Through recent decades academic archaeologists have been urged to conduct their research and excavations according to hypothesis-testing procedures. It has been argued that we should construct our general theories, deduce testable propositions and prove or disprove them against the sampled data. In fact, the application of this ‘scientific method’ often ran into difficulties. The data have a tendency to lead to unexpected questions, problems and issues. Thus, archaeologists claiming to follow hypothesis-testing procedures found themselves having to create a fiction. In practice, their work and theoretical conclusions partly developed ____________________. In other words, they already knew the data when they decided upon an interpretation. But in presenting their work they rewrote the script, placing the theory first and claiming to have tested it against data which they discovered, as in an experiment under laboratory conditions.

* excavation: 발굴 ** deduce: 추론하다