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The Paradox of the Historical Archaeologies

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Between Artifacts and Texts

Part of the book series: Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

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Abstract

Archaeology is limitless. Archaeologists can study the first human beings in East Africa with the same interest as yesterday’s kitchen garbage in Tucson, Arizona. Yet archaeology is also full of limits Archaeology is not a coherent tradition covering the whole of human history, but rather a scientific field crossed by different traditions and separated by diffuse boundaries from other fields of scholarship.

A text that is nothing other than an artifact, an artifact that is nothing other than a text has remarkably little to say.

Josiah Ober, 1995:122

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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Andrén, A. (1998). The Paradox of the Historical Archaeologies. In: Between Artifacts and Texts. Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9409-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9409-0_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-9411-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-9409-0

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