Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a series of arguments and counterarguments through which the ambivalence about analogy noted by recent commentators took definite shape. The chapter focuses on an increasingly acute concern that analogy seems to be both indispensible to interpretation and always potentially misleading. At a more fundamental level, these debates can be seen to express a fundamental dilemma that archaeologists confront whenever they seriously undertake to use their data as evidence of the cultural past, namely, that any such broadening of the horizons of inquiry seems to be accomplished only at the cost of compromising actual or potential methodological rigor. Each of the critical reactions against analogy and each of the ameliorating responses represent an attempt to come to grips with this dilemma. Each either endorses one of the methodological options it defines, accepting that research is unavoidably limited or unavoidably speculative, or rejects these options and attempts to show how one or another of the premises yielding the dilemma may be amended and the dilemma itself escaped.

The reaction against analogy

This book offers the first detailed comparative study of the seven best-documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and adjacent peoples in the Valley of Mexico, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, economic systems, religion, and culture. Many of this study's findings are surprising and provocative. Agricultural systems, technologies, and economic behaviour turn out to have been far more diverse than was expected. These findings and many others challenge not only current understandings of early civilizations but also the theoretical foundations of modern archaeology and anthropology. The key to understanding early civilizations lies not in their historical connections but in what they can tell us about similarities and differences in human behaviour.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam034/2002074052.pdf

Understanding early civilizations : a comparative study

This volume is a collection of the most important essays written by Franz Boas on the science of anthropology. \"Franz Boas is the father of American anthropology and one of the founders of the field of modern anthropology. The book, \"Race, Language, and Culture,\" is a collection of some of his most important essays.\"-David Schneider, University of Chicago \"An exceptional book. Exceptional because it brings into one volume sixty-two papers written by the most influential figure in American anthropology. . . . Exceptional in that it exhibits the wide range of interests and scientific exactness which made it possible for one man to exert such a profound influence on the growing science of anthropology. . . . This is a volume every student of anthropology will wish to possess; it will also have a wide distribution among other students of the social sciences, and all interested in the problems of race.\"-Fay-Cooper Cole, \"American Anthropologist\

Race, Language and Culture.

List of illustrations Preface 1. The relevance of archaeological history 2. Classical archaeology and antiquarianism 3. The beginnings of scientific archaeology 4. The imperial synthesis 5. Culture-historical archaeology 6. Soviet archaeology 7. Functionalism in Western archaeology 8. Neo-evolutionism and the New Archaeology 9. The explanation of diversity 10. Archaeology and its social context Bibliographical essay References Index.

Stuart Piggott

Papers

A History of Archaeological Thought