Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the PastIan Hodder There has been a profound shift in the direction of archaeological activity in the last fifteen years, a change reflected in this volume. While excavation remains a professional priority, the interpretation of archaeological evidence is now attracting increasing critical study. In part this is stemmed from the public demand for explanation of archaeological evidence, which moves beyond the more restricted academic debate among archaeologists. But it also follows from a desire among archaeologists to come to terms with their own subjective approaches to the material they study, and a recognition of how past researchers have also imposed their own value systems on the evidence which they presented. |
Contents
Figures | 26 |
some themes and questions | 30 |
some philosophical issues | 37 |
Past realities | 45 |
poststructuralism and beyond | 51 |
The origins of meaning 57 7 | 57 |
The research cone | 59 |
Cognitive and behavioural complexity in nonhuman primates | 68 |
Steel comb excavated at Gotts Court | 113 |
710 The BannekerDouglass Museum exhibit | 118 |
the rhetoric of heritage claims | 125 |
The nature of history | 141 |
the Annales school | 158 |
Hayden Whites metahistorical tropes | 166 |
The tropes applied to the south Scandinavian Neolithic | 167 |
An aryballos perfume jar produced in Korinth in the seventh century BC | 169 |
Alliance structure and kinship in primates | 71 |
Language and thought in evolutionary perspective 76 | 76 |
Hominid encephalisation quotients through time | 77 |
Genetic diversity and linguistic diversity | 79 |
The relationship between archaeology and evolutionary biology | 81 |
Interpretation in the Palaeolithic | 87 |
Interpretation writing and presenting the past | 95 |
Can an AfricanAmerican historical archaeology be an alternative voice? | 110 |