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ix Preface Toward an Eventful Archaeology At first glance Pompeii and Iceland would seem to be worlds apart. On the one side are the sunny shores of the Bay of Naples. On the other, one encounters settlements in the cold, rainy north. One lies at the center of what is regarded as ‘Western Civilization’, the other at its outer margins. However, the archaeological worlds of the two widely separated cultures have important points in common. They represent two of the epochal peoples in the Western narrative, the Vikings and the Romans. Both are places, where volcanoes have made decisive interventions in historical times. Finally, they are part of exploring cultures, where written texts are abundant and cannot help to shape the narrative, no matter how much the archaeologist may try to escape that reality. It can be argued that historians of the written word create ‘events’ in history out of a confusing mass of inscribed textual material. Readers accept those ‘events’ or else create different ‘events’ as they peruse the written page. The initial archaeological investigator creates a material text and material events through field research and through the presentation of the results of field research. Both historians and archaeologists are ‘authors’ dealing with material produced by human beings. Both create ‘events’ that are often more significant to them than to the people who experienced them. As the first IEMA conference and its proceedings clearly show, a key dilemma arises immediately because the contemporary archaeologist and especially those of anthropological orientation want to see themselves more as social scientists than as humanists. Patterns and processes, if not laws, are what they seek, and events become secondary, even distracting . The more abstract, the more scientific the discourse sounds. x Preface This book offers a fresh consideration of ‘events’ and archaeology, and we would argue that the interpretative landscape needs to have a too strong emphasis on ‘process’ modified by a greater concern for the specific and the contingent. The world of the ‘post-depositional’ that behavioral archaeologists talked about years ago is central to archaeological thinking, but it is more the ‘destroyer’ than the ‘creator’ of events in the archaeological record. Human action is always played out against a background of natural processes, which only rarely, as in the case of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, can be described as ‘events’. The behavior of human beings is obviously shaped by the complex of encoded processes that in the past anthropologists called ‘culture’. These ethnographers recreated such patterns through field observation. The archaeologist must recreate them through the careful and systematic reading shaped by social science models, but also conscious of defining episodes, or what is here designated as ‘events’. Scholars can define events in a variety of ways as we can see in this book. Social science oriented archaeologists feel nervous with the contingency implied in the ‘event’, but the spectacular ‘event’ in the past sustains an expensive, if esoteric professional world. Archaeologists may feel somewhat ambivalent about the event filled world of the burial, but the public loves it. Bloody events were presumably behind the abandonment of a villa treasure. We archaeologists want to look at the end of Roman Britain as a process. Public imagination is sustained by gold and silver. Events not only bring together a whole range of cultural process and material goods in limited moments in time, but they remind us of punctuality and contingency in history. Moreover, they are everywhere, shaping the archaeological record, but also the archaeologists themselves, and the traditions in which she/he works. The issues raised by this conference and its papers are important. The social science consensus in many archaeological subfields is breaking down. One does not want a future dominated by the often sterile particularism, so often characteristic of anthropological as well as classical archaeology or the abstract theoretical chatter of so much of the postmodern intellectual world. Archaeology at the core is about the real and the particular, and the event, as manifested in the material remains, is an important reality focus. *** The IEMA Distinguished Monograph Series This book is the first volume of the newly founded Distinguished Monographs Series of the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology (IEMA) at the University at Buffalo , State University of New York. The Institute was founded in 2007 with the support of the College of Arts and Sciences as part of its UB2020 strategic strength ‘Culture and Text’. We thank the Dean of the College of Arts Sciences, Bruce...

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