100 Books Like Tracing Archaeology's Past

In its original edition, Bruce Trigger's book was the first ever to examine the history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in worldwide perspective.

Now, in this new edition, he both updates the original work and introduces new archaeological perspectives and concerns. At once stimulating and even-handed, it places the development of archaeological thought and theory throughout within a broad social and intellectual framework.

The successive but interacting trends apparent in archaeological thought are defined and the author seeks to determine the extent to which these trends were a reflection of the personal and collective interests of archaeologists as these relate - in the West at least - to the fluctuating fortunes of the middle classes.

While subjective influences have been powerful, Professor Trigger argues that the gradual accumulation of archaeological data has exercised a growing constraint on interpretation.

In turn, this has increased the objectivity of… show more.

Out of the feminist movement in American archaeology came this thick testament to the number and importance of women archaeologists and ethnographers who worked in the American Southwest before the U.S. Civil Rights Act made discrimination illegal. As a woman who had been ignored and even brutally put down by men archaeologists, reading of these hardworking, persistent, and some of them brilliant women thrilled me. Over and above the revelations of great researchers who often collaborated with First Nations people, the book is a treasure of stories about pioneer conditions in the Southwest, discoveries of famous ruins, and early anthropologists breaking through into native communities.  

Read this book along with the other handsomely published book, Hidden Scholars, and we have a pair that opens up the idealized Southwest and the ideology of White Supremacy behind it. Schemes and sufferings, deals and derring-do abounded in the territory that now boasts our U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Laguna Pueblo citizen Deb Haaland. Don Fowler and his wife Catherine Fowler are themselves archaeologists/ethnographers in the Southwest borderland, my longtime good friends and colleagues, with an eye for arresting details and a story-telling style that make this book a gripping account of how the Romantic Ruins and fascinating Pueblos were created out in America's desert.

Palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete seized the imaginations of scores of modernist writers, artists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers as wealthy English archaeologist Arthur Evans had its ruins disinterred and reconstructed with reinforced concrete, a novel building material in the early twentieth century. Evans' imaginative palace complex is today mobbed by tourists (I recommend going off-season in January, as I did) who revere the Aegean as the birthplace of Civilization. Gere ties it in to Modernist projects rejecting Victorian overstuffed ornamentations in favor of supposed ancient purity. Her fascinating documentation of culture leaders from Freud to Le Corbusier buying into Evans' myth of an idealized past embeds archaeology in arts and humanities fashions that still confuse speculation with history.

The first (and still most influential) history of archaeology in the Americas.

Willey and Sabloff wrote at a time of great ferment in the theory and practice of archaeology where old certainties were beginning to give way to radically new ways of creating and understanding archaeological knowledge. This book was particularly influential in helping archaeologists find their ways through a new intellectual landscape.

This is a bit more of a technical archaeology book dealing with the ethnographic and archaeological Pueblo communities of the American Southwest. For those interested in secret societies, it deals extensively with the nature of Pueblo ritual organizations (sodalities) and deftly provides critiques of views that these were egalitarian communities and ritual organizations. In fact, he argues that some were among the most non-egalitarian societies in North America, beginning with the Chacoan culture about 1,000 years ago. Puebloan ritual organizations are prime examples of secret societies.

I love the way Malafouris delves into deeply philosophical questions about the boundaries of the mind. Working from the perspective of cognitive archeology, he broadly examines what makes us human in our engagement with objects and each other. Why does it help to understand the mind this way? Whenever we want to learn more about how we do the things we do, theories like Malafouris’ material engagement theory can help us to organize familiar tasks and situations in a way that makes the underlying cognitive processes transparent. If you want to improve your performance in any area, conceptual frameworks like this one (and the one in my book) can bring tacit processes into focus. 

Since hunter-gatherer times, our relationship with animals has been full of contradictions. We relied on them not only as a source of food and traction but also worshipped and deified creatures through the millennia.

This feisty and, at times, refreshingly irreverent book pulls together everything we know about the cultural history of human-animal relationships, from pampered pets to sacrificial offerings.

Peeling back the stratigraphic layers of archaeology’s history, self-described “weirdshitologist,” archaeologist Jeb Card, reveals the discipline’s very “spooky” foundations in this riveting book. These foundations included a belief in a mythic time that preceded our modern world which has left behind its spoor in the form of eerie and phantasmagorical archaeological sites imbued with evil spirits, elves, pixies, djinn, elementals, and other paranormal entities. Card discusses haunted landscapes, bloodthirsty Druids, cursed mummies, and Lovecraftian “Old Ones” in his romp through all that is weird, strange, and, indeed, spooky in archaeology. Finally, Card shows that archaeology as presented on cable TV, YouTube videos, blogs, and social media is still haunted by the specter of Victorian Age beliefs about humanity’s presumably spooky past.

This book is one of my absolute favorites for expressing how archaeology really works on a macro level. As a student, I learned that archaeology has often been co-opted to serve political and nationalist purposes.

But the hows and whys of that process weren’t clear until I started doing archaeology. I love how Nadia Abu El Haj makes extremely clear why archaeology as a science lends itself so well to solidifying claims about identity, history, and land. I really admire how Abu El Haj captures what happens between the direct, tangible encounter of a person with an artifact and the abstract, national level of narrative construction and policymaking.