This provocative introduction examines the most important new school of archaeological thought and practice to have emerged over the last two decades and provides students with an assessment of the impact and importance of recent theoretical debates.

Ian Hodder is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is general editor of the Blackwell Social Archaeology series, author of Reading the Past (1986), Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (1982), The Domestication of Europe (Blackwell, 1990) and co-editor with Robert Preucel of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996).