Theory Midterm

Rouse 1953

Overview of different culture-historical objectives

descriptive, classificatory, geographic, chronological, historical

Steward 1942

Direct historical approach is better than the taxonomic approach

Can nowd esribe artifacts within space and time

combine ethnographic and historical data

arcaheologists need to return to a cultural science-taxonomic approach is too much of a natural science methodology

Spaulding 1985

McKern (taxonomic) method as a precurser to chronology

Steward 1949

Looked for regularities accross culture

differences in societies are caused by differences in environmnets

Deetz 1988

Primary concern for anthropology is culture

arcaheology and anthropology are after the same goal

we should refocus the questions on the process that creates that archeological record, not just teh documentaion of the record

Kluckholn 1940

Is a cultural anthropologists who is critical towards anthropology becasue they are too preoccupied with facts

Best way to do archaeolgy is to ask questions first and not let the data limit you

Spaulding 1953

Arguaing for statistics in archaeology and seriation

Ford 1954

Argues when you use statsitics, you take the poeple out of archaeology

Argues for an emic approch

OBrien et al. 2005

The goal of the new archaeology was to study cultural processes as a dynamic process that cannot be understood by a static archeological record

Archaeology had to be studied scientifically

New arcaheology is less of an explosion, more of a revolution

Binford 1962

Archaeology as anthropology

Processularism birth announcement

Culture is anything other than biological functions

Processuralism is different than the direct hirostical approach because it emphasizes herterogeniety

With new archeology, the goal is not to reconstrcut the past, but to explain it

Binford 1967

Historical reconstructions and processural explanations cannot be seperated

Chang 1967

Valuable for archaeologists to do ethnographic work

argusing for an emic approach

Salmon 1967

All archaeologists do science

all science is inductive

archaeologists use prior probaility to determine the liklihood of a hypothesis

There is a difference between general and universal laws

Watson 1971

As archaeologists we are not interested in laws, but the explanation of things

A law is something that is repeadetly true- there is none in archeology that seek to understand themes of human behavior

Kuhn 1962

The growth of science is not gradual, but happens in terms of puncuated equillibrium

Paragdigm shifts change the way we fundamentally think of things and teh changing strcuture of knowledge

Bintliff 1993

Post processuralism rose in the wake of post fordism as a result of decentralized governmnet and means of production

post processuralism is about the indvidual, its ironic because in compartmentalized women and marginilized groups

Wittgenstein and the third way

Flannery 1982

Critique on how archaeologists are moving away from culture

Binford 1989

Porcessuralism challenged culture history

We label cultures based on what is reprented in the arcaheological record, and we map them and see patterns, but we make no effort to explain anything. This is the basis of culture history, and most people still practice itWe are just looking for variability, and we need some new ways to arganize the data and share ideas

Gould 1980

Not everything has a purpose

Archaeolgists are unable to see all possibilities, most poeple just go the most common route- problem of equifinality

Leone et al. 1987

Employing critical theory is helpful to address that history will always be written from a certain POV

Earl and Pruecel 1987

Radical approach in archaeology and geography reject postivism

Radiaclas raise 4 issues: new archaeologists discount history, archaeologists cannot eliminate subjectivity, relevance of archaeology to the modern world, overlook the geographic inference problem

Shanks and Tilley 1987

Use historical contexts as their concultion, produced no new knowledge

Hodder 1985

People seen as active in their culture

there is a split between function/menaing, process/norm, and system/culture

Social change is historically dependent

archaeological knowledge of the past is based on meaning given to the arcaheologiacl record within the current cultural paradigm

Popper 1959

A single argument cannot be both inductive and deductive

If an argument cannot be falsified, then it stays as the status quo, not as the truth, and remains valid until it can be falsified