ABSTRACT
Archaeologists take the object of their study to be the material residues of the human past. These residues appear to derive from, and to thus represent a record of, a number of complex and extinct processes. As a consequence it appears that archaeologists must identify those extinct processes if they are to explain how the record was formed. I will define this as the representational model of archaeology. In this model the material residues stand in for the absent processes which the archaeologist seeks to ‘uncover’ or to ‘construct’ to establish an image of the past.
