportions. It is insisted that, at the very least, the use of analogical inference in archaeological research should be strictly limited; analogy should serve only as a means of generating hypotheses whose credibility must be established on independent, nonanalogical grounds.

The more extreme critics, like...