| Abstract: |
More than an entire archaeological generation has passed since “post-processual” critiques up-ended the world ofarchaeological theory, and we now travel through a rich and varied theoretical landscape that draws inspirationfrom scholarship from the natural sciences to the humanities. Our collective obsession with new methodologiesstill threatens to overwhelm our interpretive frameworks, as advances in science, geomatics, and AI offer evermore precise tools for data recovery and analysis. Against this backdrop, and with metrics looming ever largeras the primary criterion of intellectual success, it is perhaps not surprising how few archaeologists today read thesource literature from which we draw our dominant theoretical frameworks. Like their predecessors a generation ago, most archaeologists still engage in the mining-and-bridging strategy that Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt(1993: 3) described during the peak of the post-processual era: grab a current approach from the social sciencesor humanities and cobble it into archaeological shape, without fully understanding the source field from which itoriginated. Few archaeologists today cite Immanuel Wallerstein when they invoke some revisionist world-systems model, and still fewer mention Benedict Anderson when discussing variations on imagined communities. We are not unique among scholars in doing this, as such ideas become deeply embedded in our interpretive world. Yet understanding how this intellectual current shape-shifts as it wafts across the field of archaeology requires returningto its source. James Scott has been a more important contributor to these currents of the last several decades than I suspect most archaeologists recognize.
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