influence of international scholarly trends; foreign scholarship; internal social, political, and economic conditions; and institutional structures for teaching and research on the development of archaeology in a single country.

The comparative, and hence the socially oriented, study of the history of archaeology was further stimulated by an international conference on the history of archaeology held in Aarhus, denmark, in 1978, the proceedings of which were published as Towards a History of Archaeology (1981), edited by Glyn Daniel. Antiquity and Man (1981), a festschrift edited in Daniel’s honor by John Evans, Barry Cunliffe, and Colin Renfrew, as well as two successive issues of World Archaeology titled “Regional Traditions of Archaeological Research” (1981– 1982), edited by Bruce Trigger and Ian Glover, also contained studies of the history of archaeology in various parts of the world. These studies, despite a shared corpus of methods, the questions archaeologists asked, and the answers they were predisposed to accept, varied widely from one society to another. The studies confirmed Klindt-Jensen’s and Bernal’s observations that the cultural patterns of individual societies and the expectations of particular social groups within them have influenced the practice of archaeology, as have the formal organization of the discipline and levels of funding available to carry out research.

Many historians of archaeology have begun to examine the impact of social, political, and economic conditions on the practice of archaeology. Karel Sklenár’s Archaeology in Central Europe (1983) emphasizes how over a 500-year period prehistoric archaeology has been used by diverse ethnic groups and by particular social classes within those groups to pursue their own social, political, and economic agendas. Such agendas have encouraged and suppressed various archaeological projects and favored radically different interpretations of archaeological data. Kenneth Hudson’s A Social History of Archaeology (1981) consists of a series of essays that attempt to relate the practice of archaeology in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the social conditions of the times and to “see how money, the educational and political system and the class structure have determined both the selection and ambitions of archaeologists and the way in which they have set about their work” (1). Specific topics examined include the class affiliations of Victorian archaeological societies and the impact of the development of the railways on such bodies. Similar topics have been explored in Philippa Levine’s The Amateur and the Professional (1986) and in some of Piggott’s essays in his Ruins in a Landscape (1976).

In the United States, the first example of a social approach to the history of archaeology was Robert Silverberg’s Mound Builders of Ancient America (1968), which explored the link between the nineteenth-century belief in the Mound Builders as a civilized, non-Indian people who had inhabited North America in prehistoric times and the denigration of aboriginal peoples that accompanied the spread of European settlement. The general impact of racism on North American archaeology was explored in Bruce Trigger’s “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian” (American Antiquity, 1980), and how it influenced the practice of archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution is discussed in Curtis Hinsley, Jr.’s, Savages and Scientists (1981) and David Meltzer’s “The Antiquity of Man and the Development of American Archaeology” (Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 6: 1983). In The Davenport Conspiracy (1970), Marshall McKusick documented the disorder that could occur in the small scientific clubs that flourished in the United States during the nineteenth century and the widespread antagonism between such organizations and “the big science” that was being sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.

Neil Silberman’s Digging for God and Country (1982) and Between Past and Present (1989) trace the impact of European colonialism and local nationalism on the archaeology of the Middle East. He demonstrates how archaeologists’ loyalties determine what questions are and are not investigated. For example, western archaeologists have systematically ignored or misinterpreted evidence they have excavated that demonstrates that western European reorientations of world trade rather than the Turkish occupation