To observe and define is to know

Transfer of epistemology into and in archaeology

Raimund Karl

Prifysgol Bangor University

Abstract: In the late 19th century, neopositivism was the dominant epistemology. Promoted by
successful and prominent scientists, their views about how to execute 'proper scientific inquiries'
influenced the 'founding fathers' of Germanophone archaeology; perhaps most obviously so the first
Austrian professor and founder of the 'Viennese School' of prehistory, Moriz Hoernes. Yet, the 'early
adopters' in prehistory stripped positivism of much of its (epistemo-) logical foundations and instead
transformed it into a method; into what became 'the method' of most of Germanophone prehistory
ever since. What remained of the epistemology became the ' prehistoric faith': that any (prehistory-
related) scientific inquiry necessarily proceeds from observation to 'indisputable knowledge'; that
'correct' observations, turned into 'proper' definitions by classificatory descriptions, form the
(Aristotelian) primary premises from which we proceed using inductive reasoning; the requirement of
'completeness' of observations before any 'methodically sound' explanation may even only be
attempted, let alone can be successful; and the perceived need for scholars to present themselves and
be seen as detached, 'objective', observers. Once within the discipline, this 'method' has been passed
on almost entirely uncritically and with hardly any theoretical reflection as the main, the essential, 'skill
of the craft'; taught by example, and learnt by repetitive imitation. It has become an 'indisputable
truism', a part of the archaeological habitus; something that simply is part of normal (or rather
'normalised') archaeologists' behaviour. Both how it is done, and how it is taught, has (apparently)
become so 'obvious' that any attempt at questioning it has become almost impossible: one is met, at
best, with the blank stare of utter incomprehension, or at the worst accused of having failed to
understand the most basic fundamentals of how prehistory ought to be studied.

Keywords: prehistory, archaeology, epistemology, neopositivism, method, habitus

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In the second half of the 19th century, prehistory emerged in the Germanophone parts of Central
Europe as an independent academic discipline. Its founding fathers, like Moriz Hoernes in Austria-
Hungary, and Rudolf Virchow, Gustaf Kossinna and Gero von Merhardt in Germany, created not just
the discipline, but also, in many ways, its theoretical and methodological foundations (not least being
prominently involved in the emerging culture-historical paradigm, whether Kossinna’s mainly
historical linguistically inspired approach, or Hoernes’ more anthropologically inspired and
internationally less well know ‘Kulturkreislehre’; see Rebay-Salisbury 2011). The discipline founded by
them (and to a lesser extent, eastern and south-eastern European traditions strongly influenced by it)
can be and has been described as being almost exclusively positivist in its approaches, at least until
quite recently (e.g. Atzbach 1998; Karl 2010; Rączkowski 2011).

In this article, using Austrian archaeology as a case study, I want to discuss how this positivist
epistemological approach entered into, and was perpetuated within the discipline without much
regard for and impact of changes to epistemological approaches outside it, including such that
transformed at least considerable parts of Anglophone archaeology since the advent of processualism.
It is important to note in this context that the ‘positivism’ of Germanophone prehistory is not
encompassing everything that would be understood as ‘positivism’ in Anglophone archaeology: e.g.
the ‘positivist’ hypothetico-deductive approaches strongly promoted by the ‘new’ processual
archaeologist from the 1960ies onwards, based more or less directly on a Popperian ‘critical
rationalist’ approach (Popper 1934), would not be considered to be acceptable (sufficiently ‘positivist’
approaches) in Germanophone archaeology. Rather, the ‘positivism’ of Germanophone archaeology
is rooted in a very specific form of ‘positivist’ epistemology, that of neo- or logical positivism.

That particular form of positivism was especially popular and thoroughly dominant as the approach to
scientific discovery in late 19th century Europe, and particularly its Germanophone parts; that is, in the
time when prehistory emerged as an independent academic discipline in the latter. It is thus not
particularly surprising that this epistemology strongly influenced the founding fathers of the discipline,
though perhaps somewhat more why it persisted as long as it did (and mostly still does) within it.
However, before I take a closer look at how it did enter into and was perpetuated within the discipline,
a short summary of how scientific discovery (allegedly) works according to neopositivist epistemology
seems necessary to me.

Neopositivist epistemology
In very simple terms, neopositivist epistemology works from the assumption that scientific discovery
is based on observations, and progresses from individual observations to (‘general’) conclusions
exclusively by means of inductive reasoning. The conclusions thus created are – in the strictest
interpretation of this epistemology – deemed to be true; staunch positivists believe that their
conclusions accurately reflect objective reality, that they express, in words, ‘how it actually is’ (or in
case of studies of the past, ‘how it actually was’ – e.g. explicitly espressed in von Ranke’s famous
dictum that the aim of history is to find out ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’).

