Introduction

Many of the points I have wanted to make about the importance and value of the history of archaeology have already been made in the introduction to The Great Archaeologists (the first two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology). In those first volumes I was concerned mainly with exploring the role of biography in writing the history of archaeology, and in coming to grips with the great diversity in approach taken by the contributors to those volumes. The essays in The Great Archaeologists have attracted considerable attention (most of it very good), but one comment made by an eminent historian of archaeology struck a particular chord. Contemplating the richness of new information about something that he felt we knew reasonably well, he was moved to remark that in recent decades the history of archaeology had really come of age.

I think that he meant this in two ways. First, that archaeologists were now sufficiently confident about the value of their discipline and its perspectives to seek a deeper understanding of its history—an understanding that had the clear potential to challenge disciplinary orthodoxies. Second, that the sheer scale of archaeology practiced at a global scale gave rise to many interesting questions about the unity of the discipline. In the early 1980s Bruce Trigger and Ian Glover pursued some of these questions in two editions of the journal World Archaeology that were devoted to the exploration of “regional traditions” in archaeology. What Trigger and Glover (and the contributors to their project) were keen to establish was whether the diversity of experience among archaeologists and the societies they served had led to real differences in approach and purpose among nations or groups of nations such as “Anglo-Saxon” or “Francophone,” “First World,” “Second World” or “Third World,” “Colonialist” or “Postcolonialist.”

While the first two volumes of this encyclopedia amply demonstrated the diversity of personal histories among influential archaeologists and antiquarians over the past four centuries, they pointed to significant commonalities as well. This notion that there are questions, issues, and fundamental activities, such as classification, that lie at the heart of a discipline like archaeology supports the view that it is possible for archaeologists to communicate with each other (however imperfectly) and to share knowledge. This theme of unity in diversity (and the ambiguities that arise from it) is even more strongly supported in the final three volumes of the encyclopedia that together comprise History and Discoveries.

In these volumes we have histories of archaeology as it has been practiced in most parts of the world, biographies of significant archaeologists in addition