Introduction: Historical socionatural systems and models

Citation: Kohler, T. A., & van der Leeuw, S. E. (2007) Introduction: Historical socionatural systems and models. The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. p, 1-12. (RSS)
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Summary

The main style of questions of archaeologist and other social scientists is consisted of “how” or “why” and a model is made to try to answer the question. Certain generation of archaeologists might know the term of logical positivist or logical empiricist science with the notion of generalizations or “covering laws”. And then they moved toward model-based or semantic approach and away from variants of covering-law models or hypothetic-deductive.

Model based archaeology (mba) is different from the scientific approaches to archaeology by the New Archaeologists who prefer “generalization” and “laws”. Models are not true or false in the manner of hypotheses and good model is not a universal scientific truth but fits some portion of the real case, so the model might be useful for one purpose but not for another needs. Mba approach suggests a sense of flexibility in model choice and in joint exploration of the model and its target system and the authors use mba as a way of doing science involving quantitative models that provide partial descriptions of socionatural systems.

The subjects that archaeologist or other social scientists deal with are complex and dynamic because those systems including social ones are in open interaction with their environment, exchanging matter and energy with it. To deal with the complexity, the authors asserts to focus on context first and to apply all possible models which explore all aspects of the social science.