Research area / Foundation
Foundation
Everything is material in motion. This simple insight, rooted in pre-Socratic philosophy yet validated by modern physics, forms the foundation of all work presented here.
Central question
What follows for the human sciences if there is one material universe, and everything in it is in motion?
01 / Premise
The Bedrock: Motion, Matter, and Meaning
For too long, archaeology and the human sciences have operated under dualistic frameworks that separate mind from matter, culture from nature, organism from environment. These artificial divisions create conceptual barriers that prevent us from understanding technology, evolution, and human development as unified processes.
02 / Origin
Mortals have settled in their minds to speak of two forms, one of which they should have left out, and that is where they go astray from the truth.
Parmenides, DK 28 B8 (Burnet)
That is precisely the error made with culture and the physical, mind and matter, and myriad other dualisms.
01
Parmenides
What is, is one. Do not make it two.
02
Heraclitus
The one is in motion; what seems stable is structured motion.
03
Zeno
There are no instants of time, and no discrete elements of space.
04
Epicurus
The literal steps for building a science.
05
This programme
The study of signals propagating through space.
03 / Two problems
Declare a discrete thing, and the problem begins
Studying Parmenides, it took years to identify two problems at the root of archaeology’s difficulties.
The infinite objects problem
Trying, on recording forms or elsewhere, to name every possible entity, or every combination of entities, is doomed to fail. The complexity of a site cannot be recorded in a few categories, and every category added demands more.
The infinite times problem
Epochs and ages each become a container, a silo for information that cannot touch the others. As you try to represent ever smaller amounts of time, the layers build up infinitely. The same is true of stratigraphic layers.
With everything, as soon as you declare it a discrete thing, you have an issue.
Zeno of Elea
At every instant the arrow is stationary. And yet it moves.
If you declare instants of time, there can be no motion. At each instant the arrow is stationary, and no matter how finely you measure, it will always be stationary — and yet it moves. Zeno demonstrates it, proving that there cannot be instants of time, or discrete elements of space.
When archaeology declares timestamps, epochs and layers, or tries to record the complexity of a site in a few categories, it walks into the same error.
The objection is not that we may not discretise. All science discretises; every measurement samples a continuous field. The error is to mistake the partition for the world.
04 / Consequence
All is one. All is in motion.
So we declare that all is one, that all is in motion, and that there is no time; and the study becomes the study of signals propagating through space. That is how it starts, in Elea, at the turn of the fifth century BC.
Physical world
Motion & process
Interaction
Material trace
Persistence
Observation
Inference
That is why the programme begins with ontology and physics: archaeology is built up from the physical conditions that make archaeological evidence possible.
05 / Method
Epicurus: how a science is built
Epicurus is also vital. In the Letter to Herodotus he lays out the literal steps to take to create a science, and I followed them faithfully.
01
Begin from what is evident
Begin from what is evident to the senses.
02
Fix the meaning of terms
Fix the meaning of your terms to those evident things, so the words do not float free.
03
Admit nothing against the phenomena
Admit nothing that contradicts the phenomena.
04
Permit several explanations
Where the phenomena underdetermine the cause, permit several explanations rather than forcing one prematurely.
05
Recombine elements, not essences
Atomism replaces the transformation of essences with the recombination of elements: the difference between a study that can only classify and a science that can count, combine and predict.
Read the full derivation: An Ancient Method for a New Science →
06 / Principles
Core Principles
01
Monistic Ontology
There is one material universe. No separate realm of “culture,” “ideas,” or “information” exists independently of physical processes. Everything we study—from stone tools to social systems—is matter in motion.
02
Technology Defined
Technology is not “applied knowledge” or “cultural trait.” It is physical extensions combined with somatic motion patterns that alter the speed and scale at which organisms interact with their environment. This is fundamentally a relativistic transformation—tools change the organism’s effective size and motion capabilities.
