Prehistoric Social Groups in North Norway

• Published in: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
• Main Author: Gjessing, Gutorm
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1956
• Subjects: General Medicine; Norway; North Norway
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0079497x00017448; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0079497X00017448

‘They have accused the archaeologist of tatting endless taxonomic rosettes of the I same old ball of “material culture” and maintained that his findings are next to useless for the purpose of history and culture study. It seems that the archaeologists are becoming as Tolstoy once said of modern historians, like deaf men answering questions which no one has asked them. In their broader implications these accusations are all too true’ (Taylor, 1948, p. 95). Certainly this not too kind, ironical remark was explicitly aimed at archaeologists in the United States; yet it may, perhaps, be suspected that even some of their European colleagues feel somewhat uneasy on being confronted by such an unflattering mirror. One has, undoubtedly, the feeling that relatively few archaeologists in the West have ever really scrutinized critically what they and their field of study are ultimately aiming at, apart from the somewhat loose and undefined aim of ‘reconstructing the past’. Now, this ‘past’ obviously does not consist of ‘taxonomic rosettes’ for their own sake, nor of economic techniques only. There can be little doubt of the validity of V. Gordon Childe's remark that the cultures established by archaeology represent societies, and in other of his writings, most explicitly in his intriguing book, Social Evolution (Childe, 1951), he has laid down the foundations of a ‘socio-archaeology’.