Archaeology After Interpretation: Returning Materials to Archaeological Theory [Paperback]

A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people’s understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.

This volume marks a significant departure from previous symbolic approaches in post-processual archaeology, bringing together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches to chart a new direction in material culture studies.

Benjamin Alberti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University and lectures in the post-graduate anthropology program at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. He has published on sex/gender, masculinitities, and anthropomorphism in both South American archaeology and Bronze Age Crete. He is the editor of a major collection of essays on ontologies in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2009) and Current Anthropology (2011). He has co-edited two volumes on South American archaeology, Latin American Archaeology (Routledge 1999) and Genéro y Etnicidad en la Arqueología Suramericana ( INCUAPA 2006), and has published research articles in World Archaeology, Intersecciones en Antropología, and in other books and journals. Currently he is researching anthropomorphism and notions of materiality in northwest Argentina.Andrew Meirion Jones is a Reader in archaeology at the University of Southampton and tel3J