Entdisziplinierung und Negation des Wissens: die Archäologie der Moderne

Abstract

Our contribution looks first at the historical development of archaeology in general and briefly shows that it has been a chronologically and chorologically expansive field since its inception. A consideration of this history makes clear that archaeology is not a zerosum economic game in which the addition of one aspect is at the expense of another. In the second part of the paper, we show why an archaeology of modernity, although it only adds a chronologically minimal part of human history to the field of archaeology, raises profound and up to now inadequately posed questions that affect the entire field of archaeology. These are not about object categories or finds organized in catalogs, but about fundamental matters such as the relationship between form and content of archaeological discourses and the meaning of working ‚scientifically‘.