Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice

Description

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. Cover 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 2 Repeating the unrepeatable experiment 3 Experimental archaeology at the crossroads: a contribution to interpretation or evidence of ‘xeroxing’? 4 ‘Proportional representation’: multiple voices in archaeological interpretation at Çatalhöyük 5 Integrating database design and use into recording methodologies 6 The tyranny of typologies: evidential reasoning in Romano-Egyptian domestic archaeology PART II Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies 7 The archaeological bazaar: scientific methods for sale? Or: ‘putting the “arch-” back into archaeometry’ 8 Radiocarbon dating and archaeology: history, progress and present status 9 Using evidence from natural sciences in archaeology 10 Working the digital: some thoughts from landscape archaeology 11 Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology PART III Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation 12 Uncertain on principle: combining lines of archaeological evidence to create chronologies 13 Lessons from modelling Neolithic farming practice: methods of elimination 14 Evidence, archaeology and law: an initial exploration 15 Law and archaeology: Modified Wigmorean Analysis 16 Traditional knowledge, archaeological evidence, and other ways of knowing PART IV Broader perspectives: material culture as object and evidence 17 Evidence of what? On the possibilities of archaeological interpretation 18 Meeting pasts halfway: a consideration of the ontology of material evidence in archaeology 19 Matter and facts: material culture and the history of science Index