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Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives
Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium provides an account of the changing world of archaeological theory and a challenge to more traditional narratives of archaeological thought. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with other current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. Bringing together different strands of global archaeological theory and placing them in dialogue, the book explores the similarities and differences between different contemporary trends in theory while also highlighting potential strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.
Written in a way to maximise its accessibility, in direct contrast to many of the sources on which it draws, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium is an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field.
Written in a way to maximise its accessibility, in direct contrast to many of the sources on which it draws, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium is an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field.
238 pages, ebook
Published June 26, 2017
8 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Oliver J.T. Harris
5 bookshttps://leicester.academia.edu/Oliver...
https://le.ac.uk/people/oliver-harris
"I started in archaeology with an undergraduate degree at Sheffield, followed by an MA and PhD at Cardiff under the diligent supervision of Alasdair Whittle. Since then I have worked in commercial archaeology, held post-docs at Cambridge and Newcastle, and, since 2011, been teaching at Leicester. My research interests are pretty varied, ranging across most time periods, but I especially love archaeological theory and the British Neolithic. Currently I am writing a book about how archaeology contributes to thinking differently about contemporary issues, and co-directing fieldwork in a multi-period landscape in Ardnamurchan, Western Scotland."
https://le.ac.uk/people/oliver-harris
"I started in archaeology with an undergraduate degree at Sheffield, followed by an MA and PhD at Cardiff under the diligent supervision of Alasdair Whittle. Since then I have worked in commercial archaeology, held post-docs at Cambridge and Newcastle, and, since 2011, been teaching at Leicester. My research interests are pretty varied, ranging across most time periods, but I especially love archaeological theory and the British Neolithic. Currently I am writing a book about how archaeology contributes to thinking differently about contemporary issues, and co-directing fieldwork in a multi-period landscape in Ardnamurchan, Western Scotland."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 22, 2019
This is the best introduction to archaeological theory I've read, and I've tried a number of books on the history and theory of archaeology as background research for a writing project on which I'm working.
There were very clear, accessible explanations of the culture history, processual, and various post-processual approaches. They use many particular examples, which are helpful, and have a very accessible, conversational tone. It's a great book, and I took copious notes for two different writing projects on which I'm working.
"Culture history emphasises the when, where and what of different human 'cultures', placing great importance on description, typology and the transformation and spread of material culture through space and time. Processual archaeology, modeled after the natural sciences, asks why and how human culture changed through time, often looking to the environment for explanations. Postprocessual archaeology rejects the idea that archaeology is only a science, and instead embraces questions concerning multiple meanings, symbolism and identity."
For culture historians, material things were indicators of the kinds of thoughts people had and what it was to belong to a certain group -- not by environmental or material concerns (18) [Good Lord, have these people ever actually made anything? I can't do 70s macrame b/c I don't have the yarn/patterns for it now]. Culture history also wasn't good at explaining how/why innovation happened, or what about the people that rejected various norms.
Processual -- explain versus merely
I'm not a scholar, or a person of importance at all, but I do read widely, and so sometimes I'm amazed at the way in which ideas that are pretty common/standard/mainstream to one group of people are completely new and incomprehensible to another. To take one example, there's an extensive discussion of the way in which "in some cultures" personhood is not limited to human beings. This notion is taken to be completely new and strange and weird -- and at no point do they point out the obvious example in our culture, which is that corporations are taken to be persons, with tremendous implications for the well being of all of us.
Processualists wanted to explain and not merely describe (19)
To take another example, in the discussion of the "new materialisms," which take seriously the ways in which matter is active in shaping our decisions and practices, they give the example of Jane Bennett's interpretation of a 2003 electrical blackout as caused by the properties of materials, company policies, people’s actions and a particular wildfire” rather than human error and mechanical failure (142). Well, duh. Richard Feynman pointed out years ago that the Challenger explosion was caused by the material properties of the O Ring as well as by engineering practices and cultures.
Interesting discussions of whether there were individuals in the past or whether people thought of themselves as bundles of relationships (um, probably both, just like now?). Interesting reference to different conceptions of personhood that existed until recently in terms of expectations of privacy, eating from shared plates, lack of "personal spaces" in homes, etc. (61).
Marilyn Strathern and the ways in which gifts of bags in Melanesia construct relationships. Tilley's argument that you can better understand landscapes by visiting them in person (97).
Or again, an idea presented as radical: “What if domestication is seen as much about the lives of plants and animals as about people’s control of them" Perhaps Michael Pollan was influenced by these deeply theoretical thoughts when he wrote _The Botany of Desire_, where he returns often to the ways in which plants do (tulips, apples) or do not (oak trees, which have resisted domestication despite heavy human use/processing of acorns) respond to human desires. Or writings about wolves, which point out that the decision to ally with people 30K years ago has been hugely helpful to the genome: there are billions of dogs in the world today and only about 160,000 wolves. Their decision to ally with us -- and the genetic predispositions to lowered levels of anxiety/aggression that permitted it -- which may have been due to the agency/decision of only one or a few wolves -- was critical. (I read something recently about an osteoarchaeological analysis of pre-Columbian dog bones that showed that those had been domesticated from European wolves rather than North American genes, thus predating Indian arrival; those gene lines died out and were replaced by dogs of European/Asian descent after conquest).
The notion of "enchantment" helped me appreciate my kids' fascination with watching _other_ people play video games.
