What is Archaeology?
Lesson Objectives: Understand anthropology’s role in the
social sciences and archaeology’s role in anthropology.
Definition of anthropological archaeology: First define anthropology, since archaeology is a part of it. It is the study of humanity from a bio-cultural perspective. How is anthropology different from all other social sciences? All social science was developed in the West; anthropology is the only one traditionally studying non-Western people and cultures.
We need to know anthropological terms. How do we define ethnocentrism? The judging of one culture by the standards of another. Every culture does it; it is just a matter of degree, from the extremes of viewing other lifestyles as inferior to one’s own to ethnic cleansing and holocaust. We can find many examples in the news every day. What is the antidote to ethnocentrism? Cultural relativity, or judging a culture in its own terms. A newer term, multiculturalism, is popular these days, but the meaning is different, implying a society made up of many different cultural traditions. Our Western culture is so obsessed with technology that we judge everyone by that standard, and those who don’t have all our PalmPilots and cell phones are called underdeveloped or lesser developed. We have come up with silly abbreviations: LDCs are the Lesser-Developed Countries, and so on. What is development, exactly? To us it is technology. Well those folks are still plowing with an ox, so they are more “primitive” than we (even if the ox makes more sense to them because it is cheap and available). If we defined development in some other way, would we be the most “advanced” of all? What if we spoke of literary, architectural, or artistic development? Where would the U.S. be, say, in comparison with India and its Taj Mahal and thousands of years of beautiful poetry? Let’s throw out those words “primitive” and “advanced” and just see different cultures as different, perhaps with systems more or less complex, but not higher or lower, better or worse.
Define emic and etic? They are terms originating from concepts in linguistic anthropology. Phoneme is the sound that has meaning to the native speaker, while phonetic analysis is the scientific study of the sounds made in a language by an outside expert, whether they are understood or not. By extension, etic is the study of a culture by an anthropological specialist, and emic is the understanding of the culture from the point of view of the native. Which is better? Both of course are important to do/have. Besides, etic is just someone else’s emic.
What are the unique traditions of anthropology that differentiate it from other social sciences? First there is participant observation, in which the anthropologist who is doing the ethnographic study, for example, becomes a participant in the culture being studied, not just observing it from the outside. Another hallowed tradition is cross-cultural comparison of anthropological data so as to study humanity as a whole, not just “Western” (white, Judeo-Christian, Euroamerican) culture. Finally, anthropology is holistic, meaning it is inclusive of many different kinds of research, linking the biological and cultural and looking for the worldwide perspective. All this can relate to the modern world’s different political agendas. Applied anthropology offers advocacy for people without power, without history. Anthropological views of current world problems can include studying the origins of civilization and the long history of violence in the Middle East, the imposition of Western technology and values upon other cultures, or the application of methods from within a culture to help alleviate poverty, disease, and other ills.
What are the subdisciplines of anthropology? See diagram on page 17 of Ashmore and Sharer text [project on screen]. First there is the twofold division of biological and cultural, with each overlapping the other. Can we separate biology and culture? Nature vs. nurture arguments are among the most crucial in many world issues today (whether in questions of gender, race, ethnicity, or other social stratification; medicine; and so forth).
Cultural anthropology includes specializations such as economic, political, social, folklore, kinship studies, anthropology of art, of dance, ethnomusicology, etc. The primary terms to know are ethnography and ethnology. The former is the recording of culture, the description and detail, while the latter is the use of ethnographic data for scientific study and cross-cultural comparison.
What is linguistic anthropology? A linguist is not the same thing as a polyglot (someone who knows many languages), but someone who studies language in its cultural context. Linguistic anthropology is considered a very large subdivision of cultural, or a subdiscipline on its own, with a huge body of knowledge and subject matter, including sociolinguistics (how the social setting influences language use), historical linguistics (important to see how languages evolve and originate), language and thought (how one influences the other and vice versa), and other specializations. Biological anthropology comprises two major areas of research: human evolution and human biological variation. These two overlap, and also include related areas such as studies of non-human primates.
