New book! Archaeology as History
This is the last weekly post for a while - moving to fortnightly installments until I have more information, results, and progress to report. It's also not directly relevant to the KINnect project, but self-promotion is a grand academic tradition, so...
I have a new book out this fortnight (released in the UK and US last week, in Australia next week, not sure for the rest of the world.
Archaeology as History: Telling Stories from a Fragmented Past is my attempt to explain how archaeological interpretation works across a number of domains. It's a short volume (about 100 pages) and aimed at a non-specialist audience (first year archaeology students, interested non-academics, historians, ancient historians, other scholars who interact with archaeological data... maybe geneticists?) and sits within a series on historiography. The publisher talked me into preparing a video abstract to describe the aims and structure (please clap: I hate being filmed).
There are a lot of small goals for this volume, but the big one is to help my colleagues in other fields get there heads around what archaeologists actually do when confronted with the chaotic mess of the archaeological record. All too often, I've found other fields assume archaeological objects, sites, etc. are just raw data we've collected, but in this volume I do my best to explain how archaeologists make the archaeological record through methodical processes of investigation and interpretation.
If you're interested in teaching with this volume, I'm happy to send you a sample chapter - just drop me an email!