World Archaeology - Intro - Wed, jan 7

What is the archaeologist’s task?

• Uncovering and understanding material traces of past cultures

Where do archaeologists work?

• Private government

• Government organizations

• Universities

• Museums

8 principles of archaeological ethics

• stewardship

• accountability

• commercialization

• public education and outreach

• intellectual property

• public reporting and publication

• records and preservation

• training and resources

Describe the early state societies

• Interest in ancient objects was neither archaeological nor scientific

• Nabonidus, king of Babylon, excavated temple ruins to rededicate them to deities

• Thutmose IV (1412-1402 BC) excavated the Sphinx at Giza because he believed that the sun god would make him Pharaoh if he did so

• Excavation is NOT new

Describe the emergence of archaeology

• Three Age system for organizing time

  • Developed in the 19th century by C.J. Thomsen (Danish antiquarian)

  • Divided prehistory: Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages

Describe the establishment of human antiquity: 1800s

Irrefutable evidence of human artifacts contextually with extinct animal bones

Describe the establishment of human antiquity: 1857

Neanderthal skull provides evidence of a premodern human

Describe the establishment of human antiquity: 1859

Darwin published On The Origin of Species; Lyell studied geologic time and human

Describe the establishment of human antiquity: 1865

Lubbock defined Neolithic and Paleolithic eras

Describe questionable archaeological motivations

• Imperial archaeology

• Looting by treasure hunters

• Connecting to ancient Greeks

• Confirming biblical events

• Justifying oppression and colonialism

• Validating racist policies (e.g., Nazi concept of racial purity

Describe modern archaeology

• Basic archaeological tools

• Both in terms of excavation and theory

• Developed during the early twentieth century

Describe modern excavation methods

• Stratigraphic excavation and seriation

• As used by Sir Flinders Petrie in Egypt and Palestine

Describe culture history

• North American archaeologists

• Had goal of developing chronology

• Developed culture histories through formal schemes

• Classified sites into culture groups using the Midwestern Taxonomic System

• Depression archaeology drove need

  • The Great Depression resulted in a loss of jobs, which led to the government paying workers to do archaeology

Who is V. Gordon Childe

• 1892-1957

• Recognized patterning in archaeological collections across Europe

• Started shift from artifacts to societies

• He himself did not do excavation, he was mainly into armchair archaeology —> analyzed artifacts

• Proposed the occurence of 2 worldwide societal revolutions

  • Neolithic revolution: emergence of settled villages and agriculture

  • Urban revolution: appearance of cities and complex forms of government

Describe the events of 1940s

• Developing scientific methods

• Archaeologists began to focus on study of ancient societies

• NOT just the description and classification of artifacts as in the past

• Gordon Wiley - Viru Valley Survey Project

Describe induction

• Drawing general inferences on teh basis of particular data

• Before 1960s, archaeological work focused on collecting site data, then extrapolating to a culture

Describe deduction

• Drawing particular inferences from general laws and models

• Involves hypothesis testing

• Posits general hypothesis to explain specific data

• Is characteristic of the work in hard sciences

Describe the works of Lewis Binford

• Processual archaeology in the 1960s

• “facts do not speak for themselves”

• We have to ask the appropriate questions to learn anything about the past

• How to get from a static artifact to a dynamic society?

• More data or better methods do not help

• Archaeology must focus on deductive scientific work

• However, this means that processual archaeology can have an extremely reductive view of culture. In Binford’s view, culture was how we adapted to the environment and all aspects of symbolic behaviour were insignificant

Describe middle-range research

• Binford

• Allow archaeologists to make statements about past processes based on observations made on present archaeological materials

• Key methodological steps

  • Observe processes in the present

  • Analyze material patterning left by those processes

Describe Alison Wylie’s contribution

• Induction still valid as science is not EITHER induction OR deduction

• They are varied ways to get to inferences

Define the systems theory

• A system is an interconnected network of elements that together form a whole

Describe systems theory within new archaeology

• One direction pursued by the New Archaeologists was teh application of systems theory to study past societies

• They used systems theory to explain the feedback loop of changes in teh archaeological record that result from changes in interrelated aspects of culture

Describe cultural resource management

• Archaeology carried out with the aims of mitigating teh effects of development

• National Historic Preservation Act, Section 106 (1966)

• Additional municipal or provincial legislation may regulate the impact of development or archaeological sites

Describe the contributions of Ian Hodder

• Postprocessual archaeology - reaction against processual archaeology from the late 1970s

• Should not be a hard science like physics

• Should emulate historians in interpreting the past

• Should work to understand teh past from the perspective of the people who lived through the past - EMIC not ETIC (internal perspective, versus external approach)

• Should not be hypothesis based —> contextual data is very important and required a dynamic interpretation

• Is not “truth” based

Describe hermeneutics

• Central to postprocessual archaeology

• Encompasses a theory of interpretation

• Stresses the interaction between the presuppositions brought to a problem and the independent empirical reality of observations and experiences

  • Biases

  • Reinterpretations

  • Continual inquiry

Describe hermenutics versus processual

• New archaeology tests archaeological hypotheses

• In Hermeneutics archaeologists come with preexisting knowledge and questions

• Hermeneutic interpretation is an open-ended cycle of continual inquiry

• Different presuppositions could mean different interpretations

Contrast processual and postprocessual archaeology

Describe feminist archaeology

• Gender inequities in the practice of archaeology

• Focuses on how archaeologist study gender

• Examines a wide range of topics

• Focuses on how archaeologists represent gender:

  • Masked bias toward viewing men as the active agents of change and women as a passive

  • Who does what in a society —> depends on who and how you research

Describe agency theory

• Assumption that the basic unit of archaeological interest is the individual, not society

• Focus on purposeful actions of individuals in society

• Requires constant balancing through

  • Recognition that history consists of the choices and actions of individuals

  • Awarness that the choices people make are strongly shaped by

    • The social world

    • The material conditions in which they live

  • E.f. Hegmon and Kulow - Mibmres Pottery

Describe the contributions of Robert Dunnell

• Evolutionary archaeology

• Stresses teh importance of evolutionary theory as unifying theory for archaeology

• Encompasses a range of approaches

  • Ecological studies of changes in human adaptation

  • Artifact studies that explain changes in frequencies and types of artifacts at sites in terms of selection

Describe thunderstones