In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record

By Lewis Roberts Binford

Book Overview

Many consider Lewis Binford to be the single most influential figure in archaeology in the last half-century. His contributions to the "New Archaeology" changed the course of the field as he argued... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500050422
• ISBN13: 9780500050422
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Entertaining

An entertaining, even relaxed and conversational, read. It recovers some the intellectual history of archaeological theory, albeit not in the most unbiased manner. The most attractive quality of the book remains its ease of reading, it reads just like a fascinating lecture, which, in fact, it was. The book can easily be read over the course of a weekend, or an especially long plane ride. What one will get from the volume depends greatly on what one brings to the volume. The best portion stands as the superlative and unsurpassed ethnoarchaeological work in Northern Alaska, the worst as a very weak discussion of sociocultural evolution. Still, warts and all, it's a valuable read to anyone vaguely interested in archaeology or in the evolutionary development of human culture, which may or may not be an adaptive system relative to its environment.