Every generation re-writes history in its own way'. Re-writing History applies Collingwood's dictum to a series of topics and themes, some of which have been central to prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology for the past century or more, while some have been triggered by more recent changes in technology or social attitudes. Some issues are highly controversial, like the proposals for the Stonehenge World Heritage sites. Others challenge long-held popular myths, like the deconstruction of the Celts and by (...) extension the Picts. Yet some traditional tenets of scholarship have gone unchallenged for too long, like the classical definition of civilization itself. But why should it matter? Surely it is in the order of things that each generation rejects received wisdom and adopts ideas that are radical or might offend previous generations? Is this not simply symptomatic of healthy and vibrant debate? Or are there grounds for believing that current changes are of a more disquieting character, denying the basic assumptions of rational argument and freedom of enquiry and expression that have been the foundation of western scholarship since the eighteenth century Enlightenment? Re-writing History addresses contemporary concerns about information and its interpretation, including issues of misinformation and airbrushing of politically-incorrect history. Its subject matter is the archaeology of prehistoric and early historic Britain, and the changes witnessed over two centuries and more in the interpretation of the archaeological heritage by changes in the prevailing political and social as well as intellectual climate. Far from being topics of concern only to academics in ivory towers, the way in which seemingly innocuous issues such as cultural diffusion or social reconstruction in the remote past are studied and presented reflects important shifts in contemporary thinking that challenge long-accepted conventions of free speech and debate. (shrink)

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the "death of cinema" debate, Film History as Media Archaeology​ presents a robust argument for cinema's current status as a new epistemological object of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The study is the fruit of twenty years of research and writing at the interface of (...) film history, media theory, and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of new film history and media archaeology. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction as we experience them today. (shrink)

Material evidence: learning from archaeological practice / Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman -- Part I. Fieldwork and recording conventions -- Repeating the unrepeatable experiment / Richard Bradley -- Experimental archaeology at the cross roads: a contribution to interpretation or evidence of xeroxing / Martin Bell -- Proportional representation: multiple voices in archaeological interpretation at çatalhöyük / Shahina Farid -- Integrating database design and use into recording methodologies / Michael J. Rains -- The tyranny of typologies: evidential reasoning in romano-egyptian (...) domestic archaeology / Anna Lucille Boozer -- Part II. Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies -- The archaeological bazaar: scientific methods for sale? or: putting the "arch" back into archaeometry / A. M. Pollard and P. Bray -- Radiocarbon dating and archaeology: history, progress and present status / Sturt W. Manning -- Using evidence from natural sciences in archaeology / David Killick -- Working the digital: some thoughts from landscape archaeology / Marcos Llobera -- Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology / Sara Perry -- Part III. Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation -- Uncertain on principle: combining lines of archaeological evidence to create chronologies / Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle -- Lessons from modelling neolithic farming practice: methods of elimination / Amy Bogaard -- Evidence, archaeology and law: an initial exploration / Roger M. Thomas -- Law and archaeology: modified wigmorean analysis / Terence Anderson and William Twining -- Traditional knowledge, archaeological evidence, and other ways of knowing / George Nicholas and Nola Markey -- Part IV. Broader perspectives: material culture as object and evidence -- Evidence of what? on the possibilities of archaeological interpretation / Gavin Lucas -- Meeting pasts halfway: a consideration of the ontology of material evidence in archaeology / Andrew Meirion Jones -- Matter and facts: material culture and the history of science / Simon Werrett. (shrink)

Wolfgang Ernst, Professor of Media Theories at the Humboldt University in Berlin, has become known through his work on media archaeology. Hence the inclusion of this translation represents an alternative take on cultural techniques. It places the legacy of cultural studies, or Kulturwissenschaften, in an interesting tension with the different epistemological demands that technical media impose. After Vico and Dilthey, argues Ernst, we need to investigate the specific modes of knowledge that technical media propose to cultural techniques. Ernst’s media (...) archaeology and the slightly different approach to cultural techniques found in some other contributions in this issue can be seen as two of the most intriguing ways in which current German media studies has been developing in relation to Friedrich Kittler’s impact. For Ernst, this has resulted in a more technical focus and also in the development of critiques of temporality that go beyond media history. Ernst argues that media temporality is not to be understood only through the cultural history of media technologies, but also how media technologies produce time. Machines have their own specific temporality, Eigenzeit. It is in this context that the article discusses the different approaches to cultural techniques, taking into consideration the specific time-critical and epistemic implications of technical media. (shrink)

