Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This book explains about 'dwelling', both as a theory and as a way of being. It explores what has come to be called the 'dwelling perspective' as this has been outlined in recent archaeological and anthropological theory. The book discusses the notion of dwelling in the existential sense in terms that might allow us to deploy this concept in archaeology, specifically in connection to early evidence of mortuary practice in the archaeology of the Palaeolithic. It argues that it is possible to develop a reading of some of Martin Heidegger's key insights that allows for their extension to our pre-modern ancestors, ancestors for which, in its current form, Heidegger's thought cannot really account. The book also reviews for a phenomenological archaeology that goes 'beyond the human', as we might understand it, and that tries to inhabit the 'Dasein that has been there'.