This volume provides a forum for debate between varied approaches to the past. The authors, drawn from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, represent many different strands of archaeology. They address the philosophical issues involved in interpretation and a desire among archaeologists to come to terms with their own subjective approaches to the material they study. The book also recognizes how past researchers have also imposed their own value systems on the evidence which they presented.

Archaeologists do not discover the past but take the fragmentary remains which they recover and make something of them. Archaeology is a process of detection and supposition; this is what makes it so fascinating. However, the interpretations of archaeologists differ and change over time. They depend upon the amount of evidence available, the ideas and preconceptions of the archaeologist and their interests and aims.
Michael Shanks's enlivening work is a guide to the discipline of classical archaeology and its objects. It assesses archaeology as a means of reconstructing ancient Greek...

This study presents a challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a methodological framework. It facilitates a new way of investigating landscape and cityscape, and notions of physicality, encounter, site and context. The book is the result of a long-term collaboration between a renowned archaeological theorist and a leading theatre artist.

This study presents a challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a methodological framework. It facilitates a new way of investigating landscape and cityscape, and notions of physicality, encounter, site and context. The book is the result of a long-term collaboration between a renowned archaeological theorist and a leading theatre artist.

Archaeological theory and method have recently become the subject of vigorous debate centred on the growing realization that archaeological theory is social theory and as such can be looked at by means of a wide variety of sociological frameworks, such as structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and critical theory. In this analysis, Shanks and Tilley argue against the functionalism and positivism which result from an inadequate assimilation of social theory into the day-to-day practice of archaeology. Aimed at an advanced undergraduate audience, the book presents a challenge to the...