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trekbicycles's review
3.0
Felt like the intellectual historian in me was yawning for something more! This was a good chronology and survey of archaeological theory, certainly. But interesting explanatory stories for these movements? That felt surface level.
samuelbeer's review against another edition
4.0
Well, I ended up reading it in less than a year. Barely. The breaks in reading were many.
I don't feel particularly qualified to write a review about it, as approximately the entirety of everything I know about the history of archaeological thought is what I learned in this book--I don't know how to evaluate its content in a way external to it itself. I would say that it seemed like Trigger tried to strike an interesting balance between summarizing 300ish years of different schools of thought in archaeology, including ongoing controversies, and putting forth his vision for an ideal theory of archaeology. In the last few chapters, in particular, he tries to find a middle way between hyper-relativists and hyper-positivists, and has pretty strong words for both extremes.
The last 20 pages really successfully recapitulate a lot of the rest of the content of the book. They were a nice way to finish reading it, as they left me feeling like I had a better grip of the broader themes that he was dealing with than I had had when lost in the very specific details.
My current interest in archaeology is stimulated by a desire to situate myself to do collaborative research with archaeologists in the future, or to incorporate archaeological methods/findings into my work in historical linguistics. There was no discussion of interdisciplinary work with linguists, which was a little bit disappointing to me, but also is not obviously an issue of theory, but rather of practice, so I can see it not having as much of a place in this book. Additionally, collaboration between linguists and archaeologists may not have been as prominent in 1989, when my edition of this book was published, as it is now.
I don't feel particularly qualified to write a review about it, as approximately the entirety of everything I know about the history of archaeological thought is what I learned in this book--I don't know how to evaluate its content in a way external to it itself. I would say that it seemed like Trigger tried to strike an interesting balance between summarizing 300ish years of different schools of thought in archaeology, including ongoing controversies, and putting forth his vision for an ideal theory of archaeology. In the last few chapters, in particular, he tries to find a middle way between hyper-relativists and hyper-positivists, and has pretty strong words for both extremes.
The last 20 pages really successfully recapitulate a lot of the rest of the content of the book. They were a nice way to finish reading it, as they left me feeling like I had a better grip of the broader themes that he was dealing with than I had had when lost in the very specific details.
My current interest in archaeology is stimulated by a desire to situate myself to do collaborative research with archaeologists in the future, or to incorporate archaeological methods/findings into my work in historical linguistics. There was no discussion of interdisciplinary work with linguists, which was a little bit disappointing to me, but also is not obviously an issue of theory, but rather of practice, so I can see it not having as much of a place in this book. Additionally, collaboration between linguists and archaeologists may not have been as prominent in 1989, when my edition of this book was published, as it is now.
latinandlattes's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Bruce Trigger did a fantastic job at undertaking the writing of a history of all archaeological thought. Trigger touches on all the important movements of thought in archaeological theory, including evolutionary archaeology, cultural-historical theory, processualism, and post-processualism (to name a few) and writes in a way that is neither pretentious nor complicated. It is easy to follow his argument through the chapters, even if they span up to one hundred pages.
This book is probably not a great start for those looking to read their first book about archaeology, since some of the chapters are quite long and there is a lot of technical theory in this book. But if you have some knowledge of archaeological techniques already, this book gives a great overview of all the schools of thought behind archaeological theory.
This book is probably not a great start for those looking to read their first book about archaeology, since some of the chapters are quite long and there is a lot of technical theory in this book. But if you have some knowledge of archaeological techniques already, this book gives a great overview of all the schools of thought behind archaeological theory.
jazin95's review against another edition
I got this book initially for my History of Archaeology class at uni.
akagingerk's review
2.0
I keep this book to cure insomnia. I have never been able to get through an entire chapter without falling asleep, regardless of where or when I'm reading it. It should be interesting! It's not poorly written! I have NO IDEA what my problem with it is.
fitzwilliam's review
2.0
The first chapter was very confusing, as was some of the later ones, but maybe that's just because I am not so good with the theoretical stuff...BUt I would recommend reading the first chapter last.
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