Neopositivism maintains that scientific discovery depends on the verification of (knowledge expressed
as) scientific statements by means of ‘supporting evidence’. This supporting evidence is considered to
provide ‘proof positive’ for any such statements.

The evidence which ‘supports’ statements (that is, the ‘proof positive’) is gathered by observing
reality: effectively, one looks at the available data to see ‘what it (that data) actually is’, identifies
through this observation the essential features of the data, and explicates these features in the form
of descriptions. Since such a description is effectively a definition of the essential, uniquely
characteristic features of the observed, it is (in the Aristotelian sense) intuitively true knowledge. It
thus can be used as a primary premise, as a statement which is so obviously true that its truth need
not be demonstrated. It can thus serve as a sound foundation for the creation of demonstrative
knowledge (knowledge whose truth must be demonstrated by drawing on sound premises and logical
operations): it constitutes proof positive.

Since neopositivism believes that there is an objective truth which can be found by observation, this
process of ‘defining’ the essential features of the observed is naturally both ‘objective’ (independent
of the observer) and repeatable: everyone who is of sound mind and sound senses can repeat the
same process of observation and identification of essential features and will always arrive at the same
result as everyone else; that is, at the true definition of the observed object’s essentially characteristic
features 1. Thus, the observation of data is assigned primacy in creating scientific knowledge: according
to neopositivist epistemology, any scientific study must start with the observation of the (relevant)

1
From this, it of course necessarily follows that should two scholars observe the same data and still arrive at
different (and perhaps, god forbid, even mutually exclusive) descriptions of it, at least one of them must have
made a mistake, must have described the data wrongly.
data, because this and only this can provide the scientist (or scholar) with a sound basis, with the
premises he needs to be able to apply any logical operation.

Only as a second step, the descriptions can and must be synthesised into (more or less general)
statements using inductive reasoning. And it must be inductive reasoning, since, as Charles S. Peirce
has put it, ‘Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is
operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be.’ (Peirce 1931, 171). Thus, to provide
verification that something actually ‘is’, only induction will do.

To provide an example, let us say we are observing swans. Let us also, for the sake of the argument,
say that swans only exist in the here and now, that there never were any swans in the past and there
will not ever be any swans in the future, and only in Europe. If we look at any swan, we will see that it
is a white bird (independently of who makes the observation). We can thus explicate the observation
of any such swan in a descriptive sentence d1 → dn: ‘This swan is white’. Once we have observed all
swans in Europe, we can synthesise all these individual ‘true’ statements d1 → dn that ‘this swan is
white’ into a general statement GS ‘all swans are white’. And since we have observed all swans and all
indeed are white, we know that this general statement actually is true. Thus, by observing the data
and synthesising ‘true’ descriptions of it by inductive reasoning, the general statement is verified, has
been proven positively to be true.

Problems of neopositivism
There are, however, several problems with this neopositivist approach. Perhaps the biggest of these,
particularly where archaeology is concerned, is that proof positive by inductive reasoning only works
if it is based on all theoretically possible observations; on a ‘complete’ induction. We can only know
for sure that the general statement ‘all swans are white’ is positively true if we have truly observed all
swans that ever existed, exist, and ever will exist. To just observe all swans that we know of just proves
that all swans we know of are white, which – as David Hume (1740, 61-5, 89-97) has already
demonstrated conclusively – does not prove positively that the general statement ‘all swans are white’
is also true, since this conclusion would be reliant on a circular argument.

This can also easily be demonstrated by removing the conditions imposed on our observations of
swans in the above example and no longer pretend that swans exist only in the here and now, and
only in Europe. Even if indeed all swans in Europe were white, in Australia and New Zealand, there are
black swans. Thus, had we constructed a general statement ‘all swans are white’, based on the
observation of European swans alone and assumed it to be proven positively by the fact that we did
indeed observe all swans we could find in Europe, it would nonetheless be a false general statement.
We did not observe all swans, and thus, such a ‘partial’ induction only proved that all swans we had
observed were white, while where all swans are concerned, it was no more than an abduction: it
demonstrated that ‘all swans may be white’, but did not prove that all swans actually are.

In archaeology, where data, and thus also the possible observations, are necessarily incomplete,
inductive proof thus is logically impossible: ‘complete’ induction is precluded by the incompleteness
of the data, and thus all that is ever logically possible in archaeology where synthetic logical operations
are concerned is abduction. But abduction cannot provide proof positive of anything, and thus
neopositivist epistemology cannot work in archaeology.

