Philip Tonner
Archaeology has, over the course of the 20th Century and into the 21st, become aware of the contribution that theory can – and does, whether explicit or not – make to its enterprise of understanding the human past. What I’d like to do in this short article is to introduce two thinkers from the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition in European philosophy who’s writings are incredibly suggestive for archaeological theory and, ultimately, for archaeological practice. The thinkers in questions – Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) – each have something to say about how we might understand human engagement with the world, past and present, and how we might
approach the archaeological record. With Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger was one of the central thinkers to have contributed greatly to the development of phenomenological philosophy in the 20th Century. His early masterpiece Sein und Zeit (Being and Time [1927]) had a formative influence on the ‘existentialists’ and his other works, particularly on art and language, have been crucial to the development of hermeneutics and deconstruction in the hands of Gadamer and Jacques Derrida.