Abstract
“If History is bunk, then Archaeology is junk.” So begins Paul Bahn’s (1989:5) wickedly humorous book Bluff Your Way in Archaeology. Bahn, a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in archaeology from Cambridge University, goes on to say that archaeology is a “bizarre subject” that “entails seeking, retrieving, and studying the abandoned, lost, broken, and discarded traces left by human beings in the past.” He concludes that archaeologists are just the opposite of janitors. Archaeologists collect and save trash, whereas janitors have the good sense to discard it.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Orser, C.E. (1996). The Entangled World of Artifacts. In: A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-8988-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-8988-1_5
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