Introduction: Why every archaeologist should tell stories once in a while

Re-Visiting Viking Vinland: II. 'Virtual Excavation' of 'Keelness', a Viking Shipwreck Site in North America

“…However, in searching for 'truth' in history, one must construct scenarios which are consistent with all the observations, even though not always enough to conclusively prove anything, one way or another. Even some professional archaeologists have strongly advocated for more imagination and 'story-telling' in archaeological investigations (19,20). Sometimes one must use creativity and imagination to bridge gaps between facts, artifacts, and hypotheses, while developing more complete and coherent narratives of the human story (even though still 'working hypotheses'), and that is what we have attempted to do.…”

Infancia, género e historias de vida: una niña Selk’nam en la Misión Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, Siglos XIX-XX)

“…Asimismo, dichas historias no sólo sirven para presentar el pasado al público en general; también son un medio para interpretar, promoviendo la reflexión entre los investigadores (Gibb, 2000a(Gibb, , 2000bPraetzellis, 2014). Si bien esta perspectiva ha sido desarrollada en varias investigaciones de arqueología histórica (Beaudry, 1998;Cook, 1998;De Cunzo, 1998;Praetzellis & Praetzellis, 1998;Ryder, 1998;Yamin, 1998;Zarankin & Senatore, 2013), también ha recibido críticas. Algunas de las más importantes sugieren que la perspectiva de storytelling no debería sustituir al método tradicional de conocimiento, y que la misma hace correr el riesgo de que el público no especializado confunda estas historias ficticias con los hechos reales (Lewis, 2000;McKee & Galle, 2000).…”

“…Dado que el pasado siempre es una construcción que se realiza a través de datos (Deetz, 1998;Thomas, 2015), nunca se sabe con seguridad si las reconstrucciones que hacemos son totalmente acertadas o no (Majewski, 2000). Por lo tanto, puede considerarse que toda interpretación arqueológica es storytelling (Praetzellis, 1998), y que la perspectiva de storytelling es un camino para entender mejor la condición humana (Little, 2000).…”

From ‘questions that count’ to stories that ‘matter’ in Historical Archaeology - Mark D. Groover. An archaeological study of rural capitalism and material life: the Gibbs farmstead in southern Appalachia, 1790-1920. xix+320 pages, 105 figures, 31 tables. 2003. New York (NY): Kluwer Academic / Plenum; 0-306-47502-2 hardback $130, 0-306-47773-4 paperback $60. - Chris Dalglish. Rural society in the Age of Reason: an archaeology of the emergence of Modern life in the southern Scottish

“…Looking back at a range of moments between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, we have marked out and narrativised false boundaries between past and present. In contrast, alternative traditions of historical archaeology have started telling the stories that issue from their material (Praetzellis 1998). As the range of contributions to Susan Lawrence's volume suggests, historical archaeology's strengths do not lie in priming material like that studied by Groover or Dalglish to answer big questions, short-circuit complexity, or tidy up messiness and contradiction.…”