ABSTRACT
In the mid twentieth century, archaeology came under the spell of theory as Gordon Childe urged his contemporaries seriously to address the matter of explanation. So-called historical archaeology has to our minds offered considerable potential in overcoming artificial barriers between the disciplines, as evidenced, for example, in the recent work on early imperial formation. Most would think that archaeologists deal with the ancient past, that is, with those peoples that inhabited a material rather than a written culture. In some respects, this may be a convenient division of labour between archaeology and history: simply stated, archaeologists use artefacts as evidence, historians use written sources. In North America, nineteenth-century archaeology was driven by questions arising from its own historical experiences of settlement in an occupied land. Historical archaeology also attempts to break down the opposition between material artefact and written text.