There are, of course, other shortcomings of this epistemology, too. To name just the two major ones,
firstly, we cannot assume that there is one, and only one, ‘true’, objective and repeatable description
of the essential features of any (archaeological) object, which any observer of sound mind and senses
will agree with and accept as so obviously true that its truth need not be further demonstrated. In
observable reality, much too often, scholars significantly and incommensurably disagree about what
the essential features of something (whether real or abstract) we work with in archaeology are, not
because either or all are wrong, but simply because things can be seen and defined differently by
different observers, with no way of telling which way of seeing and defining the thing is true, nor
whether there is only one true way of seeing and defining the thing. Thus, intuitive knowledge
provides no sound basis for proof positive in the first place, and thus the core assumption of
neopositivist epistemology is fatally flawed anyway.

And secondly, and equally importantly, neopositivist epistemology does not actually create any ‘new’
knowledge as such, that is, knowledge not already included in the ‘intuitive’ one gained by ‘true’
observations: if we have observed all theoretically observable swans and seen that they indeed all are
white, we already know that all swans are white, whether we explicate this ‘truth’ in the form of a
general statement or not. The general statement in this case just states what is plainly obvious
anyway, and thus adds nothing ‘new’ to our body of knowledge. All it does is provide us with
summaries of descriptions, which can be used for classificatory purposes, but don’t tell us anything
else. Thus, while we, once we have seen the Australian black swans, can ‘refine’ our classification by
creating the general statement ‘all European swans are white, all Australian ones are black’, we are
e.g. no wiser as to why the European ones are white and the Australian ones are black. To arrive at an
explanation, no amount of observation and induction will ever suffice, rather, we need a hypothesis
which is introduced to the data ‘from the outside’, that is, is not based on the observation of the data
itself, but ‘creatively invented’.

Regardless of these problems (which admittedly were not necessarily yet recognised fully in the
second half of the 19th century), neopositivist epistemology maintained that to achieve scientific
knowledge of anything, a number of steps were necessary, and had to be taken in a particular order.
Firstly, all pertinent data must be observed; secondly, that data must be correctly described; and
thirdly, the correct descriptions must be synthetically combined by inductive reasoning; to define its
essential characteristics, its nature. If these steps are taken correctly, the resulting conclusion (the
definition) is taken to be the positively proven (= verified) ‘truth’, and that and only that, then, is
scientific knowledge. Ergo, the principle of neopositivist epistemology is: to observe and define is to
know!

Vienna, c. 1900 AD
Vienna c. 1900 AD was the capital of one of the major European powers, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and its main university, the Alma Mater Rudolphina or Universität Wien, one of the world’s leading
universities. It was certainly a cultural and intellectual power-house, home of many leading scholars,
and the birthplace of many significant academic ideas. It was also one of the world’s leading centres
for developing neopositivist epistemology. For instance, the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach
(1838-1916) 2, in 1895 was appointed Professor of ‚Philosophy, especially the history of the inductive
sciences‘ at Vienna University. A leading proponent of neopositivism, he strongly influenced the
establishment of the famous ‘Vienna circle’ (founded 1907), whose main proponents included e.g.
Hans Hahn (1879-1934) and Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), which – though he was never formally
associated with it – influenced and also was influenced by the young Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-
1951). At any rate, neopositivism (and other similar variants of essentialist epistemologies) was the
dominant epistemology in much of science during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly at
Vienna University.

2
Mach today is best known for the Mach number, the relation of the speed of an object to the speed of sound.
Moriz Hoernes (1852-1917) and the ‘Vienna School’ of prehistory
It was in this intellectual (epistemological) context that prehistory was founded as an independent
academic discipline in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at Vienna University.

Its founding father became Moriz Hoernes (1852-1917), who had studied classics (both classical
archaeology and philology, PhD accepted 1878) at Vienna University and worked from 1885 onwards
in the ethnographic-anthropological department of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. In 1892,
Hoernes Habilitation thesis ‘Die Urgeschichte des Menschen nach dem heutigen Stand der
Wissenschaft’ (Hoernes 1892) in the subject ‘prehistoric archaeology’, was accepted at the University,
providing Hoernes with the right to teach as a Privatdozent. Following the publication of another major
book in 1898 (Hoernes 1898), he was awarded the title of (unsalaried) extraordinary professor for
prehistory of mankind (salaried from 1907 onwards), and promoted to full professor in 1911
(Öst.Akad.d.Wiss. 2011, 368). Hoernes, mostly ignored by modern historians of archaeological
thought, thus not only became the first professor of prehistory in any central European university, but
also – given that he was the professor at the main university of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – was
extremely influential in the development of much of central and eastern European prehistory. His
epistemological, methodological and archaeological beliefs became the foundation of a school of
thought, the ‘Vienna School’ of prehistory, which has ever since and until very recently dominated
both Austrian prehistory, and indeed that of many of the countries which in Hoernes’ times still were
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hoernes outlined the major tenets of his archaeological approach in his two main monographs
(Hoernes 1892; 1898), including his methodology. The main principles of his approach were to assign
primacy to ‘cultural circles’ (Kulturkreise, see Rebay-Salisbury 2011) in archaeological explanations, a
textbook example for the so-called ‘culture-historical approach’ also characteristic for Gustaf
Kossinna’s (somewhat later but in many ways very similar) Siedlungsarchäologie (‘settlement
archaeology’). In this respect, Hoernes was influenced by and in turn strongly influenced the founder
of the (considerably later) Vienna School of Ethnography, W. Schmidt, and other significant
anthropologists of his time, not least the famous German doctor, anthropologist and prehistorian
Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). The latter, together with the epistemological climate of late 19th century
Vienna, also strongly influenced the epistemological and methodological principles underlying
Hoernes’ approach to prehistory: and that was none other than neopositivism.

