Archaeology: the Key Concepts Is the Ideal Reference Guide for Students, Teachers and Anyone with an Interest in Archaeology
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ARCHAEOLOGY: THE KEY CONCEPTS This invaluable resource provides an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of key ideas in archaeology and their impact on archaeological thinking and method. Featuring over fifty detailed entries by international experts, the book offers definitions of key terms, explaining their origin and development. Entries also feature guides to further reading and extensive cross-referencing. Subjects covered include: ● Thinking about landscape ● Cultural evolution ● Social archaeology ● Gender archaeology ● Experimental archaeology ● Archaeology of cult and religion ● Concepts of time ● The Antiquity of Man ● Feminist archaeology ● Multiregional evolution Archaeology: The Key Concepts is the ideal reference guide for students, teachers and anyone with an interest in archaeology. Colin Renfrew is Emeritus Disney Professor of Archaeology and Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. Paul Bahn is a freelance writer, translator and broadcaster on archaeology. YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN THE FOLLOWING ROUTLEDGE STUDENT REFERENCE TITLES: Archaeology: The Basics Clive Gamble Ancient History: Key Themes and Approaches Neville Morley Who’s Who in Ancient Egypt Michael Rice Who’s Who in the Ancient Near East Gwendolyn Leick Who’s Who in the Greek World John Hazel Who’s Who in the Roman World John Hazel ARCHAEOLOGY The Key Concepts Edited by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn for selection and editorial matter; the contributors for individual entries. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN 0-203-49109-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-60160-2 (Adobe e-reader Format) ISBN 0-415-31757-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-31758-4 (pbk) CONTENTS List of Key Concepts vi Contributors viii Introduction x KEY CONCEPTS 1 Index 208 KEY CONCEPTS Agency The antiquity of man Archaeoastronomy Archaeogenetics Catastrophist archaeology The chaîne opératoire Characterisation and exchange theory Childe’s revolutions Cognitive archaeology Archaeology of cult and religion Cultural evolution ‘Dark Ages’ in archaeology/ systems collapse Darwinian archaeology Ideas in relative and absolute dating The descent of man Theorising diffusion and population movements Ecological archaeology Environmental archaeology Epistemology Ethnoarchaeology The evolution of social complexity and the state Key ideas in excavation Experimental archaeology Feminist archaeology Archaeological formation processes Gender archaeology Habitus Historical archaeology and text Holistic/contextual archaeology Indigenous archaeologies Innovation and invention—independent event or historical process? Thinking about landscape Material engagement and materialisation Materialism, Marxism and archaeology Mental modularity Multiregional evolution Non-linear processes and archaeology Notions of the person Organisation of societies, including chiefdoms Peer polity interaction Phenomenological archaeology Post-processual and interpretive archaeology Processual archaeology Public archaeology/museology/ conservation/heritage Simulation Site catchment analysis Social archaeology Theory of social practice Principles of stratigraphic succession Survey Symbolic and structuralist archaeology Systems thinking The Three Ages Concepts of time Uniformitarianism CONTRIBUTORS Leslie C.Aiello is at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK Paul Bahn is a freelance writer, translator and broadcaster on Archaeology, UK Geoff Bailey is at the Department of Archaeology, University of York, UK John C.Barrett is at the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, Sheffield University, UK Richard Blanton is at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Martin Carver is at the Department of Archaeology, University of York, UK John F.Cherry is at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan, USA Elizabeth DeMarrais is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Kenneth L.Feder is at the Department of Anthropology, Central Connecticut State University, USA Jonathan Friedman is at the Department of Anthropology, Lund University, Sweden Peter Gathercole is an Emeritus Fellow, Darwin College, Cambridge, UK Guy Gibbon is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, USA Chris Gosden is at the Pitt Rivers Museum, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK Catherine Hills is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Ian Hodder is at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Stanford University, USA Linda Hurcombe is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter, UK Timothy Insoll is at the School of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester, UK Matthew Johnson is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter, UK Martin Jones is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Kristian Kristiansen is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Gotëburg, Sweden Vincent M.LaMotta is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, USA Lynn Meskell is at the Department of Anthropology, University of New York, USA Steven Mithen is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, UK Sarah Milledge Nelson is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, USA Paul B.Pettitt is at the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, Sheffield University, UK Colin Renfrew is at the McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge, UK John Robb is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Michael Rowlands is at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK Clive Ruggles is at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, UK Jeremy Sabloff is at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, USA Michael B.Schiffer is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, USA Nathan Schlanger is at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, France Michael Shanks is at the Department of Classics, Stanford University, USA Stephen Shennan is at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK Marie Louise Stig Sørensen is at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Julie K.Stein is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, USA Joseph A.Tainter is at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Albuquerque, USA Julian Thomas is at the School of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester, UK Christopher Tilley is at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK Sander E.van der Leeuw is at the Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, USA Milford H.Wolpoff is at the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, USA Ezra Zubrow is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Buffalo, USA INTRODUCTION Archaeological theory is itself something of a new concept. Until the 1960s it was widely assumed that archaeology was essentially a practical undertaking. The digger had of course to be experienced in the relevant craft skills, and to have a sense of problem. Sir Mortimer Wheeler set out the position well, with typically military metaphor, in his Archaeology from the Earth (Wheeler 1954), when he distinguished between the strategy and the tactics of a good archaeological field campaign. It is no coincidence that he was an admirer of the field techniques of that much earlier military field worker General Pitt- Rivers. During the twentieth century archaeological science gradually developed, not least with the invention of radiocarbon dating in 1949, and original thinkers such as Gordon Childe did indeed address the principles of archaeological reasoning in thoughtful works like Piecing Together the Past (Childe 1956). However, it was not until the 1960s that archaeologists became deeply concerned with the underlying logic of their discipline, with its epistemology (i.e. theory of knowledge) and with its rather curious status—according to some as a would-be science, yet undoubtedly directed towards the history and prehistory of humankind, and hence also to be situated among the humanities. Earlier thinkers such as Collingwood (1946) and the first historians of archaeology (Daniel 1950, 1962) had meditated upon these things. But it was not until the 1960s that questions of archaeological theory became acute, and that archaeology, to use David Clarke’s famous phrase (Clarke 1973), underwent ‘the loss of innocence’. It was around that time that archaeological theory can be said to have become an explicit sub-discipline.