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Footnotes to Plato? Palaeolithic archaeology and innocence lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Anthony Sinclair*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Liverpool, William Hartley Building, Brownlow Street, Liverpool L69 3BX, England

Extract

Trawling through old, dust-covered folders I found out that I first read ‘Archaeology: the loss of innocence’ as a 2nd-year undergraduate for an essay on whether the New Archaeology was as theoretically sophisticated as it claimed to be. My notes of the time emphasize the beginning and end of the article; suggesting that Clarke’s purpose was just to argue that

1 there had been a sea-change in the nature of archaeology leading to the development of a critically self-conscious entity in the New Archaeology; and

2 to discuss what a general theory of archaeology might look like.

Type
Special section: David Clarke's ‘Archaeology: the loss of innocence’ (1973) 25 years after
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1998

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