Socializing geoarchaeology: Insights from Bourdieu's theory of practice applied to Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete

Abstract

AbstractBecause the history of human life is about ways of inhabiting the world, geoarchaeology should play a central role in the archaeological program and cannot be reduced to a mere subspecialty of archaeology with its own autonomous theories and concerns. Hence there is a pressing need for theorizing; geoarchaeology cannot ignore nearly five decades of theoretical debates in archaeology. This contribution endeavors to demonstrate the benefits that may be achieved by practically applying social theories to the interpretation of geoarchaeological results. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice inspired a generation of post‐processual archaeologists, yet the avenues of interpretation that this opened up have barely been explored in approaches in the Earth sciences to the human past. It is suggested that the work of Bourdieu offers the possibility to sidestep recurrent issues of scale and incompatibilities of resolution between archaeological and geological dating. The argument is sustained by an alternative reading of geoarchaeological results coming from Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.