Writing the Past: Knowledge and Literary Production in Archaeology

Writing the Past attempts to reintroduce a normative dimension to knowledge practices in archaeology, especially in relation to archaeological practice further down the ‘assembly line’ in the production of published texts, where archaeological knowledge becomes most stabilized and is widely disseminated. By exploring the composition of texts in archaeology and the relation between their structural, performative characteristics and key epistemic virtues, this book aims to move debate in both knowledge and writing practices in a new direction.

Although this book will be of particular interest to archaeologists, the argument offered has relevance for all academic disciplines concerned with how knowledge production and textual composition intertwine.