Agency in ArchaeologyAgency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US. |
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action activities actors agency theory agent-centered agents aggrandizers American Antiquity analysis Anthropology archaeological record Archaeology artifacts behavior bifacial Bourdieu Brumfiel burial Cahokia Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press ceramic common complex Conkey construction context costume created Darwinian Dobres dominant elite evidence evolution evolutionary ecology example explanations feminist Flannery Freidel gender Gero Giddens grave Hodder household human hunter-gatherer identity Ideology individual interaction Joyce Kiskore knowledge labor lithic Marcus Maschner material culture Maya means Mesoamerica Mill Branch Mississippian models Monte Alban monumental mortuary Mound Neolithic Oaxaca one’s Palaeolithic particular past Pauketat perspective political pottery practice theory Prehistory production red ocher relations relationship representation resistance retouch ritual sacred San Jose Mogote Sassaman Shackel soapstone society Solutrean specific Stallings Culture strategies structure structure and agency symbolic Tattershall theoretical Tilley tion Tisza traditional Valley Valley of Oaxaca variability variation volume women