The reconstruction of hominins’ cognitive evolution has always been a crucial but challenging task. Researchers from various disciplines have tried to approach this issue, among which British archaeologist Steven Mithen’s cathedral model is regarded as one of the earliest and most creative attempts. In this model, he proposed that the Neanderthal’s mind is like a cathedral with disconnected chapels. Specifically, Neanderthals possessed advanced social, natural history, technical, and even linguistic intelligence modules, but the first three modules are isolated from (...) each other, meaning they cannot effectively use the knowledge from one domain to address the issue of another domain. This article challenges his reconstruction of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacities by presenting multiple forms of archaeological evidence bearing on various kinds of cross-domain thinking that has arisen over the past two decades. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in LackGereon KopfDavid R. Loy. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 244.David Loy's most recent work, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, constitutes an intellectual history of Europe from what he calls a "Buddhist perspective." (...) His obvious goals in this book are (1) to develop a heuristic device, if not a mature methodology, out of the Buddhist intellectual tradition and to apply it to matters that are not necessarily related to the Buddhist tradition, and (2) to reread European history from a new standpoint. I have to confess that I am not a historian and thus cannot evaluate Loy's historical claims; however, from my perspective as a scholar of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, it seems to me that not only does Loy succeed on both counts but his study of European history from what he calls the perspective of lack reveals astonishing yet previously barely highlighted insights into European thought. It also undermines, in a methodological slight of hand that at times evokes Michel Foucault's approach, the conventional assumptions about the dominant paradigms of the generally accepted periods of European history. I do not want to claim that Loy's methodology resembles Foucault's "archaeology" in any way; however, it does demonstrate that discourses and time periods are fluid rather than static and that their paradigm depends on, and changes in accordance with, the perspective of the historian.For example, seen from Loy's perspective of lack, the central and most formative event of European history was neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, but the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh century. In general, Loy's book is filled with observations and indictments of common myths that are not only provocative in nature but sure to challenge many of the presuppositions that the proponents of the so-called Western World hold dear. In concrete terms, Loy seems to focus on and examine not so much European intellectual history but the myths that are used to argue for the superiority of the "West": freedom, progress, romantic love, the sanctity of the nation-state, and free-market capitalism.Loy chooses as his standpoint "a Buddhist perspective," namely the "perspective of lack." He takes as his basic assumption the dictum he borrows from early Buddhism and, as he adds, psychotherapy, namely that humans have to live with the basic frustration-Loy's translation of dukkha, which is usually rendered as "suffering"-that reality does not conform to our innermost desires. We desire immortality but cannot avoid the impermanence of all living beings. The awareness of our impermanence not only shatters our sense of and quest for a self, but it also [End Page 580] arouses the "immediate and terrifying (because quite valid) suspicion... that "'I' am not real right now" (p. 3).This frightening sense of lack propels humans onto what Norman Brown calls the Oedipal project, that is, the attempt to create oneself. This sense of lack, Loy remarks, is common to all religions, but what separates Buddhism from most other religious traditions is that it does not offer a self and some kind of immortality, on the one hand, and refrains from reifying this sense of lack as, for example, "sin," on the other. Rather, Buddhism, to Loy, can be "understood as a way to resolve our sense of lack" (p. 6). With regard to his present project, Loy asks, "[i]f that (the sense-of-the-self's sense of lack) gives us insight into the individual human condition, can it also shed light on the collective dynamics of society and nations?" (p. 8). In other words, Loy asks how the interpretation of European history would change if one were to choose the primary Buddhist assumption, namely the deep anxiety over one's future death and present-day insignificance and groundlessness, as one's starting point.However, Loy is quick to argue that this standpoint is not unique to Buddhism, and he corroborates his perspective on lack with the findings of psychotherapy, mostly the... (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science through a quantitative analysis of the two most authoritative archaeological journals and two other relevant journals in Japan. First, although previous studies have emphasized the impact of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo on the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, results of the present study suggest that its impact has been more limited than previously assumed. Second, while previous studies claimed that research funding (...) by the Japanese government from the latter half of the 1970s was an important factor in developing the scientific aspects of Japanese archaeology, the present study shows a result inconsistent with the claim. Finally, although I admit that the previous studies have properly captured some aspects of the relationship between Japanese archaeology and science, I conclude that we should look at the broader array of contributors to the relationship between Japanese archaeology and natural science. (shrink)

