Christopher Y. Tilley is a British archaeologist and a leading proponent of post-processual archaeology.
Tilley's major works on theoretical archaeology were written with his mentee Michael Shanks, include ReConstructing Archaeology and Social Theory and Archaeology (both 1987). He has written widely on the use of phenomenology in archaeology, including his latest book The Materiality of Stone. Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford 2004).
The task that Tilley sets himself, like the author of the poem, is to create a world based on assumed meanings; he is attempting to provide a set of suppositions and meanings based on what he considers to be the most likely type of relationship between one object and the next.
Tilley's 'ethnography' of the broad timescale of the Neolithic is, in fact, little more than a review of the circumstances of deposition of certain items of material culture in the immediate vicinity of monuments.
Tilley fulfils his need to create order from chaos and is, through the medium of this book, asking the reader for acceptance.
Tilley circumvents this concern by resorting to a stock and unsatisfactory post-processual position: we have no secure, objective knowledge about the past and that any understanding of the past owes much of its genesis to the concerns of the present.
Tilley attempts to bypass the structure imposed by the textual approach by using metonymy, asyndeton and presumably synecdoche.
Tilley does seem to acknowledge the limitations of text and much of the strength of this book is in its acknowledgement of the non-visual, especially in relation to the experience of the land as a moral, omniscient force that constrains human action and which is an entity that has to be propitiated and maintained.
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