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The search for culturally bound artefacts, architecture, and other aspects of material culture reveals little about the lives, mindsets, identities, or social concerns of prehistoric or historical people. This chapter discusses at length the various theoretical issues that firstly provide a framework for a social interpretation of the archaeological and documentary evidence, and secondly form central themes in the book. The issues in question are: island archaeology/history, insularity, connectivity, islandscapes, islanders' social identity, ethnicity, habitus, migration, acculturation, and hybridization. Each is defined straightforwardly and then treated, first, from a general, social science perspective, and second by considering how it has been applied, or misapplied, in the field of archaeology. Numerous archaeological examples from around the world are provided to elaborate and exemplify the discussion of each issue, and to evaluate their usefulness in attempting to understand better the Mediterranean archaeological record.

This chapter outlines the theories about abandonment that are used in this study. It also extends an argument that endorses the benefits of comparative approaches to the remains of watercraft, with specific reference to site formation processes and the systematic analysis of discard activities.

This chapter examines whether the current research program of the discipline matches the quality of the archaeological record and argues that most processes studied by archaeologists operate over a decade or less. This is 2–3 orders of magnitude faster than the sampling interval and the resolution of archaeological data. This has three consequences. First, most archaeological results are wrong. The chance that an archaeological interpretation, picked among dozens of equifinal alternatives, is valid is vanishingly small. Second, most archaeological research is also unneeded. The short-scale processes studied by archaeologists are borrowed from other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology. These disciplines do not need archaeology to confirm or disprove their ideas. Third, archaeological theory is balkanized. The archaeological literature is crowded with a daunting number of theories and claims that are mutually exclusive. New theories and processes are added to the literature faster than old ones are eliminated. Archaeologists are ignoring the equifinality problem for historical reasons that are outlined here. This was further amplified by the way archaeologists understood uniformitarianism, a human-centric view of the world, and the way archaeologists test hypothesis. Paleontologists, faced a similar problem years ago and solved it by changing their research problem.

In chapter 1, Beaudry explores how household archaeology has grown into a vibrant area of archaeological research and provides an overview of the history of household archaeology, its major themes, theoretical approaches, and emerging trends. More than the study of architecture, household archaeology provides an avenue through which scholars may address issues of gender, power, and inequality in different societies. Beaudry points out that these themes can be addressed by employing practice theory to investigate the object worlds that households create, the material habitus that develops within particular households, and the ways in which objects in those worlds affect household members’ identity and self-presentation within and beyond the household. Beaudry suggests that archaeological theory focusing on refuse and midden analysis is key for comprehending the emotional taphonomy of discard and its relationship to episodes of household upheaval. She sees the case studies in this volume as contributions to a historical archaeology of households that affords insight into the ways that individual households are enmeshed in wider social issues and processes.

This introductory chapter establishes the importance of understanding everyday life. It considers why everyday life has traditionally been considered a mundane and trivial domain. It then elaborates upon the potentially complex, active, and productive nature of everyday life and the critical role that everyday life can play in furthering our understanding of organization, power, and change in human societies. It also introduces the Chan site, the ancient Maya farming community in Belize, that forms the core case study for this book.

This chapter discusses some of the theoretical means by which the evidence is approached with regards to the mortuary practices of the Neolithic Near East. It first provides a brief history of archaeological theory, specifically in relation to mortuary archaeology, with particular emphasis on the main theoretical trends in archaeological practice such as culture-history, New Archaeology, processualism and post-processualism, as well as the impact of these theoretical approaches on the study of the Neolithic Near East. It then turns to an analysis of mortuary practices in the Near East.

Chapter 3 explores how archaeologists through the study of the materials and spaces of everyday life have furthered broader discussions of everyday life. It examines the intersecting dimensions of household, space, gender, and historical archaeology research in archaeology. Household archaeology draws attention to how past peoples organized and made meaningful their domestic spaces. Space, place, and landscape research expands this agenda to understand how all living spaces are meaningfully constructed and experienced by people across their daily lives. Feminist and gender archaeology have drawn explicit attention to the importance of incorporating all social groups into archaeological analyses--not just different genders, but different class, ethnic, and age groups. By studying the material remains of past societies that also produce historical records, historic archaeology draws particular attention to the material dimensions of past everyday life.

Chapter 2 explores the social theoretical literature on the everyday, an explicitly eclectic and polyglot group of theoreticians who draw from a wide range of theoretical perspectives such as Marxism, phenomenology, feminist theory, developmental biology, critical theory, and subaltern studies, among others, but without a dogmatic alliance to a particular theoretical perspective. Loosely speaking, these scholars can be seen as working through ideas put forward by pioneering everyday life thinkers Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau and include Mikhail Baktin, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, André Breton, Sigmund Freud, Michael Gardiner, Erving Goffman, Agnes Heller, Ben Highmore, Tim Ingold, Alice Kaplan, Alf Lüdtke, Daniel Miller, Kristin Ross, James Scott, Hans Medick, Michael Sheringham, Dorothy Smith, Raymond Williams, and Susan Willis, among others. Many of the most prominent social theorists discussed in contemporary thought are missing from this list, and this is intentional. Everyday life scholarship highlights the overlooked, not just in human life, but also in the scholarly literature.

The brief introduction provides an entrée to the book as a whole. It sets out the general question: where did the concept of shamans come from in relation to its current prominence in both New Age culture and archaeological theory. It also outlines the author’s research methods and motivations in approaching this problem, and it gives a sense of the book’s structure.

This chapter discusses the archaeology of the colonised within the context of global archaeological theory. It stresses the need to avoid making a dichotomy between the coloniser and colonised, or Incomers and Indigenous. It also considers how colonialism alters people, values, and relations with other people and with things before concluding with a reflection on the gap in the broad general area of materiality and social ontologies.

Chapter 8 concludes this book by reinforcing the three assertions suggested by the title of this book: (1) everyday life matters because what people do on a daily basis is critical in the construction of their societies; (2) everyday life is the matter of much of the archaeological record; and (3) studying everyday life matters for archaeologists’ interpretations of human societies. With the Chan case study as an exemplar, theorists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other scholars can appreciate how some of prehistory’s most important lessons are gleaned from studies of everyday life.