Books by Michael Shanks

Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking - about what is left of the past, about temporality of humans and their material lives, about the processes of order and entropy, and about processes of creating, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. This title offers a window on this imaginative world of past and present.

This work is a guide to the discipline of classical archaeology and its objects. It assesses archaeology as a means of reconstructing ancient Greek society using the latest approaches of social archaeology. In addition, it outlines the history of the discipline.

A fresh and invigorating contribution to the emergence of a philosophically and culturally informed archaeology, which challenges the disciplinary practices of both traditional and 'new' archaeology.

In this analysis, Shanks and Tilley argue against the functionalism and positvism which result from an inadequate assimilation of social theory into the day-to-day practice of archaeology.