Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:44:51.803Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Interactions of theory, methodology and practice

Retrospect and commentary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

John Bintliff
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The development of regional projects over the last generation has been heavily influenced by changing theoretical agendas. Landscape archaeology had been a growing force since the 1920s, but after the highpoint of the ‘palaeoeconomy movement’ in the 1970s its ecological wing has been unjustly neglected over this period. The New Archaeology of the 60s and 70s injected a fascination with geographical, statistical and sampling approaches that is unlikely to disappear as an essential aspect for the analysis of settlement history. Post-processualism in the 80s and 90s has encouraged renewed interest in what has been termed the ‘culturalist’ perspective – the ways in which people's perceptions of landscape influence their behaviour across it. But it always needs repeating that this derivative movement of post-modernism is only one of several sets of approaches that has emerged since New Archaeology, so I prefer the term post-structuralist for all these ideas of the 80s and 90s: other packages that I have found exciting to read about and try to apply in archaeology include world systems/core periphery theory, the approaches of the French Annales school, and the rapidly-expanding chaos and complexity theory. My current reading of the theoretical scene sees a strong movement away from the rather tedious battle of the ‘isms’ and towards a new eclecticism – this is very much in tune with the current general intellectual trend in the West towards neo-pragmatism. Not to be forgotten finally is the greater involvement of academic regional projects with public archaeology and heritage management, areas of professional archaeology that have probably become the dominant ones over this same time-period. Indeed some regional projects, including my own in Boeotia, Central Greece, see the creation of a regional heritage centre as the logical outcome of what began as an academic research project.

Type
Special Section
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1996 , pp. 246 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barker, G., 1995a: A Mediterranean valley. Landscape archaeology and Annales history in the Biferno Valley, London.Google Scholar
Barker, G., 1995b: Regionality in Italian prehistory, or why did the Etruscan city-states develop only in Etruria? Past, 19 April, 11–12.Google Scholar
Barker, G., and Lloyd, J. (eds), 1991: Roman landscapes. Archaeological survey in the Mediterranean region, London, British School at Rome.Google Scholar
Bintliff, J.L., 1991: The contribution of an Annaliste/structural history approach to archaeology, in Bintliff, J.L. (ed.), The Annales School and archaeology, Leicester, 1–33.Google Scholar
Bintliff, J.L., 1992: Appearance and reality. Understanding the buried landscape through new techniques in field survey, in Bernardi, M. (ed.), Archeologia del paesaggio, Florence, 89–137.Google Scholar
Bintliff, J.L., 1993: Why Indiana Jones is smarter than the post-processualists, Norwegian archaeological review 26, 91–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bintliff, J.L., 1995: “Whither archaeology?” revisited, in Kuna, M., and Venclova, N. (eds), Whither archaeology? Papers in honour of Evzen Neustupny, Institute of Archaeology, Prague, 24–35.Google Scholar
Bintliff, J.L., 1996: Regional survey, demography, and the rise of complex societies in the ancient Aegean. Core-periphery, neo-Malthusian, and other interpretive models, Journal of field archaeology 23.Google Scholar
Carreté, J.-M., Keay, S.J., and Millett, M. 1995: A Roman provincial capital and its hinterland. The survey of the territory of Tarragona, Spain, Michigan, (Journal of Roman archaeology supplement 15).Google Scholar
Cavanagh, W., Jones, R., and Sarris, A. 1996: The phosphate and geophysical surveys, in Cavanagh, W., Crouwel, J., Catling, R.W.V. and Shipley, G. (eds), Continuity and change in a Greek rural landscape. The Laconia survey volume II, London, (Annual of the British School at Athens, Supplementary volume 27), 235–261.Google Scholar
Chapman, R., 1990: Emerging complexity. The later prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia and the West Mediterranean, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flannery, K.V., (ed.), 1976: The Early Mesoamerican village, New York.Google Scholar
Heidinga, H.A., 1987: Medieval settlement and economy North of the Lower Rhine, Assen/Maastricht.Google Scholar
Knapp, A.B., (ed.), 1992: Archaeology, Annales, and ethnohistory, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, H., 1939: Die Siedlungsräume Ostkretas, Geographische Zeitschrift 45, 212–228.Google Scholar
Waterbolk, H.T., 1977: Walled enclosures of the Iron Age in the North of the Netherlands, Palaeohistoria 19, 98–172.Google Scholar
Whitelaw, T., in press: Reconstructing a classical landscape with figures: some interpretive explorations in northwest Keos, in Francovich, R. and Patterson, H. (eds), Methodological issues in Mediterranean landscape archaeology. Artefact studies, Oxford.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, T.J., 1994: The structure and dynamics of dry-farming states in Upper Mesopotamia, Current anthropology 35, 483–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar