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Staša Babić
Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy
University of Belgrade, Serbia
Archaeological programmes.  
Notes on epistemic diversity
Determining the current state of a discipline and its future prospects is not a straight-
forward task, especially since a number of disparate sets of criteria may be applied for 
this purpose. In the case of archaeology, this investigation into the most productive 
modes of research raises specific issues since, by virtue of its tasks and the data set at 
our disposal, the discipline is positioned at the crossroads of the natural and social 
sciences, with strong links to the humanities (Babić, 2022; 2023). Rather than judge 
this opportunistic methodological omnivory (Currie, 2018, 25, passim) as a symptom 
of trouble, my aim here is to argue that it is the main source of its potential for future 
growth. This exercise in metaarchaeology (Babić, 2018) presupposes reaching out of 
the discipline itself and introducing the conceptual tools from other fields of knowl-
edge, above all those from the domains of the philosophy of science and sociology 
(Wylie, 2002, 7, 12–15). 
Some of the tools at our disposal have a long history, reaching back to the Classi-
cal Greek philosophers and the quests of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle for the ways to 
distinguish reliable and truthful knowledge (Agassi, 2008, 335–346; Weinert, 2009). 
However, the advent of the age of modernity marks the crucial turning point in estab-
lishing the norms of scientific reasoning, as distinct from any other pursuit of expla-
nations of the world. The rules of the scientific method postulated by René Descartes 
(1596 – 1650) formed the bedrock on which a substantial body of literature has been 
built, positioning human reason as the ultimate criterion of truthful knowledge 
(Babić, 2018, 18–23; Thomas, 2004). At the same time, these new rules of reasoning 
generated new social norms of research and institutions emerged tasked with produc-
ing knowledge deemed relevant and useful for the community, and obliged both by 
the internal rules and by the demands of society (Bourdieu, 2004). The order of the 
modern scientific inquiry was thus formed, both concerning its internal principles 
and the wider social framework sustaining it. Henceforth, the rules securing logical 
consistency, leaning heavily on the Cartesian tradition and rooted almost exclusively 
in the domain of natural sciences, above all physics, have been established as the ideal 
DOI:10.4312/ars.17.2.9-20
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of  trustworthy investigation (Babić, 2018, 18–23). This “tyranny of method” (Thomas, 
2004, 55 ff.) has been opposed by researchers devoted to the study of the social dimen-
sions of human lives at least from the middle of the 19th century, notably in the works 
of the German historians Johann Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey, who claimed 
that the ultimate goal of the humanities is to understand (verstehen), rather than ex-
plain (erklären) their object of study (Babić, 2018, 58–62). In other words, studying 
human affairs includes reflecting upon their meaning, purpose, and value as intrin-
sic features of social facts, which cannot be equated with the task of natural sciences 
(Weinert, 2009, 213–214). This line of reasoning thus challenged the modernist ideal 
of a unified set of premises of scientific work, leading to the indisputable progress of 
human knowledge, and of logically rigorous, objective and quantifiable observations 
as the sole mode of scientific enquiry. 
By the middle of the 20th century, the scrutiny of the social conditions of knowl-
edge production started to develop as a distinct field of study, primarily initiated in 
the domain of sociology (Bourdieu, 2004; Babić, 2018, 36–42). The ensuing interest 
among philosophers led to the emergence of social epistemology (Fuller, 2015; Longi-
no, 1990, 2002; Babić, 2018, 43–46). In spite of a number of contesting positions, these 
endeavours have converged in arguing that the processes of knowledge production are 
deeply immersed into the social conditions of the practitioners and decisively contex-
tualized into particular ideological, political, economic realities. Specialized knowl-
edge, produced by researchers, needs to resonate with its wider social context in order 
to enjoy the privileges of the social capital (Bourdieu, 2004) bestowed equally by the 
official decision-makers and general public. Consequently, in order to advance a field 
of knowledge needs to meet a number of conditions, in terms of its internal epistemic 
coherence and productivity, but also in terms of the relevance of its results for the 
concerns of the society that sustains it. Even when discussing the fields of inquiry 
into natural phenomena, such as physics or biology (Longino, 1990, 2002), it is now 
apparent that, apart from the rules of formal logic, a number of socially conditioned 
factors play equally important roles in knowledge production and dissemination. The 
example of Louis Pasteur and his admirable skills both in the laboratory and outside 
its confines, elegantly summarized by Bruno Latour (1983), well illustrates that even 
the most ground-breaking scientific discovery is mediated by social realities (Babić, 
2022, 87–88). 
