Sarah Tarlow Negotiates Between a Rock and a Whirlpool

In representing the people of the past we will always need to negotiate between the Scylla of making them so utterly incomprehensible that we cannot even begin to say anything meaningful about them and the Charybdis of rendering them as late-20th-century Europeans wearing wimples or furry bikinis.

Sarah Tarlow. 2000. Emotion in Archaeology. Current Anthropology 41(5):713-746.