What is archaeology and why does it attract so many enthusiasts across the barriers of class and education? In Experiencing the Past, Michael Shanks presents an exploration of the character of archaeology and reclaims the sentiment and feeling which are so often lost in purely academic approaches. With the use of illustrations, he depicts the archaeologist as a skilled interpreter of cultural remains. The author debates heritage and cultural identity and considers the key concerns of archaeology in the 1990s, weighing up controversial topics such as scientific objectivity and the validity of...

This work is a guide to the discipline of classical archaeology and its objects. One of the main functions of his study is to assess archaeology as a means of reconstructing ancient Greek society using the latest aproaches of social archaeology. In addition, the text outlines the history of the discipline and discusses why classical Greece had such an impact on European civilization and identity.

In Re-Constructing Archaeology, Shanks and Tilley aim to challenge the disciplinary practices of both traditional and the new archaeology and to present a radical alternative - a critically self-consious archaeology aware of itself as practice in the present, and equally a social archaeology that appreciates artefacts not merely as objects of analysis but as part of a social world of past and present that is charged with meaning. It aims to provide a fresh and invigorating contribution to the emergence of a philosophically and politically informed archaeology.

Widely known as an innovative figure in contemporary archaeology, Michael Shanks has written a challenging contribution to recent debates on the emergence of the Greek city states in the first millennium BC. He interprets the art and archaeological remains of Korinth to elicit connections between new urban environments, foreign trade, warfare, and the ideology of male sovereignty. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, which draws on an anthropologically informed archaeology, ancient history, art history, material culture studies and structural approaches to the classics, his book raises...

Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking--about what is left of the past, about the temporality of what remains, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the practices that archaeologists follow to uncover them, is the essence of the archaeological imagination. In this extended essay, renowned archaeological theorist Michael Shanks offers his colleagues and students a window on this imaginative world of past and...

Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking--about what is left of the past, about the temporality of what remains, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the practices that archaeologists follow to uncover them, is the essence of the archaeological imagination. In this extended essay, renowned archaeological theorist Michael Shanks offers his colleagues and students a window on this imaginative world of past and...