03
Embodiment & System Boundaries
Organisms exist in continuous feedback with their environments. The boundary between organism and environment is not a barrier but an active interface where innovation occurs. Technology represents an extension of this boundary through controlled motion of material.
04
Somatic Motion as Selective Force
Motion patterns are not merely “behavior”—they are environmental structures that exert selective pressure. When hominins began habitually using tools, they altered their own selective environment by requiring new motion patterns, creating evolutionary feedback loops.
05
Time as Spatial Geometry
Archaeological time is not a linear sequence of periods. It is spatial geometry within 3D manifolds where temporal relationships are encoded as geometric properties. This paradigm shift enables integration with physics frameworks and GPU-accelerated pattern recognition.
Conference paper · IEEE ISSC 2025
From Geospatial Patterns to Ancient Signals: A Signal Based Framework for Archaeological Machine Learning
Dylan Foley and Dr Eoghan Furey, Department of Computing, Atlantic Technological University, Letterkenny.
IEEE Paper for ISSC Conference Letterkenny ATU 2025 – final draft version – the published version is on IEEE Xplore.
07 / Status
What do we assume? What have we tested?
The programme is ambitious, and the labels on this site show how far each part of it has come: what is assumed, what follows from it, what is predicted, what has been tested, what survived the test, and what remains unknown.
Every section and post carries one or more of these labels.
Starting assumptions, definitions and philosophical sources the programme reasons from. Not established truth: if a foundation fails, that is a result.
Propositions derived from the foundations.
Propositions that make empirical predictions, stated so that they could fail.
Experiments, observations, datasets and analyses that test a hypothesis, including the tests it fails.
Formally published or externally reviewed.
Current models, experiments and unfinished work.
Foundation does not mean established truth. It means the starting assumptions from which the programme reasons. If a foundational assumption fails, that failure is a result of the research programme, and it will be recorded here, not hidden.
Foundation
Derivation
Hypothesis
Prediction
Test
Result
Corroboration
Publication
A bold hypothesis is not an unsupported claim, provided it is stated so that it could fail. Each piece of work on this site sits somewhere on this chain; the labels say where.
08 / Writing
Writing
The body has a moving edge
Second in a series. The first essay set out the ancient programme this work descends from — the ontology from Parmenides and Heraclitus, the…
An Ancient Method for a New Science
But those also who have made considerable progress in the survey of the main principles ought to bear in mind the scheme of the…
Why Archaeologists Couldn’t Respond to SETI in 2014
The Unanswered Question In 2014, NASA published “Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication,” edited by Douglas Vakoch. The initiative called for archaeologists to contribute their…
Are We the Transmission?: The Archaeological Record Future Civilizations Will Discover
Introduction Four billion years of planetary history, the complete evolutionary record of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms to technological civilization. The geological transformations…
The Unending Pandemic: How COVID-19 Triggered an Authoritarian Backlash
Dylan G Foley – history & archaeology series 2025 Introduction: We Are Still Inside the Pandemic Sometimes the fog of collective delusion clears and…
SETI is Archaeology: Signal Science Across Spacetime
Dylan Foley – Archaeological SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Philosophy of Archaeology Series Words:1823 We Know Exactly One Thing About SETI In the search…
The Persistence of Dualism: Why a Decade of Theoretical Innovation Has Failed to Advance Archaeological Science
Update of 2014 article Dualism: The “Great Divide” in the Philosophy of Archaeology. “They made up their minds to name two forms, of which…
Beyond Typologies: Why Archaeology Needs a Signal Processing Revolution
First in a three-part series introducing a groundbreaking approach to archaeological data science The Hidden Patterns in Ancient Landscapes Imagine standing in a field…
09 / Archive
Archive
10 / Connections
Connections
This foundation generates two complementary applications: understanding the past through archaeological signal reconstruction, and shaping the future through engineering that respects material reality and motion constraints.
“οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναί“
Heraclitus B50 – Quoted by Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies
“Having listened not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one“