Where does archaeology fit within all these? As the fourth major subdiscipline of anthropology, it does constitute a type of cultural anthropology. It is defined as the study of past humans based on investigation of their material remains. It is very different from the rest of anthropology because of its method. You do not need the people, only their stuff. Often, usually, the people are dead, but not always. The dead tell no lies, but often they do not tell anything: we must tease it out from the material evidence. Archaeology is detective work, with its own specialized techniques, piecing together what happened in the past based on not only the material items and residues, but also their relationships and contexts. And archaeology uses information from all the other subdisciplines of anthropology. It is easy to relate the practice of archaeology to some current case in the news media for identifying material evidence (OJ trial was great for this): testimony of witnesses can be compared with use of history (with its own biases) in historic archaeology.
Applied anthropology can be seen as a fifth major subdiscipline, or the applied focus can be viewed as something necessary to apply to all areas of anthropology. Applied anthropology can be done within or outside of academia, and includes more than research. It is the use of anthropological knowledge and methods to address modern human problems and issues. There are countless areas of applied focus, from medicine and health care to forensic anthropology to world economic development.
How is the anthropological viewpoint different? This is very important, and often stressed in the practice of applied anthropology. The perspective is from the bottom up, from the point of view of the culture or group being studied (an emic AND etic view) as presented to someone else. The anthropological viewpoint can explain culture to those outsiders making policy or otherwise affecting a particular group; it can be a position of advocacy as well.
Public archaeology is applied anthropology. It includes not only managing archaeological sites and other cultural resources, but also involvement in historic preservation planning and law, archaeology education from schoolkids to avocational archaeologists to the general public, archaeology in the popular media from cartoons to movies to literature, and understanding the politics of archaeological practice. It involves the anthropological viewpoint because it takes into consideration landowners, descendants, and people with political, legal, and other interests in the archaeological record, as well as professional archaeologists.
Now we see that all archaeology is public archaeology. We need to account for how we use public funds to investigate the past; we need to define whose past we are investigating, and why it is important to save it when there are other more pressing world problems. All archaeology can/should be applied anthropology: for example, forensic archaeology, excavation of murder and genocide victims (e.g., Lloyd 2002) in Latin America, the Balkans, and elsewhere after ethnic conflict; excavation of World Trade Center victims and finding their artifact possessions. There can be practical, useful information derived from all archaeological work. Rathje’s (2002) garbology studies are the most clearly practical in their applications of knowledge about what we throw away (up to 15 percent usable food in Americans’ garbage), what ends up in landfills, and what does not degrade as expected (paper being the greatest component of landfills). Many archaeological studies of human effects upon natural environments, and vice versa, are useful today to see the consequences of various natural and cultural disasters, environmental depletion, and overuse/extinction of biotic and other natural resources.
Is modern anthropological anthropology without bias? A last caution, about archaeology or any other research: all science or other scholarly endeavor is a product of its time, with the political and other biases that might be expected. In this class we will try to do scientific archaeology, but also to have some of what has been called the postprocessual or postmodern viewpoint and look at the biases that might be present based on who is doing the research. What do you suppose might be some modern biases in archaeology? It is still dominated by elites, white upper- or middle-class males in a Western capitalist system. Does this matter? Will our interpretation of the past be different if African-American women are doing it? A prehistoric stone tool is a stone tool to whoever excavates it, but can you determine the sex, gender, age, other social information about who made it? Not so far! This does not stop us from doing it. Think of reconstructions such as are common in many museums where male figures hold the large stone tools and women and children are in the background. Diane Gifford-Gonzales’s article entitled The Real Flintstones? (1985) [show cartoon from this article] warns us not to impose our modern views or someone’s modern view upon reconstructions of the past. She notes how most museum exhibits portray prehistoric men doing useful, interesting things and standing up straight, while their women are in the role of “drudge on the hide,” always bending over domestic tasks such as hide-scraping or cooking.