This chapter contextualizes the contemporary approaches to knowledge construction in archaeological field practice, which are generally divided along scientific and humanistic lines. More specifically, I attend to the empiricist/objectivist and interpretive schools of fieldwork through a discussion of the modernist divisions that underlie their epistemology as manifest in the ways archaeologists move between the material world and their media. I unpack the question of how is it that we have come to understand contemporary regional surveys, which are in many ways exemplified by the Argolid Exploration Project, as separating ‘data’ from explanation/interpretation? I begin by scrutinizing a classic and deeply embedded epistemological divide—the ‘field’ (as in ‘fieldwork’) separated from the supposed contexts of knowledge production whether laboratory, archive, or study. I then detail the dualist conceptual frameworks of contemporary field methodology as understood by the ‘New Wave’ of regional surface survey in Greece and the proponents behind the ‘interpretive turn.’

Subsequently I move on to argue that the proponents of interpretive field methodologies in attempting to close the gap between theory and practice have focused exclusively upon such issues of scientific epistemology in fieldwork without consideration of the real-time activities of archaeologists in practice. Because what practitioners of the scientific mode do does not match up to what they say they do proponents of interpretive fieldwork have inadvertently reproduced an asymmetry that exacerbates (rather than closes) the division between theory and practice. I argue that in order to understand the process of archaeological knowledge construction we need to suspend our interest in epistemology and focus on what practitioners do in real-time. Moreover, for archaeology to bypass the division of theory and practice it needs to acquire symmetry through the recognition of the action of instruments, materials, and media in the articulation of knowledge with regards to the material world. For this to occur archaeologists must cast aside the usage of dualistic categories because the contextualization of an entity as either one or the other (either subject or object), or indeed both/and, is the ‘outcome of a specifically modern way of distributing entities, rather than a natural and empirically verifiable occurrence’ (Jensen 2003, 226). In trudging across the first two of three turns I will unashamedly use the language of each in describing its mission. For the sake of mounting a climatic need for a third turn I take the polarized (asymmetrical) claims of ‘scientists’ and ‘humanists,’ so to speak, at face value. The first two turns are to serve as a foil for the third—for a symmetrical archaeology.

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