Ending the war on error: towards an archaeology of failure
ANTIQUITY(2023)
Abstract
Failure is a fundamental part of the human condition. While archaeologists readily identify large-scale failures, such as societal collapse and site abandonment, they less frequently consider the smaller failures of everyday life: the burning of a meal or planning errors during construction. Here, the authors argue that evidence for these smaller failures is abundant in the archaeological record but often ignored or omitted in interpretations. Closer examination of such evidence permits a more nuanced understanding both of the mundane and the larger-scale failures of the human past. Excluding failure from the interpretative toolbox obscures the reconstruction of past lives and is tantamount to denying the humanity of past peoples.
MoreTranslated text
Key words
failure,error,archaeological reasoning,intentionality,agency,scale,ritual
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
![](https://originalfileserver.aminer.cn/sys/aminer/pubs/mrt_preview.jpeg)
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined