This volume is not a memorial.

Our conviction is that our friend and mentor, Bruce Trigger (1937–2006) would hardly have wanted to see in print yet another set of heartfelt but ultimately sterile testimonials to his life and work. Now, several years after his death, the time for such tributes is past. This volume exists, not because of what Trigger did or did not do during forty years of productive academic labour, but because so much work along lines we think he would have endorsed remains unfinished, unbegun, or even unthinkable, in the present intellectual climate.

Bruce Trigger was...

The land of Punt (see Figure 1.1 for map) is mentioned briefly in Bruce Trigger’s important bookNubia under the Pharaohs(Trigger 1976a: 56). Punt was where the ancient Egyptians obtained exotic raw materials not found in Egypt or its adjacent deserts, especially incense, elephant ivory, and ebony (Kitchen 1993). Gold/electrum was also brought from Punt.

Following Kitchen (1971), Trigger placed Punt in Ethiopia or Somalia, and stated that it was reached from Egypt by overland routes up the Nile Valley through Nubia as well as by seafaring expeditions along the Red Sea (Trigger 1976a: 56). What Trigger did not...

There is no doubt that despite Christian objections, the predominant trend in eighteenth-century northern Europe was towards racism.¹ At the same time, however, there was a considerable enthusiasm for ancient Egypt (Palter 1996: 352–3; Bernal 2003: 172–3). European uncertainty about the physical appearance of Egyptians before the onset of caste racism in the late seventeenth century disappeared among Egyptophils in the eighteenth. During the middle of that century, none of them considered the Ancient Egyptians to be Africans. They saw the ancient people as at least honorary Whites and as the originators of Western Civilization. Even many of...

What is a slave? “Person who is … bound to absolute obedience [to] another” (OED). The dictionary adds, “human chattel,” “chattel” being derived from the same Latin root as “capital” and “cattle,” not a helpful gloss for societies that didn’t own valuable livestock. Blackfoot use the rootyinn, “seize, capture, hold,” indicating “captive”iiyaaminaiksirather than slave in the sense of one born into a class of chattels. Certainly, there is a strong difference between societies institutionalizing a marked, reproducing class of debased persons and those without such a marked, transgenerational class. There is also the question whether areas of...

Among my treasured offprints, in the “Theory” box, is a gift from Bruce Trigger: an article which is a tour de force, exploring the mentalities of native American peoples in early contact with European colonizers (Trigger 1991a). I still retain the “post-it” piece of yellow adhesive paper on the cover, thanking me for sending a copy of a book I had edited, with the added comment “In return a few items.” Characteristic, and for me immensely mind-expanding, was his carefully constructed argument that extreme interpretative positions force us to fall short of human realities and cripple our ability to evaluate...

Ethnoarchaeology would seem to be at a crossroads in its history. While archaeology is no less dependent on “source-side” knowledge (following Watson 1979) now than it was during ethnoarchaeology’s heyday (see Kuznar and Jeske 2006; Trigger 2006a: 508–19; Wylie 2002), the discipline has begun to show a marked ambivalence towards undertaking ethnographic research specifically for archaeology’s interpretive purposes. Some of this ambivalence has emerged from the significant ethical problems associated with ethnoarchaeology’s ethnographic “mining operations” (after Meskell 2005, see Fewster 2001), while others have found European social philosophers, such as Bourdieu Giddens, Heidegger, and Foucault, to be a more...

Since its inception more than one hundred and fifty years ago, experimenting with the production and use of stone tools has been directly informed by the prevailing intellectual climate. I propose a typology of experimental programs based on their methodological attributes (see Figure 6.1). Any experimental study can be placed against two different but related scales that reflect the conceptual and technological scope of the experiment. Each study can be differentiated according to whether it aims to identify general principles (e.g., natural vs. cultural agency, fracture mechanics and flake generation, microfracture and polish identification, post-depositional modification, quantification), or to improve...

