Introduction
To write about the field of “structural archaeology” – where it comes from, what it does, and where we are now – means we must consider structuralism as an intellectual movement and how it impacted archaeology, although this is not all there is to it. It might seem at first that writing about structuralism in archaeology in these first decades of the twenty-first century can only be a historical commentary on an approach, a theory, and a method that we have gone through and beyond. Some researchers today might opine that a structural archaeology has been bypassed by other approaches and subsequent critiques. There are even terms for what developed supposedly “after” structuralist thinking and research, namely, post-structuralism and even structuration. And there are those who might suppose that even these afterlives of structuralism are faded and discarded paradigms and frameworks for the analysis and interpretation of archaeological materials and situations. Furthermore,...
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Conkey, M. (2014). Structural Archaeology. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_275
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