Archaeology’s Turn to Ontology: A Philosophical Perspective

Abstract Archaeology, as a discipline that rests on modern foundations, has been attempting to problematise its own origins. Related to this issue are ontological approaches that seek to uncover the basic metaphysical assumptions of the field. We uncover the way in which the sources of archaeology, whether we call them things, objects, or artefacts, have to appear to archaeology. We argue that the current turn to ontology can gain additional potential if it draws on its original roots in ontological philosophy—phenomenology. We seek to highlight that a more appropriate way of relating to our modern origins is neither to resist them nor to try to overcome them, but rather to take them seriously. In doing so, we also attempt to revitalise the efforts of the ‘Heideggerian’ approaches in archaeology of the 1990s, whose potential has not been sufficiently fulfilled. In this paper, we point to the yet unchallenged primacy of cognition as a self-evident theoretical starting point of archaeological inquiry and propose a productive way of bridging this methodological problem through Heidegger’s concept of ontological difference.