In Hoernes’ epistemological and methodlogical approach, we find all the core elements of
neopositivsm, quite clearly expressed already in the ‘history of research’ section of his Habilitation
thesis: an absolute primacy in archaeological explanations being assigned to the observation of data,
and an absolute reliance on (misunderstood) inductive reasoning as the method for providing ‘proof
positive’: for Hoernes, to know was to observe and define. To demonstrate this, let me quote him
directly, though I have taken the liberty to translate his words into English for an international
readership’s convenience, and have highlighted crucial parts of the sentences:

‘The beginnings of and progress in’ archaeology are found ‘in the observation of
naked facts, the combination of the individual, in themselves inconsequential,
observations to unshakeable knowledge’ (Hoernes 1892, 43)

‘The validity of the inductive, the scientific method – i.e. patiently, meticulously
collecting every detail, freed of all subjective, generalizing influences – was
enthusiastically proclaimed for this new field of knowledge.’ (Hoernes 1892, 36)
Epistemology transformed into method
Hoernes’ epistemological neopositivist approach, from the beginning, was riddled with the problem
that it was entirely unsuitable for archaeology for plain and simple logical reasons, as already
discussed above: for the neopositivist approach to have any chance to work, all pertinent data must
be observable, not just the data that has survived until today. Yet in archaeology, that is entirely
impossible because not all data has survived until today, and thus, it is impossible to observe all
pertinent data, which makes it impossible to prove any statement positively by means of inductive
reasoning. Yet, Hoernes did not consider this problem, because, already in his Habilitation, he did not
properly research, let alone properly discuss the logical limitations of the epistemological approach
he had chosen. In fact, he had not even properly understood the logic behind the epistemology that
he chose, since otherwise, he would have realized that it could never work in archaeology.

Rather than properly researching this epistemology, considering whether it was indeed suitable for
archaeological discovery, and then consciously deciding for or against it, he had picked it up entirely
uncritically from the academic ‘Zeitgeist’ that pervaded Vienna. If one examines his ‘history of
research’ chapter in his Habilitation thesis (which serves as his methodological introduction), one
quickly realizes that this must have been the case. For instance, there are no references to relevant
academic epistemological literature or even only to relevant scholars who discussed (aspects of) the
logic of scientific discovery (in difference to e.g Darwin and his theory of evolution, which are
mentioned and discussed). Nor is there any proper discussion of the suitablility of neopositivist
epistemology in an archaeological context: rather than discussing the problem that the essential
incompleteness of the data in archaeology makes neopositivist proof positive positively impossible,
he misrepresents the requirement of completeness of all (including all theoretically possible, but
practically impossible) observations as a requirement of completeness of all practically possible
observations. Instead of such reasoned, critical consideration of the suitability of the neopositivist
method, he cites the success of this ‘method’ in the sciences as support for his insistence that it also
should be used in prehistory. Again, the translation into English is by me, as is the highlighting of
particularly relevant parts:

„Our age celebrates its greatest triumphs in the fields of engineering and the
natural sciences. The modern scientific principle, the principle of induction, which
is where appropriate also successfully applied by other sciences, prefers the
tangible evidence …“ (Hoernes 1892, 39)

The key to Hoernes‘ ‘method’ thus is not that of critical reflection and a well and fully developed
understanding of the epistemological foundations of what ‘the natural sciences’ successfully did in his
times, but rather that of imitation of a successful precedent elsewhere. The theoretical and
methodological lesson he teaches is most simple: copy the example of the (successful) scientists, who
observe and define to discover truly scientific, ‘true’ knowledge.

