Alternative Archaeology: Many Pasts in Our Present.

This article introduces the field of alternative archaeology. After a short presentation of how the field has been received by professional archaeologists, different ways of defining it are discussed, and potential demarcations are examined. A survey of the most frequently discussed topics follows,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Numen: International Review for the History of Religions Vol. 59; no. 2/3; pp. 125 - 138
Main Author: Andersson, Pia
Format: Article
Published: Brill Academic Publishers 2012
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:This article introduces the field of alternative archaeology. After a short presentation of how the field has been received by professional archaeologists, different ways of defining it are discussed, and potential demarcations are examined. A survey of the most frequently discussed topics follows, together with a discussion of the methodologies employed and the theoretical presuppositions accepted by writers in the alternative archaeology genre, and how these differ from the methods and theories of conventional academic archaeology. A brief section on the relevance of alternative archaeology to the study of religion concludes the article.