It may be a textual and literary form. I prefer a more general conception that asssociates narrative with emplotment (causation, sequence, and significance attributed to events), characters (with different agencies), viewpoint (whence the narrative is told), degrees of closure and fullness (senses of 'this is the way it happened'), and a comfort that sense, however precarious, is being made.

Problems

• conventional (historiographical) narrative has limited dimensions - reality is much more manifold

• narrative often predetermines its objects in advance (those Corinthian perfume jars set in a story of new citizens of the Greek polis trading their wares in an incipient commercial imperialism) - such narrative is more properly termed metanarrative (overarching narrative forms under which particular instances of narrative may be subsumed)

• archaeology is mortgaged to a series of modernist tropes (relating ethnicity, origins, discovery, and much more) - familiar stories and scenarios

• so there may be a desire to make sense, even a particular sense, that comes with narrative form - this may be inappropriate to the subject of study

• closure and fullness again do an injustice to most empirical research.

But we should note a distinction between narrative (form) and storytelling. Storytelling implicates the teller, the audience and the location and event of telling - the performance. This makes it inherently unstable in that it is a specific engagment with the components of narrative.

So what alternatives to narrative are there?

Aside - consider the problems that Cladistics* has with narrative.