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History as a family tree, history as an entangled bank: constructing images and interpretations of prehistory in the South Pacific

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

John Terrell
John Terrell*
Affiliation:
Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605-2496, USA
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Extract

Twenty years' debate in English and Americanist circles about the fundamental aims of archaeology, and the methods that are to achieve them, has mostly been conducted in a framework of named schools – ‘new’, ‘processual’, and now also ‘postprocessual’ and ‘contextual’ – and in terms of their philosophical good standing (or lack of it).

This paper addresses the fundamentals as they declare themselves in a different region, the Pacific, and sees that the heart of the matter lies more in the nature of history, the history of the Pacific itself, and the history of its study.

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Antiquity , Volume 62 , Issue 237 , December 1988 , pp. 642 - 657
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Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1988

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