Neither history nor prehistory: the Questions that count in historical archaeology

Abstract

Historical archaeology’s singular and unique strength among the social sciences is its simultaneous access to multiple categories of evidence bearing upon the same processes or events in past human behavior (either immediately or remotely in the past). Although this has been obvious for nearly two decades, historical archaeology has not produced the original and unparalleled insights into human cultural behavior or evolution that we might expect to result from the unique perspective and data base of the field. We have instead tended to weakly reproduce or “test” insights and principles resulting from history or prehistoric archaeology. Both the questions we have asked and the methods we have used to answer them have been grounded in fields other than historical archaeology and have generally ignored its special perspective.