eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

7.3: Final thoughts
McDavid (2000, p.287) states that “truth is made, not found”. This thesis would never have
been written if it had been a search for such a truth. To expect answers to be forthcoming,
through using correct ‘scientific’ methodology, is frustrating at the least. On the other hand,
the realisation that the archaeological process is one involving the necessary use of an
‘archaeological imagination’ is, in Julian Thomas’ words “a profoundly liberating
proposition” (Thomas 1993, p.74). To be afraid of the criticism of relativism, of alternative
truths or even abhorrent explanations of the past means there is little faith in our abilities to
show weaknesses in other types of explanations and the strengths of our own. Whether they
involve aliens, fascist agendas or prehistoric super-races, contending with alternative
explanations and refuting them, means our arguments must be sharpened, which is no bad
thing. As Feyerabend states:
‘. . . knowledge is not a gradual approach to Truth. It is rather an ever-increasing ocean of
mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part
of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation, and all of them contributing, via
this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness’ (1988, p.32).
Surely, it is this that makes disciplines such as archaeology dynamic and full of vitality. It
should not be expected that one day the truth and the answers will be realised, for they do not
exist in that they cannot be validated by a return to ‘what-actually-happened’. The past will
never be known as it ‘really was’ for there is no ‘really was’. Even if a time machine could be
built and time was traversed, it would still only be viewed through 21st Century eyes;
archaeology and the desire to ‘know’ the past is after all a modern phenomenon. Thomas
(2004) attempts to unravel what is ‘modern’ about our views on the past and questions
whether it is possible to extricate ourselves from them or indeed whether even archaeology
itself can exist without ‘modernity’. Even if it proves difficult, if not impossible, to transcend
archaeology’s attachment to modernity and still call it ‘archaeology’, being able to approach
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