"ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE : SCIENCE AND ARCHAEOLOGY OR A SCIENCE OF ARCHAEOLOGY?" John Bintliff School of Archaeological Science Bradford University It is customary in many standard archaeological textbooks, in summarising the history of the subject, to point to a very crucial new phase originating in the decade after the last war. We are told that partly as a result of technological achievements that were a by-product of the war, scientific hardware began to impinge very significantly upon archaeological investi- gations. To the survey of field remains came geophysics, to the analysis of recovered artefacts a whole range of physical, chemical and simpler optical techniques, to the business so dear to the heart of generations of archaeolo- gists —constructing time/space grids —came absolute dating, most notably C14, and to the storage and processing of excavation data, procedures of an automatic nature employing computers with complex statistical packages. Thus began our era of 'Scientific Archaeology'. Such an analysis implies that whatever archaeology was before this time, it was not scientific. Moreover, it implies that the kinds of things archaeolo- gists do today that do not directly involve machines to analyse or compute, are also unscientific. But what archaeologist in a report, extended essay or textbook has not striven, and felt he achieved a scientific approach to the collection, processing and interpretation of those matters strictly archaeological —strata, structures, artefacts, archaeological cultures? With very few exceptions, and these largely in environmental science, practitioners of the post-war 'scientific' archaeology have been trained scientists assisting archaeologists, each community doing its own thing; even at the stage of publication the scientist so defined is generally segre- gated to an appendix if not to a separate publication. Such scientists then are understood to be so-termed by their methodology and expertise in the core scientific community. Not so our archaeologists who claim to behave scientifically — it is palpably a self-nomination, a claim to be recognised as really deserving inclusion into the core of science. Clearly we require clarification of these contradictions, and such a task is all the more pressing for us here at Bradford, since we are involved in the formative years of a novel degree course, one which purports to be training a new hybrid being, a genuine archaeological scientist, quote unquote. 68