It is this methodological contribution that is usually highlighted as Hoernes’ major achievement:

„Hoernes, the first Chair of Prehistory at a Central European University, carried it

to recognition as a methodically founded discipline; without his contribution, its
later rise to prominence would not have been possible.“ (Öst.Akad.d.Wiss. 2011,
368-9; translation and highlighting RK)

And given the simple lesson at its heart – just imitate what we ‘know’ to be successful to be successful,
too – it not just provides a simple three-step methodology to discover ‘new’ and ‘true’ scientific
knowledge – first observe, then describe, and finally synthesise – but also an inbuilt didactic approach:
teach by example, learn by imitation.

Learning by doing: the pupils, and the pupils of pupils

And that is pretty much what Hoernes and his pupils did: rather than critically reflecting about their
own methods and their epistemological foundations, and whether those were indeed suitable to solve
the problems presented by the data they tried to understand and explain, they learnt by imitation and
taught by ‘successful’ example. I will, in the following, not go through the whole family tree of the
‘Vienna School’ since that would obviously be way too much for an article like this. Rather, I will
concentrate on the dynastic line of succession at the department founded by Hoernes at Vienna
University.

The first in this line of succession was Oswald Menghin (1888-1973), who studied with Hoernes from
1906-1910, wrote his Habilitation under Hoernes (accepted by Vienna University in 1913), and
succeeded to Hoernes’ chair in 1918. Menghin learnt ‘the method’ by imitating Hoernes. The
transmission of epistemological and methodological knowledge, at this stage, was already strictly
within the discipline and entirely disconnected from the non-archaeological epistemological Zeitgeist:
Menghin (and equally his students) e.g completely missed Karl R. Popper’s fundamental and utter
demolition of neopositivism as a valid epistemological approach in his Die Logik der Forschung (‘The
logic of scientific discovery’), first published in Vienna in 1934 (Popper 1934), let alone other
epistemological developments outside the ‘Vienna School of Prehistory’. Instead, Menghin and his
students continued to teach ‘the method’ by example and imitation.

The next in line was Richard Pittioni (1906-1985). He did his degree under Menghin 1927-1929 (for
the whole degree, from start to PhD), wrote his Habilitation under Menghin (accepted at Vienna
University in 1932), and succeeded to Menghin’s chair in 1946 (following Menghin’s internment as a
suspected war criminal, which later forced his emigration to Argentinia). Much like Menghin had
learned by imitating Hoernes’s ‘successful’ method, so did Pittioni by copying Hoernes’ and Menghin’s
method.

Pittioni in turn taught ‘the method’ by example to Herwig Friesinger (1942-). Friesinger studied with
Pittioni from 1962-1969, wrote his Habilitation under Pittioni (accepted by Vienna University in 1974),
and succeeded to Pittioni’s chair in 1978. Much like his predecessors, he learnt ‘the method’ by
imitating the ‘successful’ example of his teacher, and taught it by example to his pupils (which
includes, among many others, myself).

The resulting epistemological and methodological climate, which dominated the ‘Vienna School’ until
at least quite recently, is characterised by all the features of neopositivist ‘science’: an insistence on
the primacy of data, a concentration on large compilations of data, its meticulous description,
classification by definitions, and an almost all-encompassing lack of critical self-reflection of the
disciplinary foundations and practices (also see fig. 1, showing the ‘Vienna School’ network since
Pittioni). The method was never fundamentally re-assessed, but – as expected in neopositivist science
– just ‘refined’, because it was accepted as, effectively, the ‘true’ way of doing prehistory. As an
anonymous author with a Vienna University IP address put it in Wikipedia:

”Hoernes was the leading and pathbreaking prehistorian of his time in Austria. His
method was continued and elaborated by Oswald Menghin, Richard Pittioni and
Herwig Friesinger” (http://de.wikipedia.org/Moritz_Hoernes, accessed 24.5.2010,
translation and emphasis RK)
Fig. 1: Links between members of the ‘Vienna School’ employed in the department founded by Hoernes’ after
WW2 and an assessment of a sample of their publications, classified by amount of theoretical self-reflexivity
(Karl 2010). Arrows shows direct teacher-student relationships of different strengths. Yellow in the pie charts
indicates purely descriptive publications, green such that show only a minimum of reflection (usually, a
discussion of methodology of sorts), blue such that are theoretically aware or show signs of self-reflection, and
red such that are highly theoretical or self-reflexive.
The means of teaching the method
It was, of course, academic ‘teaching’ which provided the main means of the intra-disciplinary
transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. And as already hinted at above, the main
method of this ‘teaching’ was demonstration by example, and learning by imitation.

