Research Catalog

Title

Archaeology : the conceptural challenge / Timothy Insoll.

Author

Insoll, Timothy.

Publication

London : Duckworth, 2007.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

144 p. : ill.; 22 cm.

Summary

"The central question which this book seeks to explore is - are we trying to reconstruct a past in our own image, chained solely to our own unacknowledged emotional, intellectual, and philosophical traditions? Should we in fact attempt to look anew at the fundamental concepts we often take for granted and, seeing them as constructs of the relatively recent past, begin to acknowledge our limitations and perhaps engage more profitably with archaeological evidence in various ways? Concepts considered include time, age and experience, literacy, text and the oral/aural, colour, emotion and the senses, the wild and nature, and the global and local. Wittgenstein's thought on the notion of family resemblance is taken as a starting point, yet the end result is not another nihilist offering based upon a post-modernist collapsed perspective, but rather a considered approach, which is ultimately positive in tone, owing a debt, if anything, to the philosophical outlooks of critical realism."--book jacket.

Series Statement

Duckworth debates in archaeology

Uniform Title

Duckworth debates in archaeology.

Subject

• Archaeology > Philosophy
• Interpretation (Philosophy)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-139) and index.

Contents

1. Introduction -- 2. Global and local -- 3. Time, age, and experience -- 4. Textual, oral, visual, and digital culture -- 5. Nature, animals, and the wild -- 6. Conclusions.

ISBN

• 0715634577
• 9780715634578

OCLC

141384880

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library