The notion of Entanglement seems a fancy way to say something my dad told me when I was 16: "Once you have a car, you don't own the car, it owns you." _The Unmade Bed_ expresses the same concept of the "house beast" that requires care and feeding.
I was disappointed that the discussion of biosemiotics and Charles Sanders Pierce did not refer to _How Forests Think_, which strikes me as the most obvious example of this kind of approach.
Other random notes:
p. 2 -- theory as not just "the order we put facts in" but as something that shapes the questions we ask in the first place. Gives the example of whether a particular stone is an artifact or not. In Europe, head archaeologist would likely say it was if it was worked by humans. In Native American context, a stone could be an artifact, regardless of whether it had been shaped by humans. So theory is "how we organise our interpretations; how we recognise and define data; the different preconceptions, ideas and beliefs we bring into dialogue with one another."
There were very clear, accessible explanations of the culture history, processual, and various post-processual approaches. They use many particular examples, which are helpful, and have a very accessible, conversational tone. It's a great book, and I took copious notes for two different writing projects on which I'm working.
"Culture history emphasises the when, where and what of different human 'cultures', placing great importance on description, typology and the transformation and spread of material culture through space and time. Processual archaeology, modeled after the natural sciences, asks why and how human culture changed through time, often looking to the environment for explanations. Postprocessual archaeology rejects the idea that archaeology is only a science, and instead embraces questions concerning multiple meanings, symbolism and identity."
For culture historians, material things were indicators of the kinds of thoughts people had and what it was to belong to a certain group -- not by environmental or material concerns (18) [Good Lord, have these people ever actually made anything? I can't do 70s macrame b/c I don't have the yarn/patterns for it now]. Culture history also wasn't good at explaining how/why innovation happened, or what about the people that rejected various norms.
Processual -- explain versus merely
I'm not a scholar, or a person of importance at all, but I do read widely, and so sometimes I'm amazed at the way in which ideas that are pretty common/standard/mainstream to one group of people are completely new and incomprehensible to another. To take one example, there's an extensive discussion of the way in which "in some cultures" personhood is not limited to human beings. This notion is taken to be completely new and strange and weird -- and at no point do they point out the obvious example in our culture, which is that corporations are taken to be persons, with tremendous implications for the well being of all of us.
Processualists wanted to explain and not merely describe (19)
To take another example, in the discussion of the "new materialisms," which take seriously the ways in which matter is active in shaping our decisions and practices, they give the example of Jane Bennett's interpretation of a 2003 electrical blackout as caused by the properties of materials, company policies, people’s actions and a particular wildfire” rather than human error and mechanical failure (142). Well, duh. Richard Feynman pointed out years ago that the Challenger explosion was caused by the material properties of the O Ring as well as by engineering practices and cultures.
Interesting discussions of whether there were individuals in the past or whether people thought of themselves as bundles of relationships (um, probably both, just like now?). Interesting reference to different conceptions of personhood that existed until recently in terms of expectations of privacy, eating from shared plates, lack of "personal spaces" in homes, etc. (61).
Marilyn Strathern and the ways in which gifts of bags in Melanesia construct relationships. Tilley's argument that you can better understand landscapes by visiting them in person (97).
Or again, an idea presented as radical: “What if domestication is seen as much about the lives of plants and animals as about people’s control of them" Perhaps Michael Pollan was influenced by these deeply theoretical thoughts when he wrote _The Botany of Desire_, where he returns often to the ways in which plants do (tulips, apples) or do not (oak trees, which have resisted domestication despite heavy human use/processing of acorns) respond to human desires. Or writings about wolves, which point out that the decision to ally with people 30K years ago has been hugely helpful to the genome: there are billions of dogs in the world today and only about 160,000 wolves. Their decision to ally with us -- and the genetic predispositions to lowered levels of anxiety/aggression that permitted it -- which may have been due to the agency/decision of only one or a few wolves -- was critical. (I read something recently about an osteoarchaeological analysis of pre-Columbian dog bones that showed that those had been domesticated from European wolves rather than North American genes, thus predating Indian arrival; those gene lines died out and were replaced by dogs of European/Asian descent after conquest).
The notion of "enchantment" helped me appreciate my kids' fascination with watching _other_ people play video games.
The notion of Entanglement seems a fancy way to say something my dad told me when I was 16: "Once you have a car, you don't own the car, it owns you." _The Unmade Bed_ expresses the same concept of the "house beast" that requires care and feeding.
I was disappointed that the discussion of biosemiotics and Charles Sanders Pierce did not refer to _How Forests Think_, which strikes me as the most obvious example of this kind of approach.
Other random notes:
p. 2 -- theory as not just "the order we put facts in" but as something that shapes the questions we ask in the first place. Gives the example of whether a particular stone is an artifact or not. In Europe, head archaeologist would likely say it was if it was worked by humans. In Native American context, a stone could be an artifact, regardless of whether it had been shaped by humans. So theory is "how we organise our interpretations; how we recognise and define data; the different preconceptions, ideas and beliefs we bring into dialogue with one another."
March 27, 2020
It was interesting and educational. I quite liked the structure and language - but the best part was undoubtedly the illustrations. I mean... can you ever go wrong with a duo consisting of a skeleton and a trowel? I think not.
April 11, 2022
lol this was just one of my text books
March 4, 2024
very interesting!! good basis for archaeological theory, very digestible, with focus on eradicating unhelpful binaries 'dualisms' in archaeology
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews