Thomas Julian. Archaeology and Modernity

Routledge, 2004. — 275 p. — ISBN: 0-415-27156-8.Archaeologists have long recognised that they study past worlds which may be quite unlike our own. But how are we to cope with the difference of the past if our own circumstances are unique within human history? What if archaeology itself depends on ways of thinking that are specific to the modern Western world?
This is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between archaeology and modern thought, and to demonstrate that, while we may believe our approaches to be based on value-free techniques and thinking, archaeology is still dominated by philosophical ideas that developed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Julian Thomas discusses the modern emphasis on method rather than ethics or meaning, our understanding of change in history and nature, the role of the nation-state in forming our views of the past, and contemporary notions of human individuality, the mind, and materiality.
He also addresses the modern preoccupation with depth, which enables archaeology to be used as a metaphor across other disciplines. Archaeology and Modernity concludes by calling for a reformed, ‘counter-modern’ archaeology, which refuses to separate material evidence from political, moral, rhetorical and aesthetic concerns, as well as meaning.
Julian Thomas is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester. He writes and teaches on the neolithic of Britain and Europe, and the philosophy of archaeology. His publications include Time, Culture and Identity (Routledge 1996) and Understanding the Neolithic (Routledge 1999).The emergence of modernity and the constitution of archaeology.
Archaeology and the tensions of modernity.
The tyranny of method.
History and nature.
Nation-states.
Humanism and ‘the individual’.
Depths and surfaces.
Mind, perception and knowledge.
Materialities.
Towards a counter-modern archaeology: Difference, ethics, dialogue, finitude.