These paragraphs from David Meltzer’s “A Question of Relevance” (1989) and Bruce G. Trigger’s paper “Historiography” (2001) illustrate a significant shift in the way archaeologists have perceived the history of their science. As David Meltzer put it, until the 1970s the history of archaeology was often regarded as a marginal activity unrelated to archaeological practice. Written by professional archaeologists and popularizers without training in history, the history of archaeology was often considered to be a harmless amusement whose main function was to justify what archaeologists had done by showing the progress of their discipline. This situation has changed over the...

In her article entitled “Orientalism, Ideology, and Identity” (2005), Nicole Boivin, an archaeologist at Oxford University, makes explicit the presumption of cultural continuity in India that has been implicit in previous research (Fairservis 1975; Kenoyer 1989). In the article, she argues, “given that archaeological evidence is often drawn upon to support politically-motivated arguments concerning the origins of various forms of identity in South Asia, including caste, it is hardly a topic that responsible archaeologists can afford to simply ignore” (p. 227).

This argument, however, is inconsistent with Boivin’s explanation that “thelimited theoretical attentionthat has been given to caste...

This essay examines the focus and methods of culture-historical archaeology and how they developed chronologically through the articles, first published between 1907 and 1969, that were included inAmericanist Culture History: Fundamentals of Time, Space, and Form(O’Brien, Lyman, and Dunnell 1997).

This citation analysis focuses on two main points in order to examine changes in culture-historical archaeology. First, it focuses on the authors being cited at different times during the culture-historical period under review. Second, it focuses on the types of articles being cited at different times during this period.

For the purpose of clarity, the authors of the...

The Second International (1889–1914) was the successor to the International Working Men’s Association (subsequently referred to as the First International) that Marx and Engels founded in 1864. The latter was a federation of politically diverse, working-class organizations based in Western and Central Europe but also from Australia and the United States. In 1872, in the wake of the Paris Commune, a split developed within the association between the Marxists, who argued that the proletariat should pursue political power, and the anarchists, notably Michael Bakunin, who believed that participation in bourgeois politics was corrupting and that the state should be...

It may be argued that there are three groups of conditions of original scientific research: psychological, social, and philosophical. The main psychological conditions are talent, curiosity, motivation, industry, and integrity. The social conditions are research freedom, cooperation, and pecuniary support. All this is rather well known, if not by politicians and bureaucrats, at least by scientists. What is far less known is that scientific research, or at least great research, can also be either energized or obstructed by a philosophical outlook. This is the subject of the present essay.

The earliest archaeologists have been faulted for being antiquarians rather than...

InUnderstanding Early Civilizations, Trigger (2003a) mused about the origins of cognitive cross-cultural similarities: “Varied cross-cultural similarities, especially those of a cognitive variety, that cannot be explained simply by functional arguments suggest that certain ways of thinking and behaving may in some manner be ‘hard-wired’ into the human psyche even if they are not realizedin the same way in societies at different levels of complexity” (p. 274, emphasis added). Trigger came to this tentative conclusion with some reluctance,¹ and he pointed out that the mechanisms for these hypothetical hard-wired behaviours are unclear. Here, I wish to address this...

One of anthropology’s oldest and most exciting questions is why inequality emerges in previously egalitarian societies (Hayden 1995). Over the years, a number of competing and often incompatible theories have been developed to explain this transformation (McGuire 1983; Béteille 1983, 1996; Curtis 1986; Bern 1987; Lee 1990; Hastorf 1990; Paynter and McGuire 1991; Feinman 1995; Blanton 1995; Hayden 1995; Arnold 1995; Salzman 1999; Wiessner 2002; Rousseau 2006). Yet, as Kelly notes, despite a long-standing interest in the subject, “relatively little progress … has been made in explaining inequality” (1991: 136, in Feinman 1995: 255).

Several factors have hindered our understanding...

Contemporary thought tends to present any long run of events in any field as an evolution. In contrast, the biblical, creationist world-view provides clear images of the creation of the universe outside of any long-term historical context. While the creationist view continues to exist in the modern world, it has largely receded into symbolic and philosophical areas of thought. Among today’s intellectuals, very few picture our origins in terms of Gustav Doré’s nineteenth-century woodcuts of an old bearded and robed man, conjuring up the earth and man into being. The majority think of the planet’s origins in terms of evolutionary...