OF SHERDS, SOFT STONES, AND OTHER VESTIGES: PATHS OF AN UNQUALIFIED ARCHEOLOGY

Abstract

Assuming that archeology is a way to construct narratives from the material traces from other times, I follow some propositions - in archeology and anthropology - which suggests that, despite the undeniable burden of modernist science, we can consider (and therefore practice) modes of knowledge building that does not cling to the modernist model. From the modern subject position, however, formed within scientific epistemology, I venture to think about these possibilities based on an experiment in progress with an indigenous group in the northern Amazon. Fleeing the qualitatives customarily employed for locating archaeological practices conducted along the existing populations, I arguethat this qualification is more a way of domesticating other modes of knowledge within archeology (with a capital A, as supposedly universal).Keywords: Ways of knowing, archaeological practices, dialogues