The Annales School and Archaeology

Structural history, the core model of the Annales School of French historians, offers an analytical programme for structuring and hence simplifying the phenomena of the human past in all their complexity.

This volume is designed to explain the key concepts and approaches developed by Annaliste scholarship and to apply them to the discipline of archaeology. The importance of structural history to archaeology is shown in two ways.

Firstly, the principles developed in the Annales tradition are described and placed into the context of contemporary theoretical debate in archaeology.

Secondly, the book goes on to show, by means of detailed case studies from Britain, the Mediterranean and the United States, how these principles are being applied in some notable archaeological studies of the later prehistoric, Graeco-Roman and Medieval periods.