Geosophy in Archaeology

Abstract

The study of the past still is a privilege of the Global North (Benavides 2019). The chronological structure and knowledge production in fields like Archaeology or Geography are often only questioned at its fridges, for instance through Feminist or Marxist approaches, but the majority of those disciplines continues to consider the empirical analysis of material remains and ‘hard-science’-based research such as Isotope Analysis, aDNA studies or GIS, as their core purpose and actual way to reproduce a factual past, that is, producing the truth. Geosophical thinking might provide a contribution to remedy those paradigmatic limitations. It offers a critical introduction of multiple historical narratives that question the often monolithic tempo-spatial ordering and Othering of things. In my paper, I will grapple both with theoretical implications of the concept and present shortly one possible way, in how to conduct a geosophically informed archaeological research.