L’intégration interdisciplinaire en archéologie

Archaeologists are necessarily interdisciplinary at the most elementary level, as they need other disciplines, in particular the natural sciences, to shed light on part of their data. Nevertheless, these relationships have varied through time. During the Renaissance, archaeology was mainly aimed at collecting ancient works of art, and blended into art history. Then, as archaeology improved its methods, it became associated from the 19th century with history, for which it was an “auxiliary discipline”. The study of prehistoric periods but also of very recent times, and the ever-increasing range of methods and techniques have gradually made archaeology autonomous, by providing it with a new definition: the analysis of human societies, whatever their age, through their material remains. Collaboration with other disciplines involves, notably, physics, chemistry and the environmental sciences —collaborations in which archaeologists should also maintain a critical distance. Yet the relations with the other social and human sciences are also fundamental, whether they concern art history or history, under renewed forms, or ethnology (with ethnoarchaeology), geography (with spatial analysis), sociology (with the archaeology of the present-day), psychology (with cognitive archaeology and evolutionary archaeology) and linguistics (with the study of migrations). Lastly, the current institutional landscape of archaeology is discussed. This is characterized by a certain break-up, clearly making genuine scientific collaboration more complex