The Archaeological Imagination

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A study of the ‘archaeological imagination’ is an area of growing interest within archaeology and other fields (see, for example, Finn 2004; Wallace 2004; Schwyzer 2007), and Michael Shanks’s book is a timely addition to this important and inspiring subject. Building on his Experiencing the Past (1992) and other collaborative works, the author makes a foray into the worlds that create and are created by archaeological remains and experiences of them, in a journey that is as much a personal reflection as a disciplinary one. He does, however, emphasise that he is expanding out from the disciplinary definition of archaeology, blending literature, current popular culture, historical texts, archaeological remains, antiquarian interpretation, philosophy, cultural geography, geology, photography, contemporary art and social theory.