Material evidence : learning from archaeological practice / edited by Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Chapman, Robert, 1949- editor.

Wylie, Alison, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Archaeology--Philosophy.

Archaeology.

Archaeology--Methodology.

Material culture.

Physical Description:

xx, 361 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Routledge, 2015.

Summary:

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence: Learning from archaeological practice 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. The contributor to Material Evidence identify 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Material evidence: learning from archaeological practice / Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman

Part I. Fieldwork and recording conventions

Repeating the unrepeatable experiment / Richard Bradley

Experimental archaeology at the cross roads: a contribution to interpretation or evidence of xeroxing / Martin Bell

Proportional representation: multiple voices in archaeological interpretation at çatalhöyük / Shahina Farid

Integrating database design and use into recording methodologies / Michael J. Rains

The tyranny of typologies: evidential reasoning in romano-egyptian domestic archaeology / Anna Lucille Boozer

Part II. Cross-field trade: archaeological applications of external expertise and technologies

The archaeological bazaar: scientific methods for sale? or: putting the "arch" back into archaeometry / A. M. Pollard and P. Bray

Radiocarbon dating and archaeology: history, progress and present status / Sturt W. Manning

Using evidence from natural sciences in archaeology / David Killick

Working the digital: some thoughts from landscape archaeology / Marcos Llobera

Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology / Sara Perry

Part III. Multiple working hypotheses, strategies of elimination, and triangulation

Uncertain on principle: combining lines of archaeological evidence to create chronologies / Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle

Lessons from modelling neolithic farming practice: methods of elimination / Amy Bogaard

Evidence, archaeology and law: an initial exploration / Roger M. Thomas

Law and archaeology: modified wigmorean analysis / Terence Anderson and William Twining

Traditional knowledge, archaeological evidence, and other ways of knowing / George Nicholas and Nola Markey

Part IV. Broader perspectives: material culture as object and evidence

Evidence of what? on the possibilities of archaeological interpretation / Gavin Lucas

Meeting pasts halfway: a consideration of the ontology of material evidence in archaeology / Andrew Meirion Jones

Matter and facts: material culture and the history of science / Simon Werrett.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780415837453

0415837456

9780415837460

0415837464

OCLC:

890178313