This collection considers the relevance of the Annales 'school' for archaeology. The Annales movement regarded orthodox history as too much concerned with events, too narrowly political, too narrative in form and too isolated from neighbouring disciplines. Annalistes attempted to construct a 'total' history, dealing with a wide range of human activity, and combining divergent material, documentary, and theoretical approaches to the past. Annales-oriented research utilizes the techniques and tools of various ancillary fields, and integrates temporal, spatial, material and behavioural analyses. Such an approach is obviously attractive to archaeologists, for even though they deal with material data rather than social facts, they are just as much as historians interested in understanding social, economic and political factors such as power and dominance, conflict, exchange and other human activities. Three introductory essays consider the relationship between Annales methodology and current archaeological theory. Case studies draw upon methodological variations of the multifaceted Annales approach. The volume concludes with two overviews, one historical and the other archaeological.

The third edition of this classic introduction to archaeological theory and method has been fully updated to address the burgeoning of theoretical debate throughout the discipline. Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson argue that archaeologists must bring to bear a variety of perspectives in the complex and uncertain task of constructing meaning from the past. While remaining centred on the importance of hermeneutics, agency and history, the authors explore cutting-edge developments in areas such as post-structuralism, neo-evolutionary theory and whole new branches of theory such as phenomenology. With the addition of two completely new chapters, the third edition of Reading the Past presents an authoritative, state-of-the-art analysis of contemporary archaeological theory. Also including new material on feminist archaeology, historical approaches such as cultural history, and theories of discourse and signs, this book represents essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the past.

A tightly focused group of papers on the deconstruction and significance of the concept of time, with a historical background on the development of time perspectivism and a range of case studies and examples. After reading this you may never think about time in quite the same way.

Just over 20 years ago the publication of two books indicated the reemergence of Darwinian ideas on the public stage. E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, spelt out and developed the implications of ideas that had been quietly revolutionizing biology for some time. Most controversial of all, needless to say, was the suggestion that such ideas had implications for human behavior in general and social behavior in particular. Nowhere was the outcry greater than in the field of anthropology, for anthropologists saw themselves as the witnesses and defenders of human di versity and plasticity in the face of what they regarded as a biological determin ism supporting a right-wing racist and sexist political agenda. Indeed, how could a discipline inheriting the social and cultural determinisms of Boas, Whorf, and Durkheim do anything else? Life for those who ventured to chal lenge this orthodoxy was not always easy. In the mid-l990s such views are still widely held and these two strands of anthropology have tended to go their own way, happily not talking to one another. Nevertheless, in the intervening years Darwinian ideas have gradually begun to encroach on the cultural landscape in variety of ways, and topics that had not been linked together since the mid-19th century have once again come to be seen as connected. Modern genetics turns out to be of great sig nificance in understanding the history of humanity.

The concept of time is salient to all human affairs and can be understood in a variety of different ways. This pioneering collection is the first comprehensive survey of time and archaeology. It includes chapters from a broad, international range of contributors, which combine theoretical and empirical material. They illustrate and explore the diversity of archaeological approaches to time.

This collection of essays treats the fundamental issue of the correlation of archaeology and texts in recreating the ancient Mediterranean world. Contributions from Classical and Near Eastern archaeologists and historians address specific points of correlation, and their potential for future productive research in the Mediterranean. After an introduction to the issue of texts and archaeology, the essays treat concepts such as: site as text, artifactual contingency of meaning, correlating survey with documents, contextual independence of evidence, textual bases for archaeological approaches, and correlating faunal evidence with texts. This book will be of important use to archaeologists and historians of the Mediterranean, and scholars of archaeological research in historical archaeology in general.