The aim of the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), as it was phrased those first days in Alnarp in the beginning of March 2010, is to: ”bring researchers together from different disciplines to discuss the history, archaeology, archaeobotany and cultivation of gardens and plants”. We had no idea, then, how widely appreciated this initiative would become. The fifth seminar in five years was held on Visingsö June 1-3, 2014 and the sixth seminar (...) will take place in Kristiansand, Norway, June 12-14, 2015. We are very pleased to be able to publish this report, Sources to the History of Gardening: Four Interdisciplinary Seminars 2010–2013, Arranged By the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), based on the first four themes and seminars, in total 26 articles. Most of them origins from one of the seminar contributions 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. However, the editorial group has taken the opportunity, with the aim of the network in mind, to add supplementing contributions on some subjects. The articles are arranged in four themes according to the themes of the seminars. The first theme Archaeological Sources to the History of Gardens and the Cultural Landscape is linked to the first seminar in Alnarp, Sweden, 2010 which had a focus on method, the important connections between archaeology and archaeobotany and the interesting progress within garden archaeology during the last decade. The second theme Cabbage Patches and Kitchen Gardens deals with the second seminar in Norrköping, Sweden, 2011. Its focus was on historical, cultural geographical, archaeological and archaeobotanical research concerning utility gardens or kitchen gardens as well as the concept ‘kålgård’ (cabbage patch or kale yard), its shape and content over time. The third theme Cultural and Garden plants: Under Ground, Above Ground, In Herbariums and Archives connects to the third seminar in Uppsala, Sweden, 2012. It focused on sources, source criticism and interdisciplinary research to gain knowledge on the history of garden cultivation and cultural plants. The articles discuss, among other things, herbariums, written sources, DNA and molecular markers, pollen analysis and georadar. The fourth theme for NTAA’s annual seminar was Cultural Relict Plants and was held on Bornholm, Denmark, 2013. The focus on the seminar was on research and conservation of cultural relict plants, that is cultural plants which have survived in the same place for a long time after the actual cultivation has ceased. We dedicate this report to Kjell Lundquist (1955-2011) who were one of the initiators to this network and we hope it will inspire continuous research and new methodological discussions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classical Art: A Life History DAVID CAST This is a wonderful book, rich in its purposes, wide in its range and, thanks to the author’s home institution, Christ’s College, Cambridge, lavishly illustrated with images of objects, many familiar, some less so. And it is written with an elegance and clarity that belies the depths of scholarship in its history. The first letter of the subtitle suggests (...) the tenor of Vout’s account, that since every age has conjured up a different idea of the classical, what is here is yet one more such history, a modest if particular account of what was and is still there in the records made of the Greek and Roman past. The basic metaphor Vout uses to define the focus of this history is that of conversation, whether such conversing is seen to exist between the objects themselves or between the past and the present, between those objects that have outgrown their intended functions to become part of a canon that has dictated taste over the ages, as she puts it, shaping culture and culture’s questions. Thus conversation is here, plus also what Vout is not afraid, when necessary, to call the misappropriations and translocations of the Greek and Roman objects she takes note of. Yet another contribution she adds to the idea of the classical comes from what she calls, perhaps a little awkwardly, the long durée approach to its subjects, seen first when these objects were produced, then as they survived Christianity and the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the French Revolution, modernism and fascism, to live Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present, Princeton University Press, 2018. xi + 376 pages; 80 color + 132 b/w illustrations. $39.50. ISBN 9780691177038; E-book ISBN9781400890279. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 on in galleries and auction rooms, making the heart soar and the blood boil, as Vout claims, even today. It is a complex story she has to tell, difficult yet valuable, and its method is nicely exemplified by the first example considered, the two statues, known as the Tyrannicides, dated to 477–476 BCE, and located now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, attributed on the museum caption to the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, and dated to 477–476 BCE. The details here are crucial for, on investigation, it is clear these are not the statues that were erected in the Athenian agora to honor the men, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who, by tradition, had killed the tyrant’s brother Hipparchus. Yet even this second group, as she notes, had been a stand-in, since the first piece to honor these men, made by the sculptor Antenor, had been stolen by the Persians in the sack of Athens in 480–479 BCE. Nor is this group here the actual second group but rather a copy, made by an unknown copyist working under the Roman Empire. What we have here are what might be called pretenders—yet ones, despite doubts about their authenticity, that have long been taken to mark a particular moment in the formal history of Greek art, the advent of the so-called Severe style in Athens and the birth of the classical moment of sculpture. Any full account of these statues depends then on a rich history, plus a range of other events; the existence of ancient casts of the Tyrannicides during the Roman Empire, marking out such statues as art, rather than having still their first meaning; the prior history in the Renaissance of the acquisition of ancient sculpture as a sign of power; the sight of the figure of Aristogeiton, then in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the building up of these statues from fragments of other statues; in 1859 the identification of these figures as the Tyrannicides; and finally a reading of classical texts, those of Pausanias, Pliny and Lucian, that spoke, even if in contradictory ways, of all the actors here, Antenor, Kritios and Aristogeiton. To which should be added the recent accounts of these pieces, provided by schol172 classical art: a life history ars of classical art like Brunilde Ridgway, R. T... (shrink)

Part one: the search for cosmic consciousness -- R.M. Bucke and the future of humanity -- William James and the anesthetic revelation -- Henri Bergson and the Elan Vital -- The superman -- A.R. Orage and the new age -- Ouspensky's fourth dimension -- Part two: esoteric evolution -- The bishop and the bulldog -- Enter the madame -- Dr. Steiner, I presume? -- From Goethean science to the wisdom of the human being -- Cosmic evolution -- Hypnagogia -- Part (...) three: the archaeology of consciousness -- The invisible mind -- Cracking the egg -- Lost worlds -- Noncerebral consciousness -- The split -- Part four: participatory epistemology -- The shock of metaphor -- The participating mind -- The tapestry of nature -- Thinking about thinking -- The black hole of consciousness -- Other times and places -- Faculty X -- Part five: the presence of origin -- The ascent of Mount Ventoux -- Structures of consciousness -- The mental-rational structure -- The integral structure -- Last words: playing for time. (shrink)

