Front Matter, Table of Contents, Editorial
Date
1997-06-01
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Volume
6
Number/Issue
1
Starting Page
c1
Ending Page
7
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Abstract
A sentence in the lead article of a recent American Antiquity took me by
surprise. Elizabeth Brumfiel wrote that "personal experience has taught
many archaeologists that data do make a difference." My decade-long
absence from the halls of academe left me poorly prepared for the headwayan
extreme relativism has made in our field. At first I thought Brumfiel
was spoofing-does any prehistorian really think that data don't make a
difference? But it's true, relativists have advanced the propositions that
archaeological research is purely a social product and nothing more than
politics. Brumfiel's article is a dead serious first-person testimony to an
instance when data did make a difference-in this case a change in her
understanding of Indian women's resistance to tribute collection in Aztec
and colonial Mexico brought about by study of archaeological assemblages.
Her point is that prehistorians are not free to write whatever they want
about the past, guided solely by social and political forces of the moment.
Rather, they are constrained in what they can write by archaeological (and
I would add, other) evidence. They learn about the past from archaeological
data. Data do make a difference.
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Front Matter and Editorial
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9 pages
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