Archaeological Reasoning: A Guide to Understanding the Past

Bridging the gap between introductory and advanced archaeology courses, this book builds confidence in working with the tools of archaeological research and how to make plausible inferences about the past.

How do archaeologists learn what happened thousands of years ago when all they have to work with are clusters of broken artifacts or patterns of post holes? Are their explanations any better than theories about ancient civilizations that we see in social media or popular streaming services? This book answers those questions and more.

Archaeological Reasoning: A Guide to Understanding the Past explains the ways archaeologists draw conclusions from evidence, recognizing that those interpretations will change as new evidence comes into play. Readers will learn more about the research strategies and methods that archaeologists use to understand ancient technologies, economies, social and political systems, and, more specifically, to help them find, date, or classify sites, artifacts, or whole societies. The book also helps them learn to ＂think statistically＂ without necessarily doing any statistics, and reinforces skills in map-reading and effective ways to explore data with graphs.

The book is richly illustrated with more than 80 maps, images and diagrams to help students visualize sites and artifacts and understand key concepts.

Archaeological Reasoning includes 12 exercises, with fictitious case studies from around the world and different research traditions. These build students’ confidence in how to interpret data, without any expectation of statistical background. Using realistic, messy, but relatively small data sets, these exercises allow readers to think critically about how to draw reasonable conclusions, to appreciate that there may be alternative explanations, and to learn how to make strong, evidence-based arguments to support their own interpretations.

Ted Banning is an archaeologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, whose research focuses on the Neolithic of the Near East and on the theory and methods of archaeological survey. He has conducted archaeological and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Egypt and Jordan at such sites as Tell al-Maskhutah, Beidha, and ’Ain Ghazal, and is director of the Wadi Ziqlab Project and Wadi Qusaybah Project in northern Jordan. He is author of the books, Archaeological Survey (2002) and The Archaeologist’s Laboratory (2020).