were responsible for the economic decline of Cyprus and Palestine in recent centuries. In the historical sections of Black Athena (1987), Martin Bernal has argued that since the Napoleonic period, as a result of racism and ethnocentrism, European archaeologists have systematically ignored evidence of historical ties between ancient Greece and Egypt.

The Impact of Postmodernism

In the 1980s, externalism was fueled by a growing postmodernist emphasis on subjectivity and relativism, an emphasis that has influenced archaeology no less than it has the other social sciences. Central to this approach is a radical idealism that views understanding as being determined by individual presuppositions rather than by evidence and therefore minimizes the possibility of objective knowledge. This approach has been embraced by many archaeologists who wish to eliminate colonial, gender, and class biases from archaeology or to disempower the discipline as an elite discourse. Basic to this approach is the radical relativist claim that it is impossible to judge any one version of the past as being more right or wrong than any other. Inherent in this nihilistic approach to archaeology is the belief that its main, and perhaps only, legitimate role is to become a vehicle for encouraging political action by calling accepted beliefs into question.

The principal influence of postmodernism on the history of archaeology has been to encourage more radical externalism that seeks to correlate specific changes in archaeological interpretation with particular social movements of varying durations and degrees of specificity. This approach is reflected in stimulating, but highly controversial, papers such as R.R. Wilk’s “The Ancient Maya and the Political Present” (Wilk 1985) and Thomas C. Patterson’s “The Last Sixty Years: Toward a Social History of Americanist Archeology in the United States” (Patterson 1986).

Although virtually all histories of archaeology agree that every interpretation of archaeological evidence is influenced to some degree by personal or social biases, there is little agreement concerning the distortions produced by bias. The more positivistic see these biases overcome, in either the short or the middle term, by archaeological evidence. At the other extreme are those who are inclined to accept Michael Shank’s and Christopher Tilley’s denials that it is possible for evidence to contradict presuppositions. Positivists such as Colin Renfrew have countered such claims by demanding to know on what basis any externalists claim to link archaeological interpretations to the social milieu.

Other historians of archaeology have attempted to determine empirically to what extent and under what circumstances archaeologists have been able to achieve insights that are objective in the sense that they have been able to withstand the double test of new evidence and changing social circumstances. This was the main objective of Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought (1989). Trigger documented the wide range of subjective factors that have influenced the interpretation of archaeological data but at the same time offered evidence that the “resistance” of archaeological evidence had produced certain irreversible changes in the understanding of human history and human nature. Moreover, it appears that in general, as the archaeological increases, the ability of subjective factors to distort the interpretation of archaeological evidence is curtailed. Using the history of archaeology to address such theoretical issues and to understand archaeological practice makes the history of archaeology more of an essential part of the theoretical core of the discipline.

Methodological Developments

Over the years there have been marked improvement in the technical quality of scholarly studies of the history of archaeology. Early histories were based largely on scanning published works and sometimes on secondary sources. This practice continues, especially in large-scale syntheses, but is gradually being replaced by more varied and sophisticated methods.

The American archaeologist Robert Heizer encouraged the critical reading of archaeological publications by publishing two volumes of original papers that he judged had been crucial for the development of archaeological method and theory: The Archaeologist at Work (1959) and