Christopher Tilley
Author
Who is Christopher Tilley?
Chris Tilley is a British archaeologist known for his contributions to postprocessualist archaeological theory. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London.
Tilley obtained his PhD in Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student of Ian Hodder. In the early 1980s, Hodder and his students at Cambridge first developed postprocessualism, an approach to archaeology stressing the importance of interpretation and subjectivity, strongly influenced by the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. Tilley and his early collaborator Daniel Miller were amongst the most strongly relativist of first wave postprocessualist archaeologists, and was particularly critical of what he saw as the negative political implications of positivist processual archaeology. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Tilley moved away from the structuralist approach pursued by Hodder and, along with Michael Shanks and Peter Ucko, advocated a position of strong relativism. For Shanks and Tilley, academic interpretations of the archaeological record have no more legitimacy than any other, and they view claims to the contrary as elitist attempts to control the past, asserting that "there is no way of choosing between alternative pasts except on essentially political grounds."
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- Also known as
- Christopher Y. Tilley
- Nationality
- United Kingdom
- Education
- University of Cambridge
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
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