A History of Archaeological Thought

Citation

Trigger, B. G. (2006). A History of Archaeological Thought (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The second edition has a preface, ten chapters, a bibliographical essay and a reference list, in a book of roughly 730 pages. The publisher presents it as an update of the original (1989) work, the first to examine the history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in worldwide perspective. Its method is to place each approach within a broad social and intellectual setting and to ask how far archaeological trends reflected the interests of archaeologists themselves. The chapter lengths vary a great deal, from about 20 pages for the last chapter to over 100 for the fullest.

Preface to the Second Edition

The preface explains why a new edition was needed. Interest in the history of archaeology has risen sharply since 1989, and where processual archaeologists once dismissed the subject as irrelevant, a growing number now accept that context shapes interpretation.

Chapter 1: Studying the History of Archaeology

The opening chapter sets out the problem that drives the book. Since the 1950s, archaeology has moved from an apparently complacent culture-historical orthodoxy to theoretical innovation and disagreement, and some archaeologists doubt that their work can be objective. The author proposes the history of archaeological thought as a way to assess subjectivity, objectivity and the accumulation of knowledge.

Chapter 2: Classical and Other Text-Based Archaeologies

This chapter asks what conditions give rise to archaeology at all and what kinds of archaeology develop first. It limits itself to the use of material culture to study the past, and starts from archaeologies tied to written records.

Chapter 3: Antiquarianism without Texts

The chapter follows early archaeology in northern and central Europe, where written records are late or absent. It explains how classical and prehistoric archaeology grew from a common antiquarianism, and why historical archaeologists neglected most of human history.

Chapter 4: The Beginnings of Prehistoric Archaeology

The chapter describes two movements: the Scandinavian invention of a method for dating finds, including relative dating associated with Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, and the later French and English work on the Palaeolithic, which extended the time depth of human history and fed the debate that followed Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Chapter 5: Evolutionary Archaeology

This chapter treats the alignment of prehistoric archaeology and ethnology under evolutionary thinking from the 1860s, in Europe through unilinear cultural evolution and in the United States through anthropology's broader scope.

Chapter 6: Culture-Historical Archaeology

The longest chapter, at about 100 pages, treats the culture-historical archaeology that arose in the late nineteenth century in response to awareness of geographical variation. It links this approach to nationalism, racism and the importance given to ethnicity, and traces earlier interest in ethnicity.

Chapter 7: Early Functional-Processual Archaeology

The chapter follows archaeologists who found culture-historical approaches inadequate for explaining how prehistoric cultures worked and changed. It distinguishes functional approaches, which examine how parts of a system fit together, from processual approaches, which ask why systems change irreversibly.

Chapter 8: Processualism and Postprocessualism

The chapter covers the American processual attack on culture-historical archaeology from the early 1960s and the later postprocessual alternative proposed mainly in Britain. It presents these as successive fashions in anthropology that offer useful but partial answers, and its first section is on neoevolutionism.

Chapter 9: Pragmatic Synthesis

This chapter considers how archaeological interpretation continues to echo contemporary concerns, while arguing that a growing body of data offers stronger resistance to misinterpretation. It also treats the diversification of theory since 1990.

Chapter 10: The Relevance of Archaeology

The concluding chapter reviews theoretical challenges, including relativism, and discusses the roles archaeology can play within the social sciences and in modern society.

Bibliographical Essay and References

The book ends with a bibliographical essay and a long reference list, which together make up roughly the last 130 pages.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4

• Relativism and objectivity: the central question of Chapter 1, whether archaeological interpretation can be independent of the interpreter's social setting.
• Text-based and non-textual archaeologies: the distinction behind Chapters 2 and 3.
• Antiquarianism: the earlier, undifferentiated interest in the past from which both classical and prehistoric archaeology grew.
• Relative dating: the technique for establishing a chronology without written records, introduced in Chapter 4.

Chapters 5–8

• Unilinear cultural evolution: the belief behind the alignment of archaeology and ethnology in Chapter 5.
• Culture-historical archaeology: an approach organised around archaeological cultures and ethnicity (Chapter 6).
• Functional and processual approaches: studying systems from the inside (Chapter 7).
• Processual and postprocessual archaeology: the opposed positions of Chapter 8.

Chapters 9–10

• Pragmatic synthesis: the book's name for the current diversity of approaches.
• Challenge of relativism: a theme returned to in the last chapter.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A broad framing question. Chapter 1 gives the whole book an organising problem, how far social context shapes archaeological interpretation, so the later chapters read as a sustained argument, not a catalogue.
• Worldwide scope. The publisher describes the first edition as the first history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in world-wide perspective, and the chapters range from Classical and text-based archaeologies to Scandinavia, Britain, France and the United States.
• Even-handed. The publisher calls the treatment stimulating and even-handed, and a review of the first edition by Colin Renfrew in Nature judged it a work all thinking archaeologists would want on their shelves.
• Updated for debates since 1989. The second edition's preface discusses the growth of the history of archaeology as a subdiscipline, and Chapter 9 covers theoretical diversification since 1990.

Limitations

• Length and density. At roughly 730 pages, with chapters of 40 to 100 pages, the book is a major commitment and assumes the reader is willing to follow a long argument.
• A Western emphasis in the later chapters. The author states that the social trends he discusses relate "in the West at least" to the fortunes of the middle classes, and Chapter 1 frames the post-1950 theoretical shifts as occurring especially in North America and western Europe.
• A single interpretive thesis. The book explains archaeology's trends through the interplay of subjective influences and accumulating data. Readers may want to test that thesis against other histories.
• Dated at the edges. The edition appeared in 2006, so theoretical developments after that year are not covered.

Where It Fits in the Course

Trigger is the historical-intellectual survey in this archaeology course. It is not an introduction to digging, dating or analysis, so it is better read after a first course. Bahn's Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction and Renfrew, Bahn and DeMarrais's Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice explain how archaeologists work, and Durrani and Fagan's In the Beginning is a long-established introductory textbook on methods and approaches from a global perspective.

For theory, Johnson's Archaeological Theory: An Introduction follows the main schools of thought from the New Archaeology to post-processual and later approaches, and is a shorter and more current companion for Chapters 7–9. Hodder and Hutson's Reading the Past is a theoretical work on interpreting material remains as meaningful, and takes up the debates Trigger describes as the processual and postprocessual positions.

How to Use This Book

It suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have had an introductory archaeology course and want to understand why the discipline's approaches developed. No technical prerequisites are stated, but familiarity with basic archaeological terms and periods helps.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapter 1 for the argument, then Chapters 6–9 if the aim is to understand present-day theory.
• Historical background: Chapters 2–5 for the origins of archaeology and its early connections with evolutionary thought.
• Conclusion: Chapter 10 for the book's view of archaeology's challenges and roles.
• Reference: the bibliographical essay is useful for finding further reading on each period.

Read alongside a shorter theory text, and note for each school the question it answered, the social setting Trigger links it to, and what later critics rejected.