Material Evidence
Learning from Archaeological Practice
- 380 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Material Evidence
Learning from Archaeological Practice
About this book
How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence?
Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence.
Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past.
Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- 1 Material evidence: learning from archaeological practice
- PART I Fieldwork and recording conventions
- PART II Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies
- PART III Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation
- PART IV Broader perspectives: material culture as object and evidence
- Index