Artifacts and Ideas: Essays in Archaeology

Abstract

Prehistoric archaeologists cannot observe their human subjects or directly access their ideas; both must be inferred from what survives of the material objects they made and used. In recent decades this has led to a partisan approach to the history and method of archaeology. From an empirical discipline stressing data, classification, and chronology, it has given way to a behaviorist approach interpreting finds as products of ecologically adaptive strategies and then to an idealist, cultural-relativist epistemology stressing belief and cultural traditions. Most recently, Darwinian or evolutionary archaeology has established itself as a materialist substitute. In Artifacts and Ideas, Bruce G. Trigger challenges these partisan versions of recent developments in archaeology while remaining committed to understanding the past from a social science perspective.

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