Everything about Ethnoarchaeology totally explained
Ethnoarchaeology is the
ethnographic study of peoples for
archaeological reasons, usually focusing on the material remains of a society, rather than its
culture. Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. Archaeologists can then infer that ancient societies used the same techniques as their modern counterparts given a similar set of environmental circumstances.
Ethnography can provide insights of value to archaeologists into how people in the past may have lived, especially with regard to their social structures, religious beliefs and other aspects of their culture. However, it's still unclear how to relate most of the insights generated by this anthropological research to archaeological investigations. This is due to the lack of emphasis by anthropologists on the material remains created and discarded by societies and on how these material remains vary with differences in how a society is organised.
This general problem has led archaeologists (for example, London
[2000]) to argue that
anthropological work isn't adequate for answering archaeological problems, and that archaeologists should therefore undertake ethnoarchaeological work to answer these problems. These studies have focused far more on the manufacture, use and discard of tools and other
artifacts and have sought to answer such questions as what kinds of objects used in a living settlement are deposited in
middens or other places where they may be preserved, and how likely an object is to be discarded near to the place where it was used.
One good example of ethnoarchaeology is that of
Brian Hayden (1987), whose team examined the manufacture of
Mesoamerican quern-stones, providing valuable insights into the manufacture of
prehistoric quern-stones.
Bibliography
- Hayden, B. ed. 1987 Lithic studies among the contemporary Highland Maya, University of Arizona Press.
- London, G. 2000 Ethnoarchaeology and interpretation, In Near Eastern Archaeology 63:2-8.
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