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- This book has examined the various methods and ideas employed by archaeologists. To complete our picture, it is important to see something of archaeology in action. This chapter considers a few real field projects where the questions and methods have come together and produced, with the aid of the relevant specialisms, some genuine advance in our knowledge.
- The first study concerns the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico. When Kent Flannery and his colleagues began work two decades ago, little was understood of the evolution in Mesoamerica of what we would call complex society, although the great achievements of the Olmec and the Maya were already well known. The work of the Flannery team has involved continual formulation of new models. It represents an excellent example of the truism that new facts (data) lead to new questions (and new theories), and these in turn to the discovery of new facts.
- The second study, devoted to Florida's Calusa Project, investigates the apparent paradox of a sedentary, complex, and powerful society that was almost entirely based on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Until the 1980s, nearly everything known about the Calusa came from Spanish ethnohistorical accounts, but archaeology is transforming and expanding our knowledge of many aspects of this prehistoric culture.
- The third case study follows the research project of Rhys Jones and his associates in Kakadu National Park, northern Australia. Here the archaeologists worked closely with the legal owners of the region's sites, the Aborigines - an experience of growing relevance for all researchers in lands occupied by indigenous peoples.
- The fourth case study highlights one of the most exciting developments to have taken place in modern archaeology: the transformation in our knowledge of prehistoric Australia and Southeast Asia over the course of the last 30 years. The Kakadu and Khok Phanom Di projects, with their close integration of both environmental and archaeological studies, have played an important part in that transformation.
- The fifth case study focuses on the work of the York Archaeological Trust in the English city of York. Working under all the constraints of archaeology in a modern urban setting, the York unit has set out to present its findings to the public in a novel and effective way, and the Jorvik Viking Centre has for the past 15 years led the way in this aspect of public archaeology.
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