A sand table is an intentional structure that is an early, indeed ancient, interactive platform for visualization and simulation. An intellectual furnishing that is also a tangible instance of speculative infrastructure, the sand table offers a tactile space for the rehearsal of tactics, staccato words whose roots lie in haptics and arrangement. While common in military settings, sand tables have also been used to teach the blind, train wilderness firefighters, conduct therapy for trauma victims, illustrate stories to children, and play (...) imaginative games. Today there is a direct line from this seemingly modest technology—an implementation of what has been called elemental media—to augmented reality and other tangible interfaces. Part media history, part media archaeology, this article argues that sand tables belong to the lineage of platforms for speculative thinking and world-building that culminated in the rise of the digital computer amid a Cold War complex of scenario-driven futurology (whose centerpiece was the so-called situation room). It also suggests that sand, in its literal granularity—the physical affordances of the minute particulars of its particulate matter—offers an alternative to the binary regimen of ones and zeros that is the extractive product of the refined silica out of which semiconductors are still made. (shrink)

Concentrating on genetics, this paper examines the strength of the links between our biological science -- our biology -- and the particular history which brought that science into being. Would quite different histories have produced roughly the same science? Or, on the contrary, would different histories have produced other, quite different biologies? One emphasis throughout is on the kinds of evidence that might be brought to bear from the actual past in order to assess claims about what might (...) have been. Another emphasis is on the implications for debates on realism and antirealism about genes. (shrink)

Today, the most powerful research technique available for assigning chronometric age to human cultural objects is radiocarbon dating. Developed in the United States in the late 1940s by an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, radiocarbon dating measures the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (C14) in organic material, and calculates the time elapsed since the materials were removed from the life cycle. This paper traces the interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and radiochemistry that led to the successful development of radiocarbon (...) dating in the early 1950s, following the movement of people and ideas from Willard Libby's Chicago radiocarbon laboratory to museums, universities and government labs in the United States, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. I show how radiocarbon research built on existing technologies and networks in atomic chemistry and physics but was deeply shaped by its original private philanthropic funders and archaeologist users, and ultimately remained to the side of many contemporaneous Cold War scientific and military projects. (shrink)

From approximately 900 to 1300 a.d., a period known to climatologists and historians of science as the Little Climatic Optimum, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere averaged one or two degrees Fahrenheit above normal—this according to ice‐core samples, tree ring analysis, the calculation of sea levels, and other standards of measurement. In what would become known as the Four Corners region of the United States, the culture of the Anasazi flourished as never before in the now‐famous ruins of such magnificent (...) cliff dwellings as Chaco Canyon. Meanwhile, far to the north, the Viking raider and convicted killer Eric the Red brought European civilization by open boat to Greenland, so named to attract wary settlers whose common sense dictated that these harsh surroundings might spell their doom. Yet both cultures would flourish for upward of three hundred years.Things began to change for the worse in the latter half of the thirteenth century, as shifts in wind and weather ushered in the so‐called Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. Brian Fagan, a professor of archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of more than a dozen books, most of which are directed at the general reader, observes this period through the lens of climate change, with particular emphasis on what transpired in an anxious and often turbulent Europe.From 1300 onward the climate grew cooler, more stormy, and subject to sporadic extremes—in a word, unpredictable. Glaciers and pack ice advanced; rivers never known to freeze over became natural skating rinks; blizzards enveloped and erased the frozen landscape; and people starved and froze to death in the seemingly endless winters depicted by the Flemish master Peter Brueghel. At other times the climatic seesaw drove temperatures up, replacing bitter cold with blazing summers, drought, or torrential rains, changes that could take place in a single season or across decades. In between there were long periods of mild winters and warm summers that saw the harvesting of bountiful crops. But overall temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere declined, boosting the misery index of Europeans left to wonder what they had done to so offend an angry God.Unlike the current greenhouse warming ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, the climatic variability of the Little Ice Age remains, in Fagan's words, “a conundrum.” He speculates that it may have had much to do with a shift in the great ocean conveyor belt that rushes, like a thousand Amazons, from Southern Hemisphere to Northern and back again. Or it may be associated with the virtual disappearance of sunspots during much of the period under scrutiny, or with some other phenomenon that we know much too little about.The scientific causes aside, the author takes great pains to disassociate himself from what he calls “environmental determinism,” the notion that climate change has been a primary trigger for major historical events or that it has been the single most important cause of any civilization's decline and fall. Rather, he sees it as one of many factors, including politics, war, religion, and population shifts, that scholars must fold into their teaching of history and related subjects. This may be so in many instances, but how else to explain the literal overnight disappearance of the Anasazi from the Chaco, where the ashes from their fires of six hundred years ago lie scattered on the floor? Then there are the haunting words of Ivar Bardarson, a seafaring Norwegian priest who, in 1361, sailed up Greenland's west coast, hoping to make contact with his fellow Christians, from whom nothing had been heard for several years because of the ice. Search though they did, Bardarson and his companions found no survivors, causing the priest to remark: “There was never a man.”This well‐written and copiously illustrated book will make excellent reading for generalist and professional alike. And for those wishing to introduce the subject of climate change to undergraduates by placing it within a historical context, The Little Ice Age offers an excellent place to start. (shrink)

