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A review by samuelbeer
A History of Archaeological Thought by Trigger Bruce G., Bruce G. Trigger
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.