Academic Articles & Research Papers

Photography and archaeology

Through photographs we preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. But what are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a ...

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past turns what is usually seen as a method for investigating the distant past onto the present. In doing so, it reveals fresh ways of looking both at ourselves and modern society as well as the discipline ...

Postprocessual Archaeology

Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice

The text is organized around the key questions that archaeologists ask about the past and details the practical and theoretical ways in which answers to those questions are sought. The seventh edition has been thoroughly revised and updated...

The Archaeology of Animals

Ever since the discovery of fossil remains of extinct animals associated with flint implements, bones and other animal remains have been providing invaluable information to the archaeologist. In the last 20 years many archaeologists and zoo...

The Archaeology of Rank

Social archaeology is concerned with how one might use the archaeological record of the present to elucidate how social interactions were ordered in a past society. This requires a meaningful model of society, considerable archaeological da...

The Archaeology of Human Bones

The Archaeology of Human Bones provides an up to date account of the scientific analysis of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites. This completely revised edition reflects the latest developments in scientific techniques for stud...

The Craft of Archaeology

The idea of archaeology as craft challenges the separation of reasoning and execution that characterizes the field today. The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century established craftwork as an aesthetic of opposition. We es...

The Archaeology of the Caribbean

A comprehensive synthesis of Caribbean prehistory from the earliest settlement by humans more than 4000 years BC, to the time of European conquest of the islands. The Caribbean was the last large area in the Americas to be populated, and it...

The Archaeology of the Colonized

The first book to integrate fully the archaeological study of the landscape with the concerns of colonial and postcolonial history, theory and scholarship, The Archaeology of the Colonized focuses on the experience of the colonized in their...

Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology

the purpose of this meeting is to present new and current research which: shares an empirical methodology of observation and measurement; concerns interdisciplinary studies of art, archaeology, architecture, ancient technology, and conserva...

Models in Archaeology

This major study reflects the increasing significance of careful model formation and testing in those academic subjects that are struggling from intuitive and aesthetic obscurantism toward a more disciplined and integrated approach to their...

Archaeological theory an introduction

Contents: Preface: The contradictions of theory; common sense is not enough; The 'new archaeology'; Archaeology as a science; Testing, middle-range theory and ethnoarchaeology; Culture as a system; Looking at thoughts; Postprocessual and in...

Theory Building in Archaeology

Archaeology is a brand!: the meaning of archaeology in contemporary popular culture

What impact is there on the field to recognize that archaeology is a regular feature in daily life and popular culture? Based upon the study of England, Germany, Sweden and the USA, Cornelius Holtorf examines the commonalities and peculiari...

Archaeologies of Complexity

An up-to-date and critical analysis of how archaeologists study past societies, Archaeologies of Complexity addresses the nature of contemporary archaeology and the study of social change, and debates the transition from perceived simple, e...

Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy

This book is the only text devoted entirely to archaeological stratigraphy, a subject of fundamental importance to most studies in archaeology. The first edition appeared in 1979 as a result of the invention, by the author, of the Harris Ma...

Amazonian Archaeology

Amazonian archaeology has made major advances in recent decades, particularly in understanding coupled human environmental systems. Like other tropical forest regions, prehistoric social formations were long portrayed as small-scale, disper...

Emotion in Archaeology

Despite the establishment of significant traditions of emotion research in many disciplines, there has been little discussion of the state and potential of the archaeological study of emotion. This paper aims to review archaeological approa...

The archaeology of death and burial

The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we learn not only about prehistoric people's attitudes toward death and the afterlife but also about th...