This book approaches the contemporary era--a period comprised between the late nineteenth and the twenty first centuries--as an archaeological age that can be defined by specific material processes. It argues that the materiality of our era, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, tells something profound and original about us--something disturbing, as well. The aim of the book is twofold: it reflects on the theory and practice of the archaeology of the contemporary past--its epistemology, politics, ethics and aesthetics--and it seeks (...) to characterize the present based on the three excesses that define it: spatial, temporal and material. All of them leave traces that can be explored archaeologically. This is the first attempt at describing the contemporary era from an archaeological point of view. Global in scope, the case studies that illustrate the argument come from every continent. The bibliography is also global and includes works from peripheral traditions that are rarely considered. This is a book of archaeology, but one that intends to go beyond academic limits. For that, it engages in a dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, history and geography. The book will be essential reading for students and practitioners of the archaeology of the contemporary past, historical archaeology and archaeological theory. But it will also be of interest to anybody concerned with globalization, modernity and the Anthropocene. (shrink)

While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept “in the loop” of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his decisions (...) to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working “in his loop,” but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be “programmed into” their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all. (shrink)

This book explores the diverse understandings of the archaeological record in both historical and contemporary perspective, while also serving as a guide to reassessing current views. Gavin Lucas argues that archaeological theory has become both too fragmented and disconnected from the particular nature of archaeological evidence. The book examines three ways of understanding the archaeological record - as historical sources, through formation theory, and as material culture - then reveals ways to connect these three domains through a reconsideration of archaeological (...) entities and archaeological practice. Ultimately, Lucas calls for a rethinking of the nature of the archaeological record and the kind of history and narratives written from it. (shrink)

Entanglement theory posits that the interrelationship of humans and objects is a delimiting characteristic of human history and culture. This edited volume of original studies by leading archaeological theorists applies this concept to a broad range of topics, including archaeological science, heritage, and theory itself. In the theoretical explications and ten case studies, the editors and contributing authors: build on the intersections between science, humanities and ecology to provide a more fine-grained, multi-scalar treatment emanating from the long-term perspective that (...) characterizes archaeological research; bring to light the subtle and unacknowledged paths that configure historical circumstances and bind human intentionality; examine the constructions of personhood, the rigidity of path dependencies, the unpredictable connections between humans and objects and the intricate paths of past events in varied geographic and historical contexts that channel future actions. This broad focus is inclusive of early complex developments in Asia and Europe, imperial and state strategies in the Andes and Mesoamerica, continuities of postcolonialism in North America, and the unforeseen and complex consequences that derive from archaeological practices. This volume will appeal to archaeologists and their advanced students. (shrink)

Archaeology in the Making is a collection of bold statements about archaeology, its history, how it works, and why it is more important than ever. This book comprises conversations about archaeology among some of its notable contemporary figures. They delve deeply into the questions that have come to fascinate archaeologists over the last forty years or so, those that concern major events in human history such as the origins of agriculture and the state, and questions (...) about the way archaeologists go about their work. Many of the conversations highlight quite intensely held personal insight into what motivates us to pursue archaeology; some may even be termed outrageous in the light they shed on the way archaeological institutions operate – excavation teams, professional associations, university departments. Archaeology in the Making is a unique document detailing the history of archaeology in second half of the 20th century to the present day through the words of some of its key proponents. It will be invaluable for anybody who wants to understand the theory and practice of this ever developing discipline. (shrink)

Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) (...) a critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

Common sense is not enough -- The "new archaeology" -- Archaeology as a science -- Middle-range theory, ethnoarchaeology, and material culture studies -- Culture and process -- Thoughts and ideologies -- Postprocessual and interpretative archaeologies -- Archaeology, gender, and identity -- Archaeology and cultural evolution -- Archaeology and Darwinian evolution -- Archaeology and history -- Archaeology, politics and culture -- Conclusion : the future of theory.

Interpretive Archaeologies provides a forum for debate between varied approaches to studying the past. It reflects the profound shift in the direction of archaeological study in the last fifteen years. The book argues that archaeologists must understand their own subjective approaches to the material they study as well as recognize how past researchers imposed their value systems on the evidence they presented. The book's authors, drawn from Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia, represent many different strands of archaeology. They (...) address the philosophical issues involved in interpretation and the origins of meaning in the evolution and emergence of "mind" in early hominids. They discuss the ways in which material culture is understood and presented in museums, and how the nature of history is itself in flux. (shrink)

Many students view archaeological theory as a subject distinct from field research. This division is reinforced by the way theory is taught, often in stand-alone courses that focus more on logic and reasoning than on the application of ideas to fieldwork. Divorcing thought from action does not convey how archaeologists go about understanding the past. This book bridges the gap between theory and practice by looking in detail at how the authors and their colleagues used theory to interpret what they (...) found while conducting research in northwest Honduras. This is not a linear narrative. Rather, the book highlights the open-ended nature of archaeological investigations in which theories guide research whose findings may challenge these initial interpretations and lead in unexpected directions. Pursuing those novel investigations requires new theories that are themselves subject to refutation by newly gathered data. The central case study is the writers' work in Honduras. The interrelations of fieldwork, data, theory, and interpretation are also illustrated with two long-running archaeological debates, the emergence of inequality in southern Mesopotamia and inferring the ancient meanings of Stonehenge. The book is of special interest to undergraduate Anthropology/Archaeology majors and first- and second-year graduate students, along with anyone interested in how archaeologists convert the static materials we find into dynamic histories of long-vanished people. The interrelations of fieldwork, data, theory, and interpretation are also illustrated with two long-running archaeological debates, the emergence of inequality in southern Mesopotamia and inferring the ancient meanings of Stonehenge. The book is of special interest to undergraduate Anthropology/Archaeology majors and first- and second-year graduate students, along with anyone interested in how archaeologists convert the static materials we find into dynamic histories of long-vanished people. (shrink)

