The paper aims to discuss the role of phenomenology and how it has been employed within the field of archaeology.
Since the 1980s, the so-called post-processualist archaeology has found useful methodological support in Classic Phenomenology. When archaeology expanded its lens, moving from the Ancient Greco-Roman world to the prehistoric era, experts, such as Hodder, Tilley et alia turned to Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for comprehending how prehistoric humanity perceived and lived the world. Phenomenological notions, i.e. Dasein or being-in-the- world, offered archaeologists the chance to describe the relationship between people, their environment, and tools as a mutual interaction.
More specifically, the paper intends to: 1) specify what aspects of phenomenology have mostly attracted archaeologists’ interest in virtue of their disciplinary needs; 2) to what extent their peculiar reading “deformed” the phenomenological method; 3) which other – neglected – key concepts of Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophy may be fertile for the archaeological inquiry.