Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity - James Symonds
1. Finding Belief, Desire and Benevolence in Historical Archaeology
Historical Archaeologies of Cognition - Explorations into Faith, Hope and Charity - James Symonds
James Symonds [+]
University of Amsterdam
James Symonds is Professor of Historical Archaeology (North of the Alps) at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interests include the study of capitalism, colonialism, landscapes of Improvement and Diaspora, urban and industrial archaeology, and the archaeology of poverty. For the last 20 years he has concentrated on the historical archaeology of 18th and 19th century communities, with occasional forays into the 20th century. He is currently working on the archaeology of conflicts in 17th and 20th century Europe.
Jeff Oliver [+]
University of Aberdeen
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Jeff Oliver is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast: Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley (University of Arizona Press, 2010) and co-editor of Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History (BAR, 2010). His research focuses on colonial landscapes in western Canada. More recently he has become involved in a project on the historical archaeology of nineteenth-century rural life in Scotland.
Description
The significance of this introductory chapter is twofold. First, it exposes an unsettling ambiguity, which threatens to challenge the received historical narrative of the colonization of Virginia by English Protestant settlers. And second, it exposes the craft of interpretive archaeology, revealing how archaeologists often implicitly create an ‘interpretive hierarchy’ in which less favoured interpretations are ‘glossed over in favour of a single, polished conclusion’ (p. 18).