".. .wiser than he himself at the time knew" - The Histories of Archaeology and the Whig Problem

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in the history of archaeology, an interest which, unfortunately, has not always included theoretical and methodological issues. In this paper, therefore, the author focuses upon one vital problem in the historiography of archaeology the problem of anachronistic reasoning. One example put forward concerns how one textbook in the history of archaeology treats the question of how the existence of thunderbolts was explained by an early scholar, the Dane Ole Worm. As a general conclusion it is claimed that different forms of the history of archaeology need different foundations with respect to the question of how to assess the past from the vantage point of the present.