Experimental archaeology and the earliest seagoing: the limitations of inference

Abstract

Experimental voyaging, of the type made famous by the Kon-Tiki and the Hōkūleʻa, is often considered to provide a means of modelling the performance of ancient seacraft, a relevant variable if we are to understand patterning in prehistoric island colonization and maritime interaction. Recently, in order to bolster claims otherwise dependent on contentious data, some proponents who argue for maritime colonisation as an evolutionarily ancient behaviour have suggested that such experiments provide corroborating evidence for deliberate seagoing by archaic hominins. Here, we examine the epistemological foundation for these claims, and in particular what constitutes the basis for building good analogues in archaeological reasoning and the limitations of inferences drawn from them. We stress the importance of not conflating possibilities with probabilities, and caution against an unwarranted uniformitarianism in making assumptions regarding the cognitive, social, behavioural and technological contexts of archaic and modern humans.

Keywords:

• Experimental archaeology
• seacraft
• hominin dispersal
• Palaeolithic
• analogical reasoning

Notes

1 In the original formulation, Bertrand Russell (1997 [1952], 547–8) illustrated the fallacy of the argument from ignorance by postulating the existence of a china teapot in orbit around the sun which was, nonetheless, undetectable to observers on Earth. Clearly, the non-existence of the teapot is impossible to demonstrate empirically, but citing an inability to disprove an unfalsifiable claim as evidence for that claim to be truthful (i.e., we do not know this is false, so therefore it must be true) is logically incoherent. In this, Russell arguably followed Ramsey (1931, 235), who formulated the problem in this way: ‘Take, for instance, the problem “Is there a planet of the size and shape of a tea-pot?” This question has meaning so long as we do not know that an experiment could not decide the matter. Once we know this it loses meaning, unless we restore it by new axioms.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John F. Cherry

John F. Cherry is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, where he is also Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. After decades of survey fieldwork in Greece, Italy, Great Britain, the United States and Armenia, he is currently co-directing a project on Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean. He has co-edited the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology for the past twenty-five years.

Thomas P. Leppard

Thomas P. Leppard is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. Other recent papers on the earliest seagoing are published or forthcoming in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Current Anthropology. He continues fieldwork on islands in Micronesia and the western Mediterranean.