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Charles E. Orser , Jr. A Primer on Modern-World Archaeology (Principles of Archaeology. New York : Eliot Werner Publications Inc. , 2014, 172pp., 10 figs, ISBN 978-0-9898249-2-7 )
Book Reviews
I would like to begin this review with Orser's belief and claim that the archaeology of the modern-world is the most relevant archaeology (for instance, pp. 107, 146). This provocative statement will be controversial (as he admits) and even unsettling to some of his readers. As a reader, two questions follow from such a claim: what is modern-world archaeology and why is it the most relevant archaeology? The answers to these two questions form the backbone of Orser's clear, concise, and debatable Primer, which comes as an update to his previous A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (1996).
In its most essential definition, as stated in the preface of the book, modern-world archaeology 'is a kind of historical archaeology of the past five centuries that has as one of its main goals the analysis and interpretation of the union of the four great metaprocesses (or haunts) of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and racialization' (p. v). It has thus a conceptual meaning that goes beyond a mere post- ad 1500 chronological understanding; and a political commitment that engages the local and the global and the present and the past. After acknowledging the necessary, but, in Orser's view, insufficient, contributions of what he refers to as traditional historical archaeology, he goes on to break down the main features behind his definition of modern-world archaeology in the eight chapters that integrate the book.
Chapter 1 ('Modern-World Archaeology') serves as an introduction in which the main principles and tenets that will be later developed further are presented, with special attention to the distinction between modern-world archaeology and artefact- and site-oriented traditional historical archaeology. Chapter 2, titled 'The Haunts', is specifically focused on the four 'haunts' of modern-world archaeology: colonialism; mercantilism/capitalism; Eurocentrism; and racialization (with both mercantilism and racialization coming as new inclusions in this primer). 'The Foundation' (Ch. 3) summarizes the fundamental theoretical perspectives that inspire modern-world archaeology: the Annales school (mainly the work of Fernand Braudel); network theory; Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory; and Karl Marx's dialectical thinking. Drawing on Donald Donham's History, Power, Ideology (1999),...