The Jackson Flat Reservoir Project

Polity Press, 1987

Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley. Published in the US by University of New Mexico Press 1988.

2019

Tracing the Relational: The Archaeology of Worlds, Spirits, and Temporalities, 2015

2021

Social archaeology emerged in the twentieth century, as social diversity within nation states became a concern in the modern world. As archaeologists began to shift their attention from description to explanations of cultural change, they came to appreciate the ways in which social dynamics structured the material remains of the past, as well as their contemporary interpretations of the archaeological record. Despite some early skepticism, archaeologists now regularly use inference and analogy to interpret social organization and social relations in extinct cultural systems, and recognize the social context of their work.

2021

An analysis of the theoretical tendancies of U.S. archaeology in the last forty years aims at demonstrating that archeology, as other disciplines, is closely related to broader intellectual movements or paradigms. Scientifïc ideas should be treated neither as independent of different social structures and historical processes, nor as epiphenomena of those structures and processes.... Analysis of social and cognitive factors cannot be restricted only to ideas within a particular scientifïc discipline, or to the social character of that discipline. The reconstruction must also reach beyond that discipline to ideas in both closely related fields and also to ideas in the wider social, political, and philosophical movements. In addition, it must also consider social factors in related sciences, and in the wider social and political developments 1-2).

2019

2011

Archaeologies, 2010

CONSENSUS AND THE FRINGE IN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY PREFACE: When, in 1971, Joseph Needham published his discussion of-Navigation‖ in volume 4, part 3 of Science and Civilisation in China, David Kelley and I were gratified that one of the leading scientific minds of the century had judged the evidence for pre-Columbian transpacific contacts to warrant serious consideration. No one else seemed to notice. In 1975, looking up the library catalog number for Science and Civilisation, Needham's birth date, 1900, caught my attention. I phoned Kelley, pointed out Needham was 75 years old, and suggested that since archaeologists seemed unaware of his research, Dave and I should try to organize a conference with him to bring that work into our field. We wanted Needham to come to Mexico to see the data firsthand and discuss finds and contexts with archaeologists engaged with those data. Needham was delighted, and said that Lu Gwei-Djen would accompany him. With support from Wenner-Gren, Ford Foundation, and Coca-Cola (then negotiating to win the People's Republic cola-drink franchise), our group spent two weeks in Mexico in 1977, visiting Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, El Tajín, and Palenque as well as Mexico City's Museo Nacional (Kehoe 1978). The funded participants were from the United States and England, with Mexican colleagues joining us as convenient; such a peripatetic conference meeting at a series of sites and museum collections was a novel innovation for Wenner-Gren. A good time was had by all, but none of participants who had dismissed pre-Columbian contacts changed his mind, and none of those fulfilled the understood obligation to submit a paper for the proposed conference volume. I believe none of them had a reasoned argument. *Manuscript (Must NOT Contain Any Author Information) Click here to view linked References Kehoe 2 I continue to see archaeologists rejecting well-derived, well-supported scientific interpretations, espousing instead hoary dogma or simplistic scientism. As David Quinn, discussing disputes over Columbus' rivals, said of the magisterial Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, The rejection of any pre-Columbian movement across the Atlantic apart from the Norse voyages leaves the ocean peculiarly empty for many centuries, but it is a justifiable reaction in an outstanding historian whose great merit is that he sees sharply in black-and-white terms and is therefore uniquely qualified to expound what is already known. He is perhaps too impatient to study the nuances of pre-Columbian enterprise (Quinn 1974:22-23).

Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration. anthropology | cultural evolution | economics | sociology | political science