scholarly journals ".. .wiser than he himself at the time knew" - The Histories of Archaeology and the Whig Problem

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Anders Gustafsson

The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in the history of archaeology, an interest which, unfortunately, has not always included theoretical and methodological issues. In this paper, therefore, the author focuses upon one vital problem in the historiography of archaeology the problem of anachronistic reasoning. One example put forward concerns how one textbook in the history of archaeology treats the question of how the existence of thunderbolts was explained by an early scholar, the Dane Ole Worm. As a general conclusion it is claimed that different forms of the history of archaeology need different foundations with respect to the question of how to assess the past from the vantage point of the present.

Author(s):  
Douglas R. Givens

The history of any discipline involves the explanation of its past and how the past has influenced its development through time. Its ‘objects are events which have finished happening, and conditions no longer in existence. Only when they are no longer perceptible do they become objects of historical thought’ (Collingwood 1946: 233). Writing the history of archaeology involves the analysis of past events and of the contributions that individual archaeologists have made to its development through time. The roles of individuals in archaeology are best seen in biographical accounts of their labours and in the contributions to the discipline that they have made. In general, historians of archaeological science, who are interested in explaining the roles of the individuals in its development, must focus their attention on three important items. First, the most important item is evidence that something has occurred. If individuals’ contributions have no basis in truth and cannot be justified, then they are of no value to the historian of archaeology. Second, the historical picture of individuals’ lives and work must have defined boundaries in space and time. These provide the area of focus for study and description of individuals’ activities. Third, the efforts of individual practitioners must be couched within the intellectual climate in which they are made. Individuals’ contributions are not made in an intellectual vacuum, apart from collegial or institutional influences. Biography, as a tool for writing the history of archaeology, must embrace all of these requisites. For those engaged in explaining archaeology’s past, historical evidence of event and period provide the foundation upon which we can trace our science’s development. Studying and evaluating past work can be helpful in separating useful and outdated methodologies of the field and laboratory. Moreover, the study of the history of anthropology may give the anthropologist needed ‘distance from their own theoretical and methodological preoccupations’ (Darnell 1974: 2). What we see anthropology today as being is certainly not what the ultimate science of humankind will be in the future.


Author(s):  
Pablo Toro-Blanco

The encounter between the history of education and the emerging field of historical interest in emotions is a phenomenon of recent and fast development. Researchers must bear some specific dilemmas and challenges implied in attention to affective ties regarding the past of education, being the first to define critical concepts for the delimitation of the topic. Furthermore, this new path requires that theoretical and methodological issues be addressed. Among these issues are the difference in the development of educational historiographical research in countries or cultural regions. There are challenges for education historians interested in emotions and their efforts to overcome methodological chasms, as for example, the disparities between discourse and experience. Given the fact that the research on the history of emotions applied to education is still in its first steps, it is possible to outline some potential advances in the confluence of the historic-educational and the emotional fields.


1996 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 605
Author(s):  
Tim Murray ◽  
William H. Stiebing

2001 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wout Arentzen

Within the past few years not a little has been written about the relationship between Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert (see, for example, Traill, Calder 1986; Traill 1995; Robinson 1994; 1995; Allen 1999). The central thesis of these studies is that Schliemann mistreated Calvert in every possible way, not only financially, but also intellectually. For instance, ‘Schliemann's egotism and false claims have robbed Calvert of his proper place in the history of archaeology’ (Traill 1984).Such statements give the impression that Calvert was a better scholar than Schliemann and that there is still a good deal in his work, as there is in that of Schliemann, which can help us. From the above interpretation by Traill one could almost believe that it is a distinct loss that Calvert has become nothing but a footnote in the works of Schliemann and that it is high time for a revaluation. Robinson is the most ardent exponent of this attempted revision. She is of the view that the world was duped by Schliemann, and that everything would have been done much better by Calvert. If truth be spoken, Schliemann has robbed us of the knowledge that Calvert would have given.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie Love ◽  
Claire Dembry ◽  
Andrew Hardie ◽  
Vaclav Brezina ◽  
Tony McEnery

Abstract This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the UK, recorded in the years 2012–2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this new corpus, we describe the main stages of the Spoken BNC2014’s creation: design, data and metadata collection, transcription, XML encoding, and annotation. In doing so we aim to (i) encourage users of the corpus to approach the data with sensitivity to the many methodological issues we identified and attempted to overcome while compiling the Spoken BNC2014, and (ii) inform (future) compilers of spoken corpora of the innovations we implemented to attempt to make the construction of corpora representing spontaneous speech in informal contexts more tractable, both logistically and practically, than in the past.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 539
Author(s):  
Staša Babić ◽  
Zorica Kuzmanović

The idea of universal linear course of time is an important element of the basic framework of reference of the archaeological research into the past. However, even the fundamental theoretical premises of the discipline, such as the conceptualization of time, may be changed and differently interpreted, depending upon the social and cultural context of research. The history of archaeology in Serbia testifies that, contrary to the generally implicit linear course of time, the regional past is seen as a series of repetitions, stagnations and detours, implying the assumption of a different, a-historical course of time in the Balkans. This narrative is especially noticeable in the works dealing with the role of the Classical Greek-Roman civilization in the Balkan past. The ambivalence of the leading narratives in Serbian archaeology towards the presumed sources of the European culture corresponds to the images of the Balkans identified by M. Todorova as the discourse of Balkanism.


Antiquity ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (245) ◽  
pp. 778-787 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce G. Trigger

The English reviewer for Nature (Renfrew 1990) declared that Bruce Trigger's new history of archaeology will become the standard account of our subject's history, and the French reviewer for ANTIQUITY also has a warm view (this issue, page 960). Having looked to the past, what does Trigger see for the future of archaeology in North America, as the reaction comes to the view of archaeology as, primarily, science that has dominated these last decades?


Author(s):  
Y. M. Kariyev ◽  
◽  
D. B. Samratova ◽  

As we know, the material objects of the past are the most important sources of historical science. Also, we are aware that material monuments were not immediately included in the orbit of interests of history. Archaeology is recognized as a field of history. It has come a long and difficult way from general evidence of the past and art history to an academic discipline with its base of sources, methodology and other inherent attributes of a full-fledged scientific unit. There are many works on the history of archaeology, archaeological thought and archaeological research of different scale and nature, where the material sources are historical, or this issue is ignored and the concept of «archaeological source» is openly emphasized. It reflects separative trends in archaeology. In the realities of the current day there is an urgent need to revise the prevailing views and perspectives in the understanding of material evidence as a historical source. It is more than obvious that it should begin with the historiography of the problem. In the present article the history of perception and use of material evidence as a source on the past of mankind is considered. For the completeness of the general presentation in the article a detailed historiographical excursus is carried out, which covers the period from antiquity to the present and considers facts of intentional, indirect, and contextual use of material remains in the reconstruction of the past.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Dean Kostantaras

<p>This article examines representations of Byzantium in Modern Greek historical<br />thought, from the first translation (1767) of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae to<br />the publication of Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’ complete Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικού Ἔθνους<br />[History of the Greek nation (1860-1874)]. In doing so, it reassesses conventions, especially<br />prevalent in English-language works, regarding the range and complexity of endeavors in<br />this vein. Developments in European thought are used throughout as a vantage point, as<br />they represent a contingency of great importance for any assessment of Greek attitudes<br />toward the past. However, these influences did not always point in one direction; a factor<br />which, in tandem with local generational and ideological divisions, helps to explain the<br />diverse perspectives on Byzantium in Greek works from the period under review.</p>


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