Bøker av Michael J. O'Brien

Combining historical research with an explication of archaeological methodology and reasoning, this work examines the origins and changing use of fundamental chronometric techniques and procedures. It also analyzes the different ways American archaeologists have studied changes in artefacts, sites, and people over time.

In assessing what the paradoxes meant to Plato, O'Brien uses certain broad principles of inquiry. First, he insists, any platonic doctrine must be placed in the context of Plato's whole philosophy - a truism not always honored. Second, the conversations of the dialogue form do not merely embellish Plato's philosophical statements but radically affect their expression.

After one of the preeminent (and often vilified) social scientists of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer, popularized the term in the 1850s, evolution became more or less a household word, usually being used synonymously with change, albeit change over extended periods of time.

Presents a critical analysis of the culture history approach to Americanist anthropology. This work uses a framework for the analysis that is founded on the contrast between two metaphysics used by evolutionary biologists in discussing their own discipline: materialistic/populational thinking and essentialistic/typological thinking.

The Powers Phase Project was a multiyear archaeological program undertaken in southeastern Missouri by the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.