ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION On hearing the title of this chapter, one Irish colleague stated that it certainly wouldn’t take very long to cover the topic, while another said ‘Thank God we have so little of that theory stuff in Irish archaeology.’ There has been a marked lack of explicit concern with the theoretical basis of archaeological practice in Ireland. The implicit assumption has been that the information is primary, speaking for itself, that the acquisition of more information is the primary goal of archaeology and that limitations in the data prevent reconstruction of many aspects of life in the past (e.g., Harbison 1988:195). In this empirical tradition, the influence of processual archaeology has been primarily in the area of data analysis and the various strands of post-processual archaeology have been largely lumped together with processual archaeology as ‘New’, or else have been ignored.
