Reverse engineering and the archaeology of flowing materials. A response to Gabriel Moshenska’s paper: Streitraum: Reverse Engineering

Abstract

First of all, thanks to Gabriel Moshenska for raising such interesting questions regarding the relationship between reverse engineering and archaeology. His paper does an excellent job in setting out similarities and alignments between the two sets of practices, opening up the topic for further discussion. The author takes us a certain distance along a path of comparison, equips us with some well-honed ideas to carry with us, and then leaves it up to us to make of them what we will, or take them in whatever direction we choose. In picking up the challenge thus laid down, I will argue that archaeologists do indeed reverse engineer after a fashion, and that this not only has important implications for our understanding of archaeological inference: more than that, reverse engineering has potential to be of practical use to archaeologists in their investigation of specific types of material evidence, which I will go on to discuss.