BACK FROM THE EDGE

 

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY FROM A WORLD PERSPECTIVE

 

Pedro Paulo A. Funari

 

INTRODUCTION

 

                               During the World Archaeological Congress 3 in New Delhi, India (4th-11th December, 1994), Martin Hall, Siân Jones and the author organized a theme on “Changing Perspectives on Historical Archaeology”, gathering papers on four main topics: exploring epistemological problems: questions of definition of the subject (organized by P.P.A. Funari); the plurality of material culture: race, ethnicity, tribe, class and gender (organized by S. Jones); archaeology an the representation of modern identities: national, colonial imperial (organized by Timothy Champion); feminist historical archaeology (organized by S. Spencer-Wood). Overall there were fifty papers from scholars all over the world, most of them now in this book as chapters dealing with a wide variety of historical periods, like ancient Palestine (Jones 1994), Roman Britain (Hingley 1994), early Medieval Ireland (Mytum 1994)  or contemporary Italian archaeology (Levi 1994), and comprising not only Europe and the United States but also Africa (e.g. Pikarayi 1994), Australia (e.g. Colley 1994), Asia (e.g. Mani 1994) and South America (e.g. Bárcena 1994). There emerged a clear divide between most United States scholars, concerned with European colonial societies from the period since the end of the fifteenth century, and Europeans and others who were ready to include in the historical archaeology label studies on Classical Athens (by an Australian, Zarmati 1994, and by an American, Small 1994), on Pre-Roman Iberian societies (by a Spaniard, Díaz-Andreu 1994) or on Pre-Modern India (Mani 1994). The first aim of this chapter is thus to discuss the epistemological implications of an international historical archaeology, a worldwide discipline whose features, purposes, and goals are very much subjected to debate.

 

You can read the entire text in:

Historical archaeology from a world perspective, in P.P.A Funari, M. Hall & S. Jones (eds), Historical Archaeology, Back from the edge, Londres, Routledge, 37-66, 1999.