ABSTRACT
It is odd that when people think about what science does, as scientists they tend to focus on new interpretations, new theories, and new knowledge. Yet what the public sees and what they too easily forgetis that more than anything, they find new objects. The only time such an acknowledgment is made is when the existence of such new objects is controversial, whether it is a new species, planet, or subatomic particle. For many archaeologists, the goal of archaeology is to get at "the Indian behind the artefact", a phrase coined by Braidwood in his obituary of Gordon Childe. The concern was also repeated against the wave of statistics and system-thinking ushered in by the New Archaeology and prompted Jacquetta Hawke's famous essay in which she underlined that the proper study of mankind is man. Applying Darwinian Theory to human history, the idea that entities other than humans are the focus of analysis in a discipline like archaeology is a provocative move.
