Perspectives on the Past

"Perspectives on the Past" shows how knowledge of the past is contingent and is largely determined by the social and intellectual milieux in which those who study it have received their training. This work examines major components of the general paradigms that structure hunter-gatherer research in the Mediterranean area. In the original essays that comprise the volume, field archaeologists discuss their own biases and the effects these biases have on how they do their research. For example, one contributor describes his shift from the traditional, "essentially historical view of prehistory" to "the evolutionary paradigm now advocated by many archaeologists" and explains the modifications of both theory and method that this change has necessitated. Other topics range from biases in "cave bound" archaeology to "normal science" and preconceptions in Italian hunter-gatherer research, and from paradigms for interpreting chipped stone to those that structure the linkages between foraging, sedentism and adaptive vigour.