Adrian Praetzellis provides a brief, readable introduction to contemporary theoretical models used in archaeology for the undergraduate or beginning graduate student. He demystifies a dozen flavors of contemporary theory for the theory-phobic reader, providing a short history of each, its application in archaeology, and an example of its use in recent work. The book teaches about different contemporary archaeological theories including postcolonialism, neoevolutionism, materiality, and queer theory; is written in accessible language with key examples for each theory; (...) includes illustrations and cartoons by the author; and provides questions at the end of each chapter to facilitate discussion. (shrink)

Provides an accessible account of the changing world of archaeological theory. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. This book will be an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field. Oliver J.T. Harris is lecturer in archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester. Craig N. Cipolla (...) is lecturer in historical archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

On 20 May 1961 Foucault defended his two doctoral theses; on 2 December 1970 he gave his inaugural lecture at the College de France. Between these dates, he published four books, travelled widely, and wrote extensively on literature, the visual arts, linguistics, and philosophy. He taught both psychology and philosophy, beginning his explorations of the question of sexuality. Weaving together analyses of published and unpublished material, this is a comprehensive study of this crucial period. As well as Foucault's major texts, (...) it discusses his travels to Brazil, Japan, and the USA, his time in Tunisia, and his editorial work for Critique and the complete works of Nietzsche and Bataille. It was in this period that Foucault developed the historical-philosophical approach he called 'archaeology' - the elaboration of the archive - which he understood as the rules that make possible specific claims. In its detailed study of Foucault's archive the book is itself an archaeology of Foucault in another sense, both excavation and reconstruction. This book completes a four-volume series of major intellectual histories of Foucault. Foucault's Last Decade was published by Polity in 2016; Foucault: The Birth of Power followed in 2017; and The Early Foucault in 2021. (shrink)

"Next to Sartre's Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years." -- Library Journal.

This book is an introduction to theory in archaeology--but with a difference. Archaeological Situations avoids talking about theory as if it was something you apply but rather as something embedded in archaeological practice from the start. Rather than see theory as something worked from the outside in, this book explores theory from the inside out, which means it focuses on specific archaeological practices rather than specific theories. It starts from the kinds of situations that students find themselves in and (...) learn about in other archaeology courses, avoiding the gap between practice and theory from the very beginning. It shows students the theoretical implications of almost everything they engage in as archaeologists, from fieldwork, recording, writing-up and making and assessing an argument, to exploring the very nature of archaeology and justifying its relevance. Essentially, it adopts a structure which attempts to pre-empt one of the most common complaints of student's taking theory courses: how is this applicable? Aimed primarily at undergraduates, this book is the ideal way to engage students with archaeological theory. (shrink)

In the perspective of the philosophical archaeology proposed, here, the arkhé towards which archaeology regresses must not be understood in any way as an element that can be situated in chronology ; it is, rather, a force that operates in history—much in the same way in which Indoeuropean words express a system of connections among historically accessible languages, in which the child in psychoanalysis expresses an active force in the psychic life of the adult, in which the (...) big bang, which is supposed to have originated the universe, continues to send towards us its fossil radiation. But the arkhé is not a datum or a substance. It is much rather a field of bipolar historical currents within the tension of anthropogenesis and history, between point of emergence and becoming, between arch-past and present. And as such—that is to say, to the extent to which it is something that it is necessarily supposed to have factually happened, and which yet cannot be hypostatized in any chronologically identifiable event—it is solely capable of guaranteeing the intelligibility of historical phenomena, of ‘saving’ them archaeologically within a future perfect, yet not grasping its origin, but rather its history, at once finite and untotalizable. (shrink)

This volume gathers together a series of the canonical statements which have defined an interpretive archaeology. Many of these have been unavailable for some while, and others are drawn from inaccessible publications.

An essay review of Léna Soler, Emiliano Trizio, and Andrew Pickering (eds.), Science As It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press).

