The Annales School and Archaeology

New York: New York University Press, 1991. BW2 - A first US edition hardcover book in very good condition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket has some scattered light scratches and rubbing, dust jacket and book have some bumped corners, light discoloration and shelf wear. 9.25"x6.25", 127 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Structural History, the core model of the Annales School of French historians, offers the most highly developed and intellectually refined analytical programme for structuring and hence simplifying the phenomena of the human past in all their complexity. This volume is designed to explain the key concepts and approaches developed by Annaliste scholarship and to apply them to the discipline of archaeology. The importance of Structural History to archaeology is shown in two ways. Firstly, the principles developed in the Annales tradition are described and placed into the context of contemporary theoretical debate in archaeology. The moral important of these principles is the notion of distinctive historical forces operating on different timescales; short-term events (événements) that dominate conventional history - historical archaeologists and much less frequently prehistorians uncover history at this fine level of detail; these events interact with and influence world-views held by past societies (mentalités) - the interest of symbolic, structuralist and cognitive archaeology; medium-term social and natural trends operating over a timescale of centuries (conjunctures) - such forces generate the recurrent, patterned phenomena identified by "New Archaeologists"; and the long-term, almost timeless, constraints on human life set by the land, by slowly changing technologies and world views (the longue durée) - obviously relevant to the study of early hominid development, the history of technology and to Environmental and Geographical Archaeology. Secondly, the book goes on to show, by means of detailed case studies from Britain, the Mediterranean and the United States, how these principles are being applied in some notable archaeological studies of the later prehistoric, Graeco-Roman and Medieval periods. The combination of sophisticated theory clearly explained and first rate practice clearly described makes this book essential reading for every archaeological and ancient historian concerned with improving our understanding of past societies. . First US Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.