Preface

Summary

Since the contents of this book are concerned so much with issues of biography, it makes sense to begin by saying something about the biography of both text and author. The subject matter – the relationship between archaeological theory and archaeological science – arose from my doctoral research between 1993 and 1997 at Glasgow University, which was supervised by Colin Richards and Richard Jones. The examination of the pottery assemblage from the Late Neolithic settlement at Barnhouse, Orkney comprised the central focus of the original thesis (see Richards forthcoming, and chapters 6 and 7 this volume). However I felt that wider and more fundamental questions lay behind my use of the techniques of materials science within a framework informed by interpretative archaeology and anthropology. It was for this reason that I began to write the first two chapters of the book in Glasgow, after the completion of the thesis. At this time the subject matter was written from a personal perspective derived from attempts to balance an interest in archaeological theory with the practical application of scientific techniques. This perspective altered when I took up a teaching appointment at University College Dublin, where amongst other things I was able to observe the pragmatic application of scientific analysis alongside archaeological theory under the aegis of the Irish Stone Axe Project, directed by Gabriel Cooney and Stephen Mandal.