Archaeological narratives and other ways of telling

Abstract

With a few exceptions, archaeologists have been far less concerned with the form of their texts or problems of authorship than have ethnographers. Typically, archaeologies are presented in the form of narratives understood as sequential stories. Approaches to narrative analysis drawn from literary theory, philosophy, and sociology and definitions of characters, events, and plots are examined, together with particular problems these may pose for the discipline of archaeology. It is suggested that neither literary analysis nor the tendency to write and evaluate archaeological and historical narratives in terms of explanatory value takes sufficient account of the often hybrid nature and aims of these texts and the contexts in which they were produced. This argument is illustrated with particular reference to stories of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Europe. It is argued that reconsidering archaeology's positioning across the 19th-century science-humanities divide suggests a broader approach to the idea of what constitutes a narrative which can offer fresh opportunities for useful reflexivity and experimentation in presentation. Further roles and possibilities of narrative and non-narrative ways of writing archaeologies are also considered. © 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.