ABSTRACT
There are many different goals of archaeology but insofar as ‘archaeology stakes its claim to be a responsible and intellectually rigorous discipline on its ability to produce convincing accounts of the past’ (Johnson 2006), some goals are likely to lead to more convincing accounts than others. As I have argued elsewhere (Shennan 2002), much recent archaeology in the postprocessual tradition has effectively set itself the goal of producing ‘tabloid human-interest stories’ about past people’s supposed lived experience, placing archaeologists in the role of ethnographers of a lost ‘ethnographic present’, struggling hopelessly to overcome the problems posed by the fact that the people they would like to talk to about their perceptions of landscape and other topics are long dead and most of the residues of their lives long decayed (see, e.g., Fleming 2006 for a detailed critique of much recent landscape archaeology in this vein; see also Brück 2005 for a critique of these approaches from within the broad postprocessual tradition). Goals such as this, at least for that vastly greater temporal extent of the archaeological record that precedes written documents, are unlikely to produce convincing and intellectually rigorous accounts.
