ANTH 450 - Exam #3

Classification exercise importance

Classification exercise importance

Helps identify patterning in space and time
Classification in eyes of the makers not always evident (except historical)

Typologies

•  classification scheme of artifacts that produces types defined by consistent clustering of attributes

Attribute

well-defined characteristic that is observable or measurable

Why do classification

• 1. Orders things - manageable units

• 2. Summarize characteristics that artifacts share; involves the description of types

  • Types - clusters of attributes (form, style, manufacture) that occur on the same artifacts repeatedly

• 3. Suggests a series of relationships between types in the assemblage

  • Are types functionally equivalent?

• 4. The backbone of culture-historical research

• 5. Lets us study variability – a processual goal

Morphological types

• descriptive grouping (akin to a class), doesn’t imply function or chronology

Temporal types

• these have chronological significance; maybe be known as index fossil

Functional types

• reflects how object was used in the past; may or may not be temporal or morphological types

Binford Vs. Bordes

• Europe was waiting for American Antiquity

  • Bordes was saying certain Neanderthal groups

• Cultural (Bordes) vs functional (Binford)

European view Versus North American

Reflecting a culture/society (European) rather than a certain aspect of more functional around the world

Was Binford a fan of ethnography?

• Yes!

• They are necessary

• Criticism?

  • They aren’t trained to be psychologists

  • If you just say observable behavior, there might not be modern analogue

Ethnoarchaeology as middle range

• The bridge between the modern and now

• Need that actual experience rather than only analysis

Behavioral Archaeology

• Rebuilding systems, and how the behavior is reflected on the record

  • Environmentally reactionary

Leslie White

Basic Law of Evolution
Formula of Culture=Energy x Technology
Did not like Boas
Sohlens and Service - difference in types of evolutions

• Find a middle ground

Major influences on post-processual

Intersectionality - critically examining past archaeologist’s work, with intersections
Trying to be as inclusive as possible

Marxism

How is marxism different from orthodox marxism?

Not as weighed down

Emphasized human consciousness

Views of postmodernism

• EVERYTHING is subjective

• Lee was taught with processualism

• Lit up with the objectivity as a processualist

• Where is the resonance?

How does the new cultural anthropology influence Post-Processual?

• Viewing from their own terms, like Boas was saying to do, while criticizing the actual process on which he does

• Nuance is necessary

• Postmodernism - take culture beyond cultural anthropology

Ian Hodder

Developed post-processual in Britain

Contextual Archaeology - need to understand the parts to conduct the archaeology

Status of gender studies in early 1980s

Beginning of Third Wave feminism
Does not need to be gendered in modern things, it does have a place, and it doesn’t need to be skewed to men

2nd Wave of Post Processual

Shanks, Tilley, Ucko

Relativism

Demystify the expressions of experts as their interpretation

Foraging

• Foragers typically do not store foods; they gather foods directly

• Practice “residential mobility” by moving their residential camps to resources

• They are not “wandering”, they know are what they doing

  • The semantics matter - post-processual

• Mover their residential camps to places where particular resources are available and access those resources from those camps

• Considerable variability in the size of the group as well as in the number of residential moves during an annual cycle

• Remembrance in tribal populations of oral history of horses

• Eric Alden-Smith

Collecting

• Collectors position their residential bases centrally, and access resources with task groups that make trips to resource localities

• They acquire whatever resource it is, process it and return to the main residential base

  • Buffering - having the ability to take more in one trip, materials to adapt

• Task groups leave the residential base, conduct a specific activity e.g., fishing, and then return to the main camp

• Collector strategies are most common in parts of the world where resource availability is limited to one part of the year, and many resources must be harvested at once

Unearthed Documentary - Yellowstone

• Words Lee hates - treasures, secrets, 

• External publications

  • Internal vs. External

Last Supper Cave

Western Stemmed Tradition (WST)
LSC - Totally excavated in 1973-74 with LSU and NSM

• Unpublished and incomplete manuscript circulated

• Grayson’s faunal analysis

  • Extremely processual
    

• There are projects I will never finish, and Last Supper Cave is one of them…” - Tom Layton, 2006

  Students are chipping away

The Foraging Spectrum

• Famous cultural anthropologist

• Hunter-gatherer is a term we ascribe

• Tries to add powerful state & non state outsiders treat as hunter-gatherers

• People who self-identify

• There needs to be a study of us calling them certain names, like primitives

• Sense of self and identify other groups

UNDRIP

United Nations: Declaration on The Rights of Indigenous Peoples

UNDROP

United Nations Declaration on the rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas

Binford on the archaeological record

The product of derivative of a cultural system, which means we cannot just look for causes

Binford’s definition for dynamics

Ethnoarchaeological study of living systems

tethered nomadism

extreme redundancy in the reuse of identical places (water sources) over time

residential base

Foragers, the hub of subsistence activities, the locus out of which foraging parties originate, where most of the processing, manufacturing, and maintenance, activities

Location (Binford)

Place where extractive tasks are exclusively carried out.
Foragers are low bulk

Collectors

Storage of food for at least part of the year
Logistically organized food-procurement parties

Collector task groups

Searching for specific resources, specialization

Types of collector sites

field camp
Stations
caches

Field camp

Temporary operational center
Artifacts depend on the resource

Station

Sites for special-purpose are localized with information gathering
Characteristic of logistically organized systems

Cache

Bulk storage for certain resources