Naturally, the ‘old’ curricula across the 20th century varied considerably in detail, in actual content,
but also in the number and selection of courses students had to take, were examined in, and what
theses had to be written. At the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century, while various courses
were offered, students did not have to actually attend any they did not want to, and did not have to
sit any exams during their degree. Nor were there BA or MA degrees as such: students just signed on
for the course and to complete it, had to write a thesis and sit one final exam in which any question
from the subject could be asked; and if thesis and exam were passed, they were awarded their PhD.
Towards the end of the 20th century, when I was doing my degrees in Hoernes’ department, very many
different courses were compulsory, all of which were assessed, and one had to submit a first
(equivalent to, but not called, a BA), master’s and if one continued on to PhD, doctoral thesis, and also
had to sit a final master’s and doctoral exam, where again in theory any question from the subject
could be asked, though in practice, at least the general topic from which questions would be asked
would have been agreed between examiners and student in advance. Only if one passed everything,
one was awarded the degree. On top of that, one could – if one wanted to become Professor oneself
– also submit a Habilitation thesis after the completion of the PhD, in effect, a second (and usually
even considerably bigger than the PhD) monograph.

But despite all these differences in detail, many of the basics remained the same, particularly in terms
of what kinds of curricular elements students had to complete, and what was being taught, and for
what purpose, in different kinds of curricular elements. In principle, there were four main kinds of
curricular elements, three ‘taught’, and one ‘by research’.

Of the three main ‘taught’ elements, the first was lectures; effectively frontal teaching aimed at
passing ‘factual’ knowledge from teacher to students. Students had to learn this knowledge, which
mainly consisted of information about material culture, effectively by heart: what kinds of finds and
features were typical for what period in which geographical area, how they had been classified by
who, and similar knowledge. Typical exam questions (in exams I myself sat) could be: describe the
inventory of objects found in grave x from y; or, give a summary of e.g. the typology of brooches of
the period x in culture y. Teaching mostly consisted of showing examples (slides or later power points
showing exemplars of particular types of finds or features) and telling students what each of them
was, where it came from, how it dated, etc.

The second ‘taught’ element were indoor practicals; usually requiring students to either provide a
literature review on some topic or other, which was then to be delivered in the form of a presentation
in class and a written essay; or requiring students to (visually) examine some finds from the
department’s teaching collection, and find some ‘parallels’ in the literature to correctly classify and
date the particular object or objects, with different methods of delivering the results (e.g. oral
presentation, written report, in class general discussion). Other such practicals included archaeological
finds drawing or similar practical archaeological skills, usually assessed by portfolio. The aim was to
teach students relevant archaeological skills in a ‘hands on’ fashion, that is, students mostly were
learning by doing, following examples from either the literature or (though only very rarely) examples
provided by the teacher in the classroom at the start of the course.

The third ‘taught’ element were ‘field practicals’, that is, excavation field schools, surveying field
schools, and field trips to relevant sites and/or museums; sometimes also including some classroom
‘preparatory’ teaching similar to indoor practicals. In these, practical skills were taught by example
and students learning by doing again, by simply practicing the relevant skill in the field, e.g. cleaning a
surface on an excavation, or using a total station for surveying, for a couple of days or weeks.
Assessment usually consisted of supervisors in the field simply assigning grades based on their opinion
of the quality of the work done by each student.

The ‘taught’ elements of the curriculum thus mainly aimed at teaching students ‘factual’ knowledge
and ‘practical’ skills; with information either presented as ‘that is how it was’, or ‘that is how it is done’,
with no or very little reflection on why this ‘was like that’, and how scholarship had arrived at these
ways of ‘doing things’. What was occasionally taught in lectures, and even less commonly in indoor
practicals, in terms of ‘theory’, were explanations earlier scholarship had come up with, e.g, Hoernes’
Kulturkreise, or similar attempts at explaining the archaeological record and the societies that had
created them, but again, this was mostly taught as ‘fact’, as ‘how it most likely had been’. Critical
discussion or reflection on how scholarship had arrived at any of this, or how to distinguish between
different interpretations, was not just not taught, it was generally considered pointless, since there
was a simple solution to this problem anyway: ‘go back to the original sources’ and decide based on
one’s own independent re-observation of these whose interpretation was ‘right’ and whose not. This
advice, indeed, is still given in modern German prehistory textbooks (e.g. Trachsel 2008, 97).
Epistemology, high-level theory, or different archaeological ‘schools of thought’, were not taught in
the prehistory department at all until c. the mid-1990ies (only towards the end of my master’s degree,
which I completed in fall 1995, some theory started to be taught by visiting professors of Anglo-
American origin, e.g. John Collis in 1995/6, and later Ian Hodder). In my master’s degree, for instance,
which for completion required students to take a course on Wissenschaftstheorie (‘theory of science’),
the course ‘on offer’ which was accepted by the department as satisfying this requirement was a
general ‘historiography’ course, offered by the history department, in which archaeology was
presented as a historical Hilfswissenschaft (‘archaeology as the handmaiden of history’). The only
exception to this was the teaching of ‘the method’ of Hoernes in an introductory methodology course,
where again, Hoernes’ ‘method’ of observing, describing and classifying archaeology was presented
as ‘how prehistory is done’ 3.

