Anthropology 2: Archaeology and Prehistory
Review Sheet #3 – Archaeological Theory
Primary theories of cultural change
- there are two broad and fundamental phenomenon which known to generate change in cultural systems (i.e., societies)
1) change in environment and 2) increase in population
Secondary processes involved in cultural change
- there are also four supplemental or ancillary processes that are involved in cultural change
1) invention - the process of creating a new idea and transforming it into a technological device or tool or other tangible innovation
and/or a new concept or perspective that changes cultural practices, e.g., domestication of plants and animals
2) diffusion - a model describing the way in which new ideas are spread among different groups of people
- the physical movement of many people is not involved
- diffusion proceeds through such mechanisms as trade or warfare and conquest, and subsequent domination
3) migration - deliberate population movements into a new area
4) inevitable variation - the notion that cultures change and vary with time, cumulatively; the reasons for these changes are little
understood, but are relative to human psychosocial idiosyncrasy
Scientific approach in archaeology
- there are several propositions or assumptions which are fundamental to the scientific approach followed by archaeologists
1) materialist philosophy
- scientific method is based on a materialist philosophy of how the world operates and three basic propositions:
materialist philosophy the environment is the primary driving force which shapes human behavior, while consciousness or thoughts
are secondary. This approach depends on science as the only way to understand the world
- Aristotle was the first to hold this philosophy, he argued that humans can only gain truth through their senses, this is the basis of
empirical science
2) psychic unity of humankind - proposes that the cognitive and reasoning abilities of human populations everywhere are within the
same range of variation, and that the differences between sociocultural systems are therefore explainable by different adaptations to
local environmental circumstances
3) logistical positivism - holds that there is a real world composed of observable phenomena that behave in an orderly manner. By
observation, formulation of hypotheses, and testing of those hypotheses, one can understand how the world works
4) deductive approach - hypotheses are formulated
- hypothesis is tested based on empirical observations
- if rejected alternate hypotheses are formulated and tested
- if accepted, they assume the status of theory
law (i.e., scientific laws) - is a generalize theory that explains a phenomena and that are accepted as a truism, e.g.,
Darwinian evolutionary biology or primary classifications sociocultural systems (i.e., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states)
- in archaeology they are usually associated within human behavior
- a scientific law must be universal in nature, i.e., they must provide statements about relations between variables that are assumed to
hold true regardless of the temporal period, region of the world, or specific cultures that are being studied
- these generalizes vary in scale from major assumptions about historical processes to regularities dealing with relatively trivial aspects
of human behavior
normative approach to explaining culture, in the normative approach, which was derived from the perspective that dominated
American cultural anthropology for most of this century
- it emphasized shared ideas and that all human behaviors are patterned
- the form of these patterns are determined by culture
- all members of a culture shared an ideal mental template that they were taught as children
- these shared ideas were expressed in cultural traits
- e.g., how pottery was made and designed or projectile pt types, or house types, etc.
- anthropologists characterized cultures by long lists of these traits
- changes in the form or pattern of these traits were assumed to reflect cultural change
- to develop trait lists archaeologists were concerned with description and classification of artifacts, architecture, sites, and cultures
- function, i.e., what is it
- where, i.e., spatial location
- when, i.e., temporal or chronological concurs, e.g., - when was a pot manufactured or projectile pt produced
- what is the relative temporal relationship between one archaeological culture, assemblage, or sub-assemblage, and another
problems with normative approach:
1) major problem within normativism is that it ignores all the variability between cultures
2) with normativism’s stress on ideas and mental templates it was difficult for archaeologist to employ to their data, i.e., it is difficult
to identify ideas in the archaeological record
processual archaeology
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- processual archaeology is an approach to archaeology that focuses on the analysis of the causes of cultural change, in particular the
transition to cultural complexity
- processual archaeology is still concerned within traditional normative issues, however, the primary interest is with the why and how
of prehistoric cultural change, i.e., the factors responsible for cultural change
Lewis Binford and the New Archaeology
- movement began in early 1960’s; although lip-service had been paid to a “need for change in archaeological research” since the end
of the 1930’s and 1940’s
- he argued that archaeology, like cultural anthropology, should adopt the goal of explaining cultural change over long periods of time,
i.e., elucidate universal laws that govern cultural change
- modern archaeologists became more interested in the growth of cultural complexity, this lead to much greater interest in the
environment
- the older possibilism perspective had held the environment more or less constant in archaeological thinking, the environment was
seen as background or the setting for cultural development
- this view was replaced within a modified determinism approach that recognized the environment as a factor in cultural change
New Archaeology an approach to archaeological research that emphasizing the importance of understanding underlying cultural
processes in order the elucidate cultural change
- this approach is commonly associated with Lewis R. Binford
- the New Archaeology stressed three things:
1) cultural ecology - per Julian Steward environment
- the study of interrelationships between human societies and their environment
- how humans adapt to their environment
- reemergence of cultural evolutionary theory
2) systems approach
- this approach views culture as a system with a number of subsystems having changing adaptive roles through time
- e.g., technological subsystem = workers, tools, materials, and techniques linked with exploitation of the environment
- while economic and political subsystems operated to facilitate subsistence activities
- New Archaeologists stressed that cultural remains had to correlated within the different subsystems in order to determine the links
between them
- different from normativism where culture was viewed as being share, this approach saw people participating in culture, and
participating in different ways
3) scientific approach
- as previously discussed
- in the past archaeology had lacked rigorous methodologies in both the field and laboratory
- this new approach emphasized standard excavation techniques, sampling methods, analyses procedures (e.g., C14 and other dating
techniques)
middle range research
- by the 1970’s Binford, Michael Schiffer, and others began to question how the extant archaeological record and be correlated with
past human behavior
- this approach attempts to link the static data from the archaeological record with the dynamic processes that formed it
- two primary issues are involved
1) how is the archaeological record form originally and how is it transformed over time
- the archaeological record is not a direct reflection of past human activities
- numerous different forces act upon the material remains after its original deposition
- two categories of processes affect the archaeological record
a) natural processes, e.g., decay, weathering, animal activity, soil pressure (i.e., weight), water transportation, etc.
b) cultural processes, e.g., reuse, trampling, construction
- thus archaeologists must understand what and how transformational processes can affect the archaeological record
2) how to link the present record within past behaviors in as unambiguous a fashion as possible
- archaeologists no longer make simple inferences
- complex analogy is used in an attempt to elucidate the archaeological record, this is a means of reasoning based on the assumption
that if two things are similar in some respects, then they must be similar in other respects
ethnoarchaeology is the study of contemporary peoples to determine processual relationships that will aid in unraveling the
archaeological record, i.e., archaeologists carry out ethnographic studies to document the relationships between human behavior and
the patterns of artifacts and food remains
- e.g., Binford’s Nunamuit Eskimos (site formation processes in camp sites and butchering sites) or study of shellfish gathering by
Australian aborigines
experimental archaeology studies are designed to aid archaeological interpretation by attempting to duplicate aspects of behavioral
processes experimentally under carefully controlled conditions
- e.g., replication studies of stone tool technology or reproduction of pottery manufacture
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