Artifacts and Ideas : Essays in Archaeology

ISBN-13: 9781412806503 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 254 str.

Bruce G. Trigger

Opis

Prehistoric archaeologists cannot observe their human subjects nor can they directly access their subjects' ideas. Both must be inferred from the remnants of the material objects they made and used. In recent decades this incontrovertible fact has encouraged partisan approaches to the history and method of archaeology. An empirical discipline emphasizing data, classifi cation, and chronology has given way to a behaviorist approach that interprets fi nds as products of ecologically adaptive strategies, and to a postmodern alternative that relies on an idealist, cultural-relativist epistemology based on belief and cultural traditions. In Artifacts and Ideas, now in paperback, Bruce G. Trigger challenges all partisan versions of recent developments in archaeology, while remaining committed to understanding the past from a social science perspective.

Spis treści

1: Introduction: Understanding the Material Remains of the Past; 2: Engels on the Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man: An Anticipation of Contemporary Archaeological Theory; 3: Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian; 4: Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist; 5: Archaeology at the Crossroads: What’s New?; 6: Hyperrelativism, Responsibility, and the Social Sciences; 7: Archaeology and Epistemology: Dialoguing across the Darwinian Chasm; 8: The Real, the Perceived, and the Imagined; 9: Imagination and Scientific Curiosity; 10: The 1990s: North American Archaeology with a Human Face?

O autorze

Bruce Trigger