Furthermore, it is not only the external social context that determines the course 
of science: it has been convincingly argued that the internal dynamics of a particular 
scientific community decisively shapes the epistemic standards considered adequate 
at a certain point in time (Fagan, 2010; Fuller, 2015; Milosavljević, 2018). Knowledge 
production is a collective practice, constrained by certain rules and standards, but they 
are under constant reconsideration and prone to changes. The history of science is not 
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only a string of amazing advancements, but also of persistent refinements of the meth-
ods applied to solve new problems. In order to bridge the gap between the idealized 
epistemic standards and the actual practices of researchers, Helen Longino proposed a 
set of epistemic norms for productive critical interaction: 1) public forum for debate, 
2) “uptake” or response to criticism, 3) public standards for debate, and 4) tempered 
equality of intellectual authority within the community (Longino, 2002, 128–135). 
It is also important to note that these standards may also vary from one such 
community to the next, some being more prolific than the others in setting the rules. 
Local intellectual traditions, institutional infrastructure, economic and political cir-
cumstances of research, all play equally important roles in the processes of knowl-
edge transfers among diverse thought collectives (Milosavljević, 2018; see also Babić, 
2023; 2023b). However, acknowledging the importance of the external social settings 
in which scholars produce the relevant knowledge does not mean that they are not 
bound by structured epistemic norms. The fact that they are produced and negoti-
ated in constant interaction of both internal and external actors does not absolve the 
researchers, but rather emphasizes their responsibility to scrupulously investigate the 
mechanisms of knowledge production, in search for the most robust and coherent 
strategies. Archaeologists have not been oblivious of this responsibility, and discus-
sions on the character of our evidence and the most productive approaches to it have 
long been present (Lucas, 2012; Chapman et al., 2016, 15 ff.), albeit not always with 
the same intensity. 
Paradigm shifts? 
In the last decades of the 20th century many archaeologists inclined to discuss the 
epistemic foundations of our research have adopted the conceptual framework set 
by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 
His account of the ways in which science operates has been a very potent inspiration 
for scholars in diverse fields of study and has produced important insights into the 
changes occurring in epistemic standards. The basic premise of his account is that the 
old worldview, burdened with unresolvable fallacies, is replaced by the radically differ-
ent set of epistemic principles, thus setting into motion a paradigm shift, as a radical 
and abrupt overhaul of the entire field of study. Due to its perceived ability to explain 
the sudden leaps in science and radical shifts in worldviews in ways different from the 
conventional narrative of continuous accumulation of knowledge, he is often cast as 
the pivotal figure in the constructivist philosophy of science (Babić, 2018, 33–36).
Kuhn’s ideas have been applied to account for two periods of turbulent discussions 
in archaeology: during the 1960s, when the explicitly logical-positivistic approach was 
advocated by the proponents of New Archaeology, emphasizing its links to the hard 
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sciences, and again in the 1980s, when its post-processual critique turned to other 
sources of inspiration, derived from the humanities (Lucas, 2016; Babić, 2023b). There 
is, of course, a much more complex argument behind both these sets of ideas, thor-
oughly investigated in a vast body of literature. For the present purpose, though, it is 
important to note that in both instances it was claimed that a fundamental change 
in epistemic standards is needed, and indeed achieved. Hence, the idea of a radical 
overturn of the previous standards, as postulated by Kuhn, presented itself as the most 
appropriate way to account for the course of events. Yet, the shift when the new para-
digm – a disciplinary matrix encompassing the state of a particular field of research, 
or a shared set of ideas, concepts and procedures normalizing the state in the field 
(Bourdieu, 2004,  28) – completely obliterates the previous one, never really occurred 
in the archaeological reasoning in the way comparable to the examples described by 
Kuhn. Instead, both processual and post-processual approaches survived together, 
more or less harmoniously, up to the first decades of the 21st century, when new com-
peting ideas are emerging, based upon the premises of new materialism and posthu-
manism in philosophy and social anthropology (Harris et al., 2017), again challenging 
the very epistemic foundations of the discipline and calling for a radical (ontological) 
turn. At the same time, the rapid increase in the possibilities of gathering and process-
ing information about the past via various techniques and methods derived from the 
hard sciences resulted in the declaration that “the third science revolution” is taking 
place in archaeology (Kristiansen, 2014). Following the previously established pattern, 
it might be argued that at least two new paradigms are currently contending for the 
position of normal science – the prevalent set of premises and methods at a certain 
point in time, according to Kuhn. However, the previous course of events does not en-
courage the prediction that this time the entire archaeological community will finally 
embrace any of the approaches currently existing in the disciplinary field, including 
both the ones present for decades, and the currently fervently advocated ones. It may 
therefore be useful to take another look at the idea of paradigm shifts and its applica-
bility in archaeology.
In spite of its huge popularity and influence, both in academia and beyond 
(Bourdieu, 2004, 32), a number of shortcomings of Kuhn’s structure of changes in 
scientific principles have been put forward. The universality of his observations and 
applicability to all research situations is questioned, not least because Kuhn rooted 
his observations mainly in his own academic background, that of physics – the epit-
ome of the natural sciences, and did not discuss at all the mechanisms of knowledge 
production in the sphere of social sciences or humanities (Fuller, 2015,  131, 134, 
144). His subsequent critics rightfully stress that Kuhn syncretically selected the in-
stances of profound changes, with the aim to create a coherent narrative about the 
history of scientific shifts. Steve Fuller even challenges Kuhn’s constructivist creden-
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tials, asserting that he in fact presents science as a self-regulatory and self-sufficient 
system, divorced from the society, in which changes occur as the result of internal, 
“normal”, and not intentional actions of the scientific community immersed into its 
social setting (Fuller, 2015, 132, 136, 140; also Bourdieu, 2004, 29; Joyce et al., 2019, 
841; Babić, 2023b). 
Regardless of these critiques, archaeologists have copiously borrowed Kuhn’s 
concept of paradigm, supplementing it with our own disciplinary concerns. The 
tides of debates in the 1960s and the 1980s have been denoted as instances of para-
digm shift, marking clean breaks between three distinct phases of archaeological 
reasoning: culture-historical, processual, and post-processual. In this manner, two 
closely related, but distinct aspects of the concept of paradigm have been conflated: 
epistemological – stressing that scientific communities share a common mode of 
reasoning (heavily leaning onto Fleck’s thought collectives, see Milosavljević, 2018), 
and historiographic – aimed at monitoring and explaining the changes in this shared 
pattern through time (Lucas, 2016, 4). In other words, theoretically inclined archae-
ologists have tacitly assumed that the introduction of novel epistemic tools inevi-
tably completely overshadowed all the previously existing ones, thus implying an 
unsurmountable epistemological distance between the three approaches identified 
in the history of the discipline. Even when the term paradigm is not explicitly used, 
the underlying assumption in most of the historical overviews is that three modes 
of archaeological reasoning are at the same time three distinct phases in its develop-
ment. Thus, Kuhn’s concept became a tool “to create simplistic historiographic divi-
sions” (Lucas, 2016, 3), heuristically useful to a certain degree, but at the same time 
generating several problems.
Firstly, in the effort to comply with Kuhn’s idea of a radical overturn, we may end 
up emphasizing the differences rather than similarities that run through the entire 
history of the discipline (cf. Lucas, 2012; see also Babić, 2018). In this manner, the 
actual research practice of the majority of archaeologists around the world, enjoying 
the benefits of the opportunistic methodological omnivory (Currie, 2018) is disre-
garded for the sake of an idealized pattern of growth. Furthermore, the huge variety 
of locally specific intellectual traditions and their echoes in archaeological research is 
taken to be the signal of varying rates of progress, with some local communities rel-
egated to the position of (un)willing recipients of ready-made ideas from the centres 
of the academic debate (Babić, 2023b). Ultimately, the established pattern of periodi-
cal radical changes sets the expectations that every few decades an earth-shattering 
shift is bound to happen in the epistemic domain (Thomas, 2015), resulting in only 
one paradigm claiming the status of normal science according to Kuhn. All these 
problems stem from the idealized notion that the entire field of archaeology can, and 
indeed should, be unified under the same standardized set of premises, regardless of a 
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huge variety of actual research situations, different in terms of goals, tasks, or circum-
stances. Some but not all of these aspects of archaeological practices can be controlled 
by researchers themselves, and an ideal setting is rarely, if ever achieved. It is therefore 
prudent to bear in mind the warning:
“Purely abstract standards for epistemic justification, lacking any connection 
to our practices, are at best pretty fictions, descriptions of imaginary science 
to dazzle the uninitiated and inspire novices. At worst, they mask relations of 
power and politics that determine what is accepted as scientific knowledge, 
protecting inequities from critique and lending social biases an appearance 
of inevitability. To prevent such misuse of epistemic ideals, their connection 
with scientific practice must be articulated.” (Fagan, 2010, 103)
Consequently, instead of casting the debate in terms of a contest for an ideal-
ized exclusive mode of reasoning, it may be more productive to search for a way 
to retain the plurality of possible approaches, already present in the practice of the 
discipline. After all, the “theory wars” (Chapman et al., 2016), waged at least from 
the middle of the 20th century, did not produce a unified set of practices, but only 
amplified the opportunities for the “methodological omnivory”. New possibilities 
emerge, especially those based upon STEM-derived techniques and methods, while 
the old procedures are still practised, such as typological analyses. Discarding the 
old ones, just because they are perceived as parts of the outdated paradigm may 
deprive us of valuable epistemic tools. Equally, fully embracing the new ones with-
out carefully investigating their potential may produce misleading results. This is 
especially problematic when archaeologists borrow concepts and ideas from another 
field of study, without much thought about their original context and the distortions 
induced by the transfer from one disciplinary setting to the other (Babić, 2018, 116 
f.). Therefore, we need to reconsider the particular epistemic proposals on their own 
merit and to seek for the meaningful connections between various lines of inquiry. 
However, arguing for plurality does not in any way imply that all the proposed ap-
proaches are equally valid or efficient in producing the relevant knowledge. In order 
to discern the ones worth pursuing and increase the epistemic potential of the entire 
discipline, it may be prudent to abandon the search for clearly bounded theoretical 
and methodological units. This bloc approach presupposes clear-cut segments cur-
tailed by nonporous boundaries and filled with homogenous contents (cf. Crellin, 
2020). However, research practice rarely operates in this manner and, in archaeol-
ogy as well as other disciplines, it consists mainly in interaction between competing 
research programmes. 
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Progressive programmes?
The concept of a research programme was first introduced in the late 1960s by the phi-
losopher of science Imre Lakatos, as a tool to evaluate different scientific theories and 
methods, and their potential for further growth (Lakatos, 1968; 1970). The basic idea is 
that in practice researchers choose to commit to a string of ideas and propositions – a 
programme, with its core consisting of the defining postulates. In the process of posi-
tive heuristics hypotheses are formulated, aimed at the empirical testing of the core 
propositions of the programme. In time, some of these propositions are empirically 
validated and start forming a protective belt around the core, enhancing its epistemic 
potential. Lakatos allows for some of the propositions to fail the empirical test and get 
rejected, as long as the core is capable of generating new viable propositions. The ones 
that are corroborated add robustness to the core and extend its protective belt, and the 
entire programme is judged to be progressive (Joyce et al., 2019, 842–843). Failures can 
be overcome as long as the core is still potent enough to produce new postulates. Al-
though Lakatos permits trial-and-error, the ultimate goal of a programme is to be both 
theoretically and empirically progressive: it must predict novel and hitherto unexpect-
ed facts, and at least some of these have to be verified (Musgrave et al., 2023). If, on 
the other hand, a programme fails to deliver successive new propositions and/or if the 
novel predictions turn out to be false, the programme is degenerating (Lakatos, 1970; 
33, 34). The recent refurbishment of Lakatos’s model introduces the third possible state 
of a scientific programme – a static one, where it may be possible that researchers cease 
to produce new hypotheses and are forced to go into stasis until technological or other 
developments allow for testing to begin or resume. And yet “having a static research 
program might be better for a field of study than having a degenerative research program 
or having no research program at all” (Joyce et al., 2019, 849). 