The thesis
While the ‘taught’ elements of the curriculum provided students with the ‘practical skills’ and
‘established knowledge’ they would ‘need’ as future archaeologists, the curricular element by which
they were supposed to prove that they actually could apply these skills independently in practice was
the element done ‘by research’, that is, the thesis (or towards the end of the 20th centuries,
increasingly, the ‘theses’, from ‘undergraduate’ first thesis via master’s and PhD thesis to Habilitation).
By and large, these theses all followed the same pattern, only increasingly getting bigger in terms of
the work to be done and the output to be submitted. That pattern, which is also the ‘teaching method’
for these theses, is basically the following:

The candidate was given by his or her supervisor (while still an undergraduate or graduate student) or
selected him- or herself (mainly in the case of a Habilitation, to a lesser extent also in case of the PhD,
only in exceptional cases before) some ‘material’ to ‘research’. This material, in almost all cases, was
usually some finds and records of some excavation(s), or some class of finds in a museum collection,
or some other selection of material culture and/or excavation or other field records; that had not been
assessed before (at least in its majority). The aim of the thesis, at least normally, was not to answer

3
Though much of this has changed considerably since the mid 2000s, see e.g. the appointment of Tim Taylor as
the successor to Friesinger’s chair.
any particular research questions as such, but rather, the aim was to ‘assess the material’, effectively
meaning to look at all the available data, properly describe it, and then ‘correctly’ interpret it, that is,
classify and date it by finding ‘parallels’ that already were (assumed to be ‘correctly’) classified and
dated. Any potential additional ‘research questions’ were assumed to arise ‘naturally’ from the
examination of the evidence: should some previously unnoticed ‘patterns’ in the evidence emerge,
the candidate would then try to describe these patterns, and where necessary provide an explanation;
though normally, it was expected that any such ‘additional’ findings would be more refined, improved
typologies or, even better, typo-chronologies.

Normally, no proper instructions were given to the candidate how to actually ‘do’ such research:
rather, the assumption seems to have been that since the candidate had been taught the necessary
factual knowledge and practical skills during the ‘taught’ part of his degree(s), he or she would only
have to put these skills into action and produce a competent study. If a candidate needed advice on
how to proceed, he or she was usually told to go to the library and look up ‘successful’ older studies,
which could serve as good examples to imitate in both form and content. If one happened to have a
particularly good and engaged supervisor, the advice might have been to look for specific examples of
what that supervisor considered to be ‘particularly good’ recent theses; if not, the advice might just
have been to look up any recent theses.

Of course, these ‘exemplary’ theses, whether specifically recommended by the supervisor or not, had
themselves been written following the same principle: their authors had imitated earlier ‘successful’
examples, all of which had been written following Hoernes’ method and thus, also, his neopositivist
epistemological approach. As a consequence, they pretty much all followed roughly the same pattern:
they usually started with an introductory chapter, usually mainly a history of the discovery of the site
the ‘material’ had come from, who had excavated there before, who had conducted the excavations
that were the topic of the thesis, and a literature review of what had been published on it, sometimes
including a methodological discussion of sorts. But mainly, they contained a (more or less) substantial
catalogue describing the data, a typo-chronological assessment of that data by using ‘parallels’ as
comparative, corroborating evidence (effectively, a very, very ‘partial’ induction), leading to synthetic
conclusions defining type(s), date(s) and ‘culture’ affiliation of the ‘material’; and a full set of
illustrations of all data that the author considered relevant. Thus, most newly written theses also
followed exactly that pattern, with pretty much all 1st, master’s and Habilitation theses following a
strictly neopositivist approach, and the vast majority of PhD theses, too (though there, there is some
degree of variance with a considerable amount of reasonably self/reflective or theoretically aware
theses, and even some highly theoretical ones, with most of the more theoretical ones having been
written near the end of the 20th or in the early 21st century; fig. 2).

Thus, to get a positive evaluation of one’s thesis, there was a simple formula: follow the example of
earlier successful candidates who observed and defined to ‘know’. Thus, Hoernes’ ‘method’, and with
it, its epistemological foundations were transferred from one generation to the next. And since the
method, by and large, was never critically re-evaluated or indeed explicitly discussed, it became a
practice, a disciplinary habitus.

