Some Detritus

Archaeology is grounded in the idea that the human past is discernible through its detritus; that the materiality of past human activity encodes culture and economy, including both deliberate strategies for existence and inadvertent consequences. Archaeologists generally embrace the possibility that this materiality both transcends and complements documentary and oral histories, potentially providing an independent truth against the limitations and ambiguities of these other narratives. However, while its concern with landscapes, sites, and objects is in many respects a mechanism for distinguishing the discipline from its cognates, its remove has never been an absolute, with archaeology seeing itself as much as a form of anthropology as of history.