How does this approach to validation of research help archaeologists in judging 
the best possible path to follow in order to produce relevant and epistemically sound 
knowledge? Firstly, Lakatos offers the means to observe discrete sets of propositions 
over time, not monitoring success in terms of a sudden breakthrough, like Kuhn’s par-
adigms, but in the potential to gradually improve and enlarge knowledge. So instead 
of treating the periods of more dynamic debates as breaking points, aimed at discredit-
ing the previous positions, we can think of them as the moments in the history of the 
discipline when valuable insights have been added to our epistemic repertoire. Several 
competing programmes may exist at the same time, since the scientific process is en-
visaged as a string of research practices, constantly exploring a number of working 
premises, not as a solid front that advances in unison until fatally challenged. Their 
success is constantly monitored with respect to the rival propositions (Musgrave et 
al., 2023), not only confined to the periods of sudden and radical change. Some pro-
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grammes may even stagnate (Joyce et al., 2019), but still hold a certain epistemic value, 
which can be reinvigorated under some future conditions. 
The debates in the history of archaeology when the existing premises were most 
radically challenged and declared obsolete by the proponents of the new set of pro-
posals, as a rule, revolved around its position with regard to the distinction between 
the sciences and humanities. This tension between the epistemic standards derived 
from the Cartesian tradition, and the ones following in the footsteps of Droysen and 
Dilthey has been articulated most notably in the 1960s, when the processual credo 
explicitly demanded “more science”, and again in the 1980s, when the pendulum 
swung towards understanding, rather than explaining (Babić, 2018, 116–120). This 
perpetual problem, succinctly labelled as “the paradox of material evidence” (Chap-
man et al., 2016), can hardly be resolved by committing ourselves exclusively to one 
set of premises at the expense of the other, since it lies in the fact that its subject 
matter can and indeed should be approached both by those means closely associated 
with the realm of natural sciences, and those close to the humanities. When viewed 
from the angle of the Lakatosian programmes, this apparent incommensurability 
of approaches proves to cause less friction, since individual research strategies are 
judged according to their potential to corroborate and expand its core in relation to 
other propositions in the field. Some of the protective belts may overlap, eventually 
creating synergies between the cores. 
This leaves unresolved the issue of empirical verification as the key criterion pro-
posed by Lakatos for discerning the character of a particular programme. Strictly 
speaking, this step in a research  presupposes the satisfactory outcome of an empirical 
test designed to verify a hypothesis (Franklin et al., 2016). This goal is rarely, if ever, 
achievable in archaeology, even when researchers firmly adhere to the positivistic ide-
als of hypothetico-deductive method. However, archaeologists share this problem with 
other disciplines aimed at producing inferences about the deep past, such as geology, 
palaeontology, or evolutionary biology (Currie, 2018). A more elaborate account on 
the solution to this problem is outside the limits of this text, but an interim proposition 
may be put forward that theoretically and logically consistent propositions, corrobo-
rated by newly acquired evidence (cf. Joyce et al., 2019), are considered to meet the 
criteria of a progressive research programme. 
