Abstract:

As a BA and PhD student of later prehistory at Cambridge, I never imagined that I would end up spending more research time observing and listening to living (if elderly) Mediterranean villagers than in digging archaeological sites. I will briefly reflect on how and why this came about, before describing some of the analogical projects in which I have been involved in the Mediterranean, what I think I have learned from them about the past (and perhaps the present), and to what extent these claimed insights are dependable. I will end by confronting some - to me – surprising recent charges that ethnoarchaeology is empirically useless, methodologically flawed and ideologically indefensible.