Paper short abstract:

Over the last 30 years, interpretive archaeology has developed in leaps and bounds – sometimes leaping and bounding past and beyond the realities of the archaeological record. This paper will review new avenues for engaging in groundbreaking, theory-led archaeological research that embraces rather than ignores the fragmentation and incompleteness of the archaeological record.

Paper long abstract:

TAG has been remarkably successful in promoting a theorised, nuanced approach to interpreting the past. Archaeological landscapes—social, technological, architectural and geographical—are now written about as subtle mixes of human life, human choices and agents, both inert and alive. However, criticisms of the interpretive approach to archaeology continue to be articulated, particularly with regard to the use (or lack thereof) of large amounts of archaeological data grounding our elegant theories. The archaeological record is, by its nature incomplete and fragmented. Yet, over the last 100 years, archaeologists working with powerful scientific and interpretive tools have managed to flesh out the landscape of the past. However, the information they collected goes by many different names—legacy datasets, grey literature, Historic and Environmental records—and is often divorced from self-consciously "theoretical" interpretation.

This paper will present a middle-way: a pragmatic approach to data collection and data utilisation that is explicitly interpretive. We will discuss the advantages and problems of using the vast amounts of legacy data collected in various databases, publications and museums. Furthermore, we will suggest that, in synthesising large quantities of fragmented data from different sources we can draw a more nuanced picture of the past than in writing biographies of single, exceptional objects or sites. In introducing the session People-Things-Places, this paper will try to define new avenues for engaging in groundbreaking, theory-led archaeological research that embraces rather than ignores the fragmentation and incompleteness of the archaeological record and the variety of archaeological specialisms which have developed in recent decades.