The article focuses on the phenomenon of “Wild Archaeologies” – that is, on “archaeologies” that have appeared in the history of knowledge outside of Classical Archaeology: The first of these projects one thinks of, is of course Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir, but there has also been Freud’s archaeology of the soul, Benjamin’s archaeology of modernity as well as Kittler’s archaeology of media – and even Kant’s archaeology of metaphysics. All of these various projects experimented (...) with a material reflection of temporality and presented alternatives to the conventional historical thinking of the past. What do these various projects have in common? What is their historical, philosophical and epistemological relation to contemporary archive theory as well as to Classical Archaeology? And which consequences has this “archaeological method” or thinking for art history? And finally, what does Giorgio Agamben’s recent claim mean: that “the archaeologist’s gesture is the paradigm of every human activity”? (shrink)

Archaeology has been an important source of metaphors for some of the key intellectuals of the 20th century: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and Michel Foucault, amongst many others. However, this power has also turned against archaeology, because the discipline has been dealt with perfunctorily as a mere provider of metaphors that other intellectuals have exploited. Scholars from different fields continue to explore areas in which archaeologists have been working for over two centuries, with little or (...) no reference to the discipline. It seems that excavation, stratigraphy or ruins only become important at a trans-disciplinary level when people from outside archaeology pay attention to them and somehow dematerialize them. Meanwhile, archaeologists have been usually more interested in borrowing theories from other fields, rather than in developing the theoretical potential of the same concepts that other thinkers find so useful. The time is ripe for archaeologists to address a wider audience and engage in theoretical debates from a position of equality, not of subalternity. Reclaiming Archaeology explores how archaeology can be useful to rethink modernity's big issues, and more specifically late modernity (broadly understood as the 20th and 21st centuries). The book contains a series of original essays, not necessarily following the conventional academic rules of archaeological writing or thinking, allowing rhetoric to have its place in disclosing the archaeological. In each of the four sections that constitute this book (method, time, heritage and materiality), the contributors deal with different archaeological tropes, such as excavation, surface/depth, genealogy, ruins, fragments, repressed memories and traces. They criticize their modernist implications and rework them in creative ways, in order to show the power of archaeology not just to understand the past, but also the present. Reclaiming Archaeology includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists. (shrink)

Entangled by modernism -- Archaeological use of theories -- Object science -- Group formation, dissent, and change -- A method for analyzing cultural action -- Fragmenting the Bronze Age -- Contestation in the Hopewell.

In the 19th century, ‘scientific archaeologists’ split from their antiquarian colleagues over the role that provenience (context) plays in the value of an artifact. These archaeologists focus on documenting an artifact’s context when they remove it from its original location. Archaeologists then use this contextual information to place these artifacts within a particular larger assemblage, in a particular time and space. Once analyzed, the artifacts found in a site or region can be used to document, to understand, and explain the (...) past. Given the central place of context for archaeological excavation, archaeologists have done everything in their power to combat the black market. Hoping to stem the tide, archaeologists have leveled attacks on those who excavate these materials, those who traffic in them, and those who purchase them. Unfortunately, despite decades of argument and legal wrangling, archaeologists have been unable to stop the black market. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this failure from the supply side (what archaeologists call looting) and to suggest better ways to engage other stakeholders to the benefit of most, if not all. (shrink)

Although'Otherness' is an extremely common phenomenon in every society, related research is still at its beginnings.'Otherness' in the Middle Ages is a versatile and complex theme that covers a great number of different aspects, facets, and approaches: from non-human monsters and cultural strangers from remote places up to foreigners from another country or another town; it can refer to ethnic, cultural, political, social, sexual, or religious'Otherness', inside or outside one's own community. In any case, however,'Otherness' is a subjective phenomenon depending (...) on personal views and ascriptions, an issue of'imagination' and experience rather than'reality'. There is neither one single model of alterity nor is'Otherness' a stable phenomenon, but it changes over time and according to the cultural context. All this calls for methodological reflection and needs thorough investigation.00The methodological introduction and the 18 contributions of this volume demonstrate the great diversity of the theme and its different manifestations and perspectives. They tackle the problem from distinct angles and disciplines (history, art history, archaeology, literary history, and philology) in a wide chronological and thematic frame, using different methodological approaches, dealing with different areas (from Northern and Southern Europe to Byzantium and India), perspectives (including law, social order, the past, a sea), and diverse kinds of sources. They examine all kinds of'Otherness' mentioned above, highlight demarcation and rejection, aversion or acceptance, assimilation and integration, thus relativizing a strict dichotomy between'the Self' and'the Other' or between inside and outside. This volume is so far the most comprehensive attempt to tackle the huge problem of'Otherness' in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial (...) in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism. (shrink)

When Jennifer Wallace travelled round Greece as a student, hiking through olive groves to hunt out the stones of old temples and lost cities, she became fascinated by archaeology. It was magical. It was absurd. Give an archaeologist a few rocks and, like a master storyteller, he could bring another world to life. Give him a vague hunch about the past, and he was prepared to spend hours raking through the soil in search of proof. From the plain of (...) Troy to the Titanic, and from Britain's Stonehenge to Ground Zero in New York, Digging the Dirt explores the excavation sites that have exerted the strongest pull on the public imagination. Some sites, in which bones are indistinguishable from dust, have driven archaeologists to despair. Other sites haunt poets with memories of loss and romance. All reveal the relevance of archaeology to our deepest cultural anxieties. Passionate and intelligent, Digging the Dirt engages with the work of philosophers and writers who have been stirred by the life below the ground, while never losing sight of the pressing demands of archaeologists today. In a world of postmodern spin, Wallace calls for a renewed sense of the poetics of depth and shows how ex. (shrink)

