This is not a commercial. But we hope he won't mind. Read on, and the reasons his work has been useful to archaeologists will become apparent. Thompson is a student and scholar of material culture and its roots in deeper artistic and philosophical traditions.
Many archaeologists are as well.
In his study of the art and philosophy of Africa, and of Africans in the Americas, he communicates much about the dignity, energy, and dynamism of classical African art, and shows how those characteristics permeate everyday culture as well as artistic expression of African Diasporan people in the western hemisphere. His book, and other secondary and primary sources about the material cultures of African and African-Americans, are best used as ways to frame questions about the artifacts and artifacts contexts found in the ground. See Ethnography for more about this approach. The Rise of the Black Atlantic Visual Tradition by Robert Farris Thompson Listening to rock, jazz, blues, reggae, salsa, samba, bossa nova, juju, highlife, and mambo, one might conclude that much of the popular music of the world is informed by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance. Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to the New.