Skandfer et al./Archaeological Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes, 3. Concepts and Methods

This chapter deliberately is titled concepts and methods rather than theory and methods. When archaeologists present a theory chapter or text subsection they typically roll out a conceptual package of paradigm-like form, consisting of a superstructure of high-order abstractions that serve as first principles. In some cases, data are simply ‘fitted’ to these abstractions, resulting in a weak metaphorical relationship between theory and data: literally a ‘package solution’. Limited attention is paid to the underlying infrastructure of basic concepts that are needed to do the heavy lifting at the empirical level. Concepts are the basic building blocks of theory and for our purposes it seems most pertinent to focus on the blocks rather than on their articulation into superstructural theory. We therefore turn to reflection on some of the fundamental categories of thought and modes of categorical organization used by archaeologists and indigenous Sámi people to conceptualize landscapes and the residues left behind by activities on those landscapes. This infrastructure is not independent of higher-level models (‘theories’), but we want to scale down and consider the operational concepts that we use to think and talk about the processes we are interested in.