From Stonehenge to Mycenae: The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation
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Overview
This book reconsiders how we can understand archaeology on a grand scale by abandoning the claims that material remains stand for the people and institutions that produced them, or that genetic change somehow caused cultural change. Our challenge is to understand the worlds that made great projects like the building of Stonehenge or Mycenae possible. The radiocarbon revolution made the old view that the architecture of Mycenae influenced the building of Stonehenge untenable. But the recent use of ‘big data’ and of genetic histories have led archaeology back to a worldview where ‘big problems’ are assumed to require ’big solutions’.
Making an animated plea for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions, the authors consider how life was made possible by living in the local and materially distinct worlds of the period. By considering how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead, we learn about the kinds of identities that people constructed for themselves. Stonehenge did not require an architect from Mycenae for it to be built, but the builders of Stonehenge and Mycenae would have shared a mutual recognition of the kinds of humans that they were, and the kinds of practices these monuments were once host to.
A radical archaeological approach to understanding the worlds that made possible great projects like the building of Stonehenge or of Mycenae, and the ways that the identities of peoples were constructed by undertaking such projects.
An important new perspective on a longstanding debate in prehistoric archaeology
Presents a new understanding of the ways archaeology has sought to explain the development of complex societies in the European Bronze Age
Reasserts the case for the production of long-term historical narratives by archaeology
Written by a major scholar who has not until now voiced his opinion on this debate
List of Illustrations
Preface by Colin Renfrew
Introduction
Chapter One: Archaeological approaches to Stonehenge
Chapter Two: The emergence of an Aegean civilisation
Chapter Three: Living with Things - The Politics of Identity
Chapter Four: Things that mattered - Identity in the production, exchange and use of materials
Chapter Five: Places that mattered - Movement and belonging
Chapter Six: Bodies that Mattered - The role of the dead
Chapter Seven: Conclusion
References
Index
The scholarship of this volume is high quality, and the bibliography is substantial and up-to-date, an especially impressive feat considering the range of examples used here.
This comparative survey is conducted in a considered, scholarly fashion, combining a detailed knowledge of sites and finds with theoretical perspectives ... [A] refreshing, ‘bottom-up’ perspective promises to advance understanding of regions far beyond both Stonehenge and Mycenae.
- Title: From Stonehenge to Mycenae: The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation
- Authors: John Barrett, Michael J. Boyd
- Series: Debates in Archaeology
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 216
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781474291903, 9781350190825, 1350190829, 1474291902
- Resource ID: LLS:9781474291903
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T11:09:55Z
John C. Barrett is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has published widely on prehistoric archaeology and his research focuses on the archaeology of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Britain and Europe and archaeological theory.
Michael J. Boyd is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is co-director of excavations on Keros and co-editor of the Keros publications series. He has published a book on Mycenaean funerary practices, and has co-edited two collected volumes on funerary practices.