Galego | English

Non fiction

O valor da Arqueoloxía

By José Carlos Bermejo Barrera, Mar Llinares García

About this book

This book includes a series of articles in which their two authors (a chair professor of Ancient History and a Lecturer of Prehistory at the University of Santiago de Compostela) question the practice of archaeology limited to a mere “attaching value” to the findings by specialists. On the contrary, here we are reminded that the study of archaeology is the study of sources, of material culture, a common wealth that does not yield economic profit but benefits of a different kind.

Book fragment

This book is both an allegation and a claim. It is an allegation for knowledge and the dignity of the lives of those who live in the culture and transmit it, and a claim against certain groups including politicians and so-called intellectuals, who are continuously manipulating and trivialising general knowledge and a whole set of knowledge that has been called culture already for some centuries now […]. Neither archaeology nor “cultural goods” are profitable. Trying to isolate “goods” as elements (material or otherwise) in popular culture is a misconception, as we see in chapter VII and its appendix, with a real perversion of the mission that archaeological knowledge has to fulfil.