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Buddhist archaeology in Republican China given at the British Academy's 2008 Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Culture. This texxt explains that Chinese archaeologists have transformed the notion of the nation and its artistic history with a series of dramatic discoveries during the Republican Period. It evaluates the impact of archaeological copies painted by Zhang Daqian and Wang Ziyun and explores how they rediscovered and popularised the (...) class='Hi'>history of early figure painting and pottery for a Republican audience. (shrink)

This paper argues identity documents (ID) prefigure wearables as artefacts connected with archives. As participants with human practices, they constitute an apparatus that engenders sensibilities about the proper way to participate in society, through the use of socio-technical systems. The use of these artefacts is necessary to make individuals legible to the state. Refusing them renders us insensible. Through a media archaeology of the history and use of IDs through modern Europe, an understanding emerges of the agential properties (...) of artefacts and their essential role in establishing a social imaginary of the state. (shrink)

This companion volume to Archaeology as Long-term History focuses on the symbolism of artefacts. It seeks at once to refine current theory and method relating to interpretation and show, with examples, how to conduct this sort of archaeological work. Some contributors work with the material culture of modern times or the historic period, areas in which the symbolism of mute artefacts has traditionally been thought most accessible. However, the book also contains a good number of applications in prehistory (...) to demonstrate the feasibility of symbolic interpretation where good contextual data survive from the distant past. In relation to wider debates within the social sciences, the volume is characterised by a concern to place abstract symbolic codes within their historical context and within the contexts of social actions. In this respect, it develops further some of the ideas presented in Dr Hodder's Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, an earlier volume in this series. (shrink)

This chapter aims to provide an outline of the archaeological remains reflecting the Ottoman presence on the Middle Nile, with preliminary interpretation and suggestions for areas in which future research could most profitably concentrate. The Nubian frontier region of the Ottoman Empire is one of its least-known areas. It raises numerous questions relating to both Sudanese and Ottoman history, as well as the nature of relations between the Ottomans and the Funj, in which the Ottoman garrisons on the Middle (...) Nile must have played an intermediary role. While Sai is traditionally thought of as marking the southernmost extremity of Ottoman rule, the evidence of some of the sites above suggests that Ottoman rule extended further south, towards Hannek. (shrink)

Forensic archaeology, the application of archaeological methods in a criminal framework, has undergone a rapid process of acceptance and development. From the initial occasional involvement of archaeologists in the search for and recovery of murder victims in the late 1970s, to the general acceptance of archaeological methods, such as shallow level geophysics, this chapter provides a brief history of forensic archaeology in the United Kingdom and beyond. It outlines the ways in which an archaeologist’s understanding of formation (...) processes and skills in the interpretation of human behaviour from physical alterations to the landscape can be of benefit to different stages and types of investigation. Discussing the way in which the archaeologist can usefully contribute to the investigation of a crime, the chapter looks at the methods which have been successfully applied in a number of high-profile cases and the considerations which the forensic archaeologist must make which are not an issue for ‘traditional’ archaeology. In a discipline which has reached a critical point in its development with the acknowledgement that archaeological skills should regularly form an integral part of crime scene investigation and an increase in professional training, the authors explain how forensic archaeology is now moving to increased standardization and attempts at quality assurance. (shrink)

Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into ‘old media’ have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, debates surrounding media archaeology as a method seem to be taking it (...) forward not only as a subdiscipline of (media) history, but increasingly into what will be introduced as materialist media diagrammatics. This article maps some recent media archaeological waves in German media theory. The text addresses Wolfgang Ernst’s mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts on how to rethink media archaeology as a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and as a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seems to not only replicate Kittler’s huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but develop that in novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst’s provocative take that hopes to distinguish itself as a Berlin brand of media theory in its hardware materiality and time-critical focus resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies. (shrink)

This paper explores the interplay between cinema and archaeology, focusing on how films interpret and represent historical and theological narratives. Initially, it reviews the evolution of film as a medium that not only entertains but also serves as a conduit for historical education, emphasizing the creation of new cinematic forms that enhance the depiction of archaeological findings. This study then assesses the accuracy of historical representations in film, analyzing the production processes to determine their fidelity to archaeological evidence. Specifically, (...) it examines two historical films, "The Building of the Army" and "The Last Emperor", evaluating how they reconstruct historical events and convey the philosophical ideas of the screenwriters. The analysis reveals that these films achieve a high degree of historical accuracy, with scene layouts and locations corroborating archaeological records with approximately 90% accuracy. Furthermore, the films significantly enhance viewers' historical understanding, increasing it from 67% to 91%, as evidenced by their engagement and the perceived authenticity of the recreations. This paper argues that the fusion of cinematic and archaeological methodologies not only fosters interdisciplinary integration but also deepens the audience's engagement with historical and theological themes. By enhancing the viewer’s appreciation for history through accurately depicted and philosophically rich narratives, films contribute to both educational outcomes and the broader discourse on the intersection of film, archaeology, and theology. (shrink)

Since archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore (...) some new directions in archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics. (shrink)