Andres Troncoso (Wednesday, October 11, 2000 2:49 AM) complains:
>>The exteme case is the last book of Matthew Johnson
"Archaeological Theory", where he write about marxist archaeology and give
some bibliographical references, but in never place there are some
references about Latinamerican social archaeology (the place where are a lot
of works about this topic, example, Venezuela, México, Cuba, etc.).<<
I am not sure that the word "extreme" is apposite here since the subtitle of
the book in question (187pp) is "... an Introduction" (and not "a survey").
Johnson's book contains very little about theory in a number of countries
both European and non-European. All of us could no doubt produce a list of a
favourite or significant author or paper or problem the author has not
discussed. I think that we all know from experience that it is easier to
criticise than to create and it would perhaps be more helpful to consider
what the text has to offer and not just picking on what was omitted for
various reasons. I think it totally unrealistic to expect that a book of
this size and nature, the work of a single author can even hope to provide a
magisterial and balanced survey of the entirity of archaeological theory in
the whole world, and I do not have the impression that this was what the
author set out to do. Surely "mulitivocality" would be ill-served by one
book which had pretensions to be the "Complete and authoritative vademecum
to archaeological theory worldwide"? (and who would buy it?)
One may reasonably suspect that the main reason why there is not an
extensive discussion of Latin American (Cuban, Venezuelan, Mexican etc.)
archaeological theory in Johnson's "Archaeological Theory: an Introduction"
is that it lies outside the scope of this particular book as conceptualised
by its author who has given us a personal introduction to the material he is
familiar with at first hand. I for one am grateful that he did not perceive
the need to attempt to summarise for example Polish theory in three
paragraphs on the basis of the material he has to hand. There are many other
works written by scholars from other countries to fill in the gaps around
the text and to balance the picture presented by Johnson. Helping each other
to find them is one of the possible functions of this list.
Paul Barford
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|