To conclude, the current state of archaeological theory and practice, much like it 
has been the case throughout the history of the discipline, is characterized by multiple 
propositions, ranging from those explicitly putting faith in the application of hard-
science methods (Kristiansen, 2016), to those opulently borrowing from philosophy 
and social anthropology (Olsen et al., 2012). The multitude of approaches generated 
over more than a century meets the diverse demands of the complex task before us 
– to produce sound and meaningful knowledge about human interactions with the 
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material world. If we choose to observe these propositions as discrete programmes, all 
geared towards the same ultimate goal, but honed to meet particular challenges, posed 
by the character of our evidence, we may be able to determine their epistemic poten-
tial in a more astute manner. Ultimately, their mutual reinforcement may prove to be 
more frequent than expected and the unity of archaeological research practices may 
be reached precisely by embracing their plurality. Consequently, the most productive 
way forward for archaeology, in epistemic terms at least, is to fully embrace its already 
existing plurality of approaches and to constantly verify their epistemic robustness 
through structured and theoretically informed practices. In this manner, a more active 
role can be achieved in the interdisciplinary exchanges and, ultimately, the esteem of 
archaeological knowledge can be restored in society. 
Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Zorica Kuzmanović, Monika Milosavljević and 
Aleksandar Palavestra for their comments. 
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Arheološki programi. Komentarji k epistemični raznovrstnosti 
Ključne besede: arheološko sklepanje, epistemične norme, paradigmatski obrat, razi-
skovalni programi, Imre Lakatos
V članku je predstavljen kratek pregled konceptov preučevanja sprememb epistemičnih 
standardov v arheologiji in njenega potenciala v bodočnosti. Opozarja na pomanjklji-
vost pogoste rabe Kuhnovega koncepta paradigem pri razvrščanju arheoloških teoret-
skih pristopov v tri izrazito ločene in izključujoče se faze. Namesto tega predlaga koncept 
raziskovalnih programov filozofa znanosti Imreja Lakatosa, ki se zdi bolj produktiven za 
vrednotenje različnih pristopov v arheologiji in s katerim je možno ohraniti različnost 
epistemičnih idej in se tako bolje soočiti z izzivi, ki so imanentni arheološkim dokazom. 
Archaeological programmes. Notes on epistemic diversity
Keywords: archaeological reasoning, epistemic norms, paradigm shift, research pro-
gramme, Imre Lakatos
The paper presents a short overview of the concepts used to observe the changes in 
epistemic standards of a discipline and its future potential, in respect to archaeology. 
The shortcomings are outlined of the common practice of structuring the theoretical 
approaches in archaeology into distinct, mutually exclusive modes of reasoning, im-
plying three distinct phases, inspired by Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The concept of 
a research programme, introduced by the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, is sug-
gested as the more productive mode of assessing the multitude of approaches present 
in archaeology. In this manner, it is possible to retain the diversity of epistemic propos-
als and to meet the challenges immanent in the character of archaeological evidence.
O avtorici
Staša Babić je profesorica klasične arheologije Grčije na Oddelku za arheologijo Filo-
zofske fakultete Univerze v Beogradu. Raziskovalno se ukvarja z železno dobo Evro-
pe in Balkana, kulturnimi kontakti Grkov in njihovih sodobnikov, recepcijo klasične 
grške kulture v sodobnem svetu ter teorijo in epistemologijo arheologije. Je avtorica 
monografij Grci i Drugi. Antička percepcija i percepcija antike (Beograd: Clio 2008) in 
Metaarheologija. Ogled o uslovima znanja o prošlosti (Beograd: Clio 2018).
E-naslov: sbabic@f.bg.ac.rs
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Staša BaBić / archaeological programmeS. NoteS oN epiStemic diverSity
20
About the author
Staša Babić is a Professor of Classical Archaeology of Greece at the Department of Ar-
chaeology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Research interests: European 
and Balkan Iron Age; cultural contacts between the Greeks and their contemporaries; 
reception of the Classical Greek culture in the modern world; theory and epistemol-
ogy of archaeology. Published works include the monographs: Grci i Drugi. Antička 
percepcija i percepcija antike (Greeks and others. Ancient perceptions and perceptions 
of antiquity), Belgrade: Clio (2008), and  Metaarheologija. Ogled o uslovima znanja o 
prošlosti (Metaarchaeology. An essay on the conditions of knowledge about the past); Bel-
grade: Clio (2018).   
E-mail: sbabic@f.bg.ac.rs
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