Regional Perspectives in Archaeology

Description

This book, inspired by the author’s work on the South Cadbury Environs Project, considers the extent to which regional narratives derived from archaeological survey are conditioned by techniques and sampling strategies. Its principal sources are reports of fieldwork in Africa, North and South America and Europe, as well as recent technical and theoretical publications. Recognising the hermeneutical process which informs every stage of the archaeologist’s work, the author attempts to trace through the transformation of data towards higher social and ideological accounts. A means for conceptualising archaeological space on a regional scale is constructed to optimise the efficacy of the choice and distribution of techniques and the subsequent analysis of data. To this end, aspects of several surveys are scrutinised. This culminates in a method for classifying surveys according to their distribution of resources, their spatial resolution and their chronological resolution.