What is Michel Foucault's 'Archaeology of Knowledge'?

When a regular archaeologist goes to a site, they dig through layers of dirt to find ancient pots and bones to understand how people physically lived in the past.

• Foucault used 'Archaeology' as a metaphor for the human mind.
• Instead of digging through physical dirt, Foucault 'dug' through old medical textbooks, prison records, and psychiatric files from hundreds of years ago.
• His goal was to uncover the hidden rules that allowed people in a specific historical era to believe that a certain idea was the absolute 'Truth'.

Before Foucault, most historians believed that human knowledge was a straight line of progress—that every century we just get smarter and discover more permanent 'truths'.

• Foucault completely disagreed. He proved that what society considers 'True' or 'Normal' changes radically depending on the era you live in.
• Example (Madness): Foucault dug into the history of madness. In the Middle Ages, mad people were considered holy or touched by God. But by the 1800s, society suddenly decided that mad people were 'sick criminals' who needed to be locked in terrible asylums. Foucault asked: Did the mental illness change, or did society's rules about what is 'normal' change?

Foucault argued that every historical period has an invisible, unconscious set of rules that completely controls what people are allowed to think, say, or consider scientific. He called this underlying rulebook the 'Episteme'. When one era ends, its Episteme breaks, and a completely new way of thinking takes over, often making the old 'truths' look ridiculous.