P R E FA C E

When in early 1997 we decided to start writing the book about ethnoarchaeol-
ogy that we had talked about for years, we both naïvely thought that this could
be achieved by little more than putting our course notes together and filling in
some blanks. Our experience has been very different. We never intended to
write a text for beginning students but rather a stocktaking of a subdiscipline
of anthropology some 45 years after its inception, and to do this we have had
to think through our understandings of the topic, and to expand them by much
further reading. In this we were greatly assisted by the Bibliography of ethno-
archaeology and related studies (David et al. 1999) that Nicholas David (hence-
forth, except in references, ND) had been compiling and developing for several
years. However, the magnitude of the task and the inevitability of our failure
to do a thorough job is apparent in its accumulation, as of the day this is
written, of 883 items classified primarily as ethnoarchaeology. We wished not
to produce a catalogue, a collation, or an encyclopedia, but rather, via a critical
reading of case studies, to guide the reader towards an informed understanding
of theoretical, methodological, and substantive issues in ethnoarchaeology at
the turn of the millennium. Decisions had to be made.
The first was to adopt a restrictive definition of ethnoarchaeology, one that
requires the involvement of ethnographic fieldwork in elucidation of relation-
ships between material culture and culture as a whole. The second was to seek
out and use a very broad range of published materials while refraining from
detailed consideration of theses and dissertations, since these cannot easily be
consulted by many readers. Third, we have attempted to discuss the work of as
wide a range of authors as possible, although this has meant relegating some
important contributions to “Further readings” or even omitting them entirely.
We are conscious that, despite our best efforts, we have not done full justice to
work published in languages other than English. Fourth, and admittedly in
partial contradiction to the third, we agreed not to be shy about discussing our
own research, which has been conducted over a period longer than either of us
cares to contemplate.
And lastly about ourselves: we are both practicing ethnoarchaeologists with
extensive archaeological and ethnoarchaeological experience primarily but not
quite exclusively in the Old World, Carol Kramer (henceforth CK) in Southwest
Asia and India, ND in Europe and Africa. Both of us have worked at various
scales from the village to the region or to cities and their hinterlands. In terms

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 xxii Preface

of theory, CK is more inclined to “naturalist” and ND to “antinaturalist”

approaches, but neither is an ideologue. Thus our perspective embraces both
the processualism of the New Arch(a)eology and (most) postprocessualism of
the 1980s and 1990s. We are, as regards theory, committed to a policy, if not of
synthesis, at least of cohabitation.

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