Home » Material Evidence
Product Image

Material Evidence

€192.20
Quantity:
In stock with our UK publisher. 14-28 days
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days
14 days return policy Shipping & Delivery
AMS
analysis
archaeological
Archaeological Context
Archaeological Practice
archaeological reasoning
archaeology
Background Generalisations
Cal Ad
Cal BC
Category=JHM
Category=NHA
Category=NKA
Category=NKX
Chart Method
constructing archaeological claims
dating
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
evidential inference
experimental
interdisciplinary fieldwork
Material Evidence
microstratigraphy methods
outgoing
Outgoing Outgoing
Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing
Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing
Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing Outgoing
Post-excavation Analysis
Postexcavation Analysis
practice
radiocarbon
Radiocarbon Dating
Radiocarbon Revolution
record
scientific data interpretation
Soknopaiou Nesos
South Lodge Camp
Southwestern USA
St Ag
Trowel's Edge
Trowel’s Edge
typological analysis
Vice Versa
Wigmore's Chart Method
wigmorean
Wigmorean Analysis
Wigmorean Chart
Wigmore’s Chart Method

Product details

  • ISBN 9780415837453
  • Weight: 657g
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 17 Dec 2014
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
Secure checkout Fast Shipping Easy returns
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.
About
Bob Chapman is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, UK. His research focuses on archaeological theory, Mediterranean later prehistory, the development of human inequality and the means by which this can be studied with archaeological data. He has pursued these interests in fieldwork projects in southeast Spain and the Balearic Islands, as well as in books such as The Archaeology of Death (1981), Emerging Complexity (1990) and Archaeologies of Complexity (2003). In recent years his research has turned increasingly to the use of historical materialism in archaeological interpretation, especially in relation to inequality and human exploitation. Running through this research activity has been a strong concern for the nature of archaeological interpretation, working with the complementary evidence of how people lived (e.g. what they produced, exchanged and consumed, centred on settlement evidence) and how they were treated in death (e.g. their disposal, centred on burial evidence). Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Washington, and of Philosophy at Durham University. She is a philosopher of the social and historical sciences who works on questions about objectivity, evidence, and research ethics raised by archaeological practice and by feminist research in the social sciences. Her longstanding interest in evidential reasoning is represented by Thinking from Things (2002) and by contributions to Evidence, Inference and Enquiry (Dawid, Twining and Vasilaki, 2011), How Well do 'Facts' Travel? (Morgan, 2010), and Agnatology (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008). In recent work she focuses on the role of contextual values in science and on how research can be improved by internal diversity and by collaborations that extend beyond the research community. These interests are reflected in Value-free Science? (co-edited with Kincaid and Dupré, 2007) and Epistemic Diversity and Dissent (edited for Episteme 2006), as well as in essays on stewardship and feminist standpoint theory.