In Lectures 1 and 2 we have briefl y touched upon the question of mistakes that have been made in archaeology historically—but we have considered these only in the context of specifi c issues at hand, such as the treatment of dissenters who were eventually shown to have been right. Here we will consider more carefully the generics of this problem: are there defi nable patterns in the epistemolo...

In this chapter we will review the use of x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning in the field of archaeology. The story will be told in roughly chronological order, starting with the first reported use of a CT scanner in the field of archaeology and then look at some some possibilities for the future. Since the introduction of the x-ray CT scanner in the 1970’s the quality of the images has st...

In the last decades a number of archaeologists have stressed the politically laden nature of creating archaeological knowledge. If this is the case, then in the modern “globalized” Europe any attempt to resurrect the ghost of Marx in any field of scholarship may appear at a first sight unnecessary if not offensive or harmful. Yet, almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the time ...

Chen et al. (Reports, 16 January 2015, p. 248) argued that early Tibetan agriculturalists pushed the limits of farming up to 4000 meters above sea level. We contend that this argument is incompatible with the growing requirements of barley. It is necessary to clearly define past crop niches to create better models for the complex history of the occupation of the plateau.

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The 13(th) century BC witnessed the zenith of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean civilizations which declined at the end of the Bronze Age, ∼3200 years ago. Weakening of this ancient flourishing Mediterranean world shifted the political and economic centres of gravity away from the Levant towards Classical Greece and Rome, and led, in the long term, to the emergence of the modern western civi...

Important recent developments in brain and cognitive sciences offer new avenues for productive cooperation between archaeology and neuroscience. Archaeologists can now learn more about the biological and neural substrates of the human cognitive abilities and use that knowledge to better define and identify their archaeologically visible traces and possible signatures. In addition, important que...

Hovey Lake and Ries-Hasting are late prehistoric Caborn-Welborn phase archaeological sites located in southwestern Indiana, along the Ohio River. Hovey Lake is a large village, and RiesHasting is a small hamlet. Both have been investigated with surface survey and small-scale excavations by researchers from Indiana University and other institutions. To understand Caborn-Welborn tool use and prod...

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This study proposes an archaeology as a means of exploring the practices by which digitally-encoded resources are generated, circulated, and received. The discussion grapples with the ambiguous relationship between digitizations and their exemplars in the well-known database, Early English Books Online (EEBO), and suggests ways in which digitizations might be analyzed as witnesses of current pe...