Vice versa, any thesis clearly and explicitly not relying on a neopositivist epistemology, or even worse,
one critical of neopositivist approaches, a thesis not using the archaeological method, was not
considered to be proper archaeology, and thus rejected. To test this, I submitted a Habilitation thesis
a few years ago at the University of Vienna that was not primarily based on the examination of a
particular ‘material’, and definitely and intentionally followed an explicitly non-neopositivist
approach: it was not primarily based on the observation of data, it was consciously non-inductive in
its reasoning, and explicitly did not aim at producing ‘true’ knowledge in the form of definitions. As
expected, the decision of the panel was negative, explicitly because:

„… the thesis … does not successfully demonstrate … the core skills of an

archaeologist, … the method of excavation, description, analysis and interpretation
of finds…“ (University of Vienna 2008, 12)

Theses at the Vienna prehistory department, 1945-2004

highly theoretical or self-reflexive

100%
80% theoretically aware of clearly self-
60% reflective
showing a minimum of reflection (e.g.
40%
methodology discussion)
20% purely descriptive
0%
1st theses Master PhD theses Habilitation
theses theses

Fig. 2: Classification of theses submitted at the Vienna prehistory department, 1945-2004, and available in the
departmental library (1st theses: n = 17; master’s theses: n = 83; PhD theses: n = 79; Habilitation theses: n = 14).

This system of the self-reproduction of the neopositivist methodology introduced by Hoernes to the
‘Vienna School’ has actually already been described on a more general level as characteristic for the
wider ‘German School of archaeology’ (of which the ‘Vienna School’ is just one major sub-school) by
Włodimierz Rączkowski:

„...the … system of … archaeology … affects the knowledge produced ... High in the
hierarchy are scholars who have knowledge ... Their knowledge is positivistic, they
are convinced that … archaeology … uncovers the truth about the past. ...
Positivistic truth is singular and absolute, objective and irrefutable. ... this group
is also equipped with ... means of evaluation (repression) … Thus, what is the
prescription for a successful academic career? ... Accept … the tools and …
procedures as used by your masters because they ... will be positively evaluated...
In this way the masters clone themselves (at least as far as archaeological
procedures are concerned).“ (Rączkowski 2011, 206; emphasis RK)

Conclusions
Neopositivist assumptions about how to properly ‘do’ archaeology were transferred into the emerging
discipline of prehistory in Austria by the founding father of this academic discipline in Austria, Moriz
Hoernes (1852-1917), the first professor of prehistory at a Central European University. Hoernes,
however, had acquired his neopositivist epistemological beliefs not by proper research and critical
assessment of the suitability of this epistemological approach for archaeology, but had picked up an
already garbled understanding of it from the academic Zeitgeist dominant at Vienna University (and
elsewhere) in the late 19th and early 20th century. Stripped of its actual logical foundations already
upon entering the emerging discipline, it was transformed into a simple ‘methodology’ and quickly
became the only ‘acceptable’ way of ‘doing archaeology’.
Its suitability for archaeology, however, was never properly demonstrated within the discipline, but
at first by reference to its ‘success’ in the natural sciences of the late 19th century, and later by
reference to earlier ‘successful’ examples within prehistoric archaeology. Being taught by example
and learnt by imitation, it since then was reproduced entirely internally within the ‘Vienna School’
(and, to a lesser extent, by mutual exchanges with other, very similar strands of the ‘German School’
of archaeological thought). Thus, progress in epistemology, not least the utter destruction of the idea
that neopositivism could create any ‘sound’ scientific knowledge, went entirely unnoticed within the
discipline. Indeed, when facing different epistemological approaches, many members of this school of
thought did (and do) not even recognise them as (at least potentially) epistemologically valid
approaches, but reject them because they believe them not to be ‘methodologically proper’ (=
neopositivist) archaeology.

And this despite the fact that neopositivist methodology is particularly unsuited to archaeology for
logically inescapable reasons, and thus cannot produce any ‘true’, ‘sound’ or indeed any
archaeological knowledge at all. But lack of theoretical reflection, especially explicit theoretical
reflection, is indeed itself a logical consequence of the neopositivist epistemological creed:
epistemology, after all, is high level theory, theory that is imposed on the data from the outside, rather
than something that can be arrived at by observing, describing and synthesising the data inductively
into unshakeable ‘true’ knowledge. Rather, the creation of archaeological knowledge is all about
practice, about correctly applying the method we know to be ‘true’, because our disciplinary ancestors
applied it successfully in the past, and taught it to us by their successful example. After all, we just
need to observe their many successes to see that their methodology worked, and can synthesise these
observations into a simple definition: to observe and define is to know.

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