Kinds of Archaeology
Lesson Objectives: Compare different types of archaeology.
What are the different kinds of archaeology, how did each originate, and in what larger discipline? Many of them overlap, and many do not have a completely anthropological viewpoint. Some immediately think of archaeology in terms of Egypt or Rome, not realizing you can do it anywhere; someone probably has, right where you live.
Much of classical archaeology concerns what Western culture
considers the classic civilizations of western Asia, Egypt, and Europe,
and the study of these derives in large part from history, philology
(study of ancient texts), and art history. Prehistoric is often
distinguished from historic archaeology, the latter being study
of cultures who have written history. Sometimes it is difficult to 
distinguish the boundary between history and prehistory,
since early writing systems do not tell us everything and that boundary
is at radically different times in different places. When does history
begin here in Florida? As soon as the first Spanish arrive in the early
sixteenth century and write down what they see of the native people
they encountered. Are these accounts biased? Of course; they are ethnocentric
and concerned with specifics of the expeditions, getting food, gold,
other needs, and often considered the natives as less than human. What
are the biases of history? Who writes history? The winners, the elites.
In the Americas there is a distinct body of methods and theory for historic
archaeology, and we have now gone from investigating only the elite
sites (such as plantations in the South, often much better-funded projects)
to the sites of those without history (such as slave cabins at those
plantations, or camps of imported Chinese railroad workers, or other
minority peoples).
Clearly classical archaeology is historic archaeology
as well. In Europe, archaeology is often considered by default to be
classical materials and time periods, as distinguished from prehistory.
So that, for example, in Florence, Italy, the prehistory museum goes
from the first Paleolithic people hundreds of thousands of years ago
to the Bronze Age, some 4,000 years ago, while the archaeology museum
begins with the Bronze Age and goes through the classical civilizations
of Greece and Rome. Prehistoric archaeology has its own difficulties,
such as the possibility of past human systems with no modern analogs
that we would have a hard time reconstructing. Sometimes we have to
treat early civilizations as if they were prehistoric, if their writing
systems cannot be understood. This is the case in the Indus River Valley
of India and Pakistan, for example. Study of the great Maya civilization
in Mesoamerica has lately been “transformed” into historic
archaeology because we can finally read their glyphic writing [show
picture of glyphs]. The story of this breakthrough is given in Breaking
the Maya Code (Coe 1999), which details how epigraphers (who studied
the glyphs), linguists, historians and art historians, as well as archaeologists,
disagreed or cooperated in the solving of the puzzles, and how political
issues delayed progress, since the correct interpretations by a Russian
linguist were ignored because of the Cold War.
Underwater archaeology is another specialization
that requires a whole additional body of knowledge, and not only about
diving. What else would be different? Specific techniques and methods
adapted to the underwater environment, complex machinery and recording
systems, various technologies, and also general knowledge of boats and
ships, which you need to get out there even if you are not excavating
shipwrecks. It is something like 100 times as expensive as terrestrial
archaeology. Besides sunken watercraft, there is everything else imaginable
underwater, from silted-in ports and docks to lost cities submerged
during floods or earthquakes to prehistoric camps drowned after the
end of the Ice Age when the glaciers melted and sea levels rose.
Pseudoarchaeology is a term given to non-scientific
accounts based on real or imagined evidence. People are still looking
for lost continents such as Atlantis, another one in the Pacific called
Mu, evidence that Native Americans are the ten lost tribes of Israelites
from the Bible, or that early forms of humans still exist (such as the
Abominable Snowman, Yeti, or closer to home, the “Skunk Ape”
still supposedly being sighted in Florida forests). This is the kind
of phony archaeology seen on television's In Search Of or in
bad-science movies such as Stargate. Is it harmless? Think
of the pseudoarchaeology of Erik Van Daniken’s Chariots of
the Gods (1971) and other books, which claim that ancient astronauts
arrived to teach people how to build pyramids and so on. This is the
ultimate racism or ethnocentrism, indicating that ancient humans were
not smart enough to think of complex technology such as pyramids or
big stone statues.
Other kinds of archaeology we will explore
include orientations toward cultural resources management, world heritage
conservation, and historic preservation fields; specific analyses such
as ethnobotany and zooarchaeology; restoration of monuments and conservation
of artifacts; and other such specializations. It should be noted that
in the Americas, archaeology is usually a part of anthropology and included
in anthropology departments of universities and museums, while in Europe,
Canada, and other locations it is a separate division. One reason for
this is historic: in America, archaeologists were studying the remains
of the cultures whose last living peoples were being studied by ethnographers
and other anthropologists, so there was natural interaction. In Europe,
naturalists and antiquarians who collected artifacts and tried to explain
them usually interacted more with the earth scientists, while social
anthropology was more allied with the social sciences.
Lately there has been some division of archaeology into more scientific vs. more humanistic; these two are sometimes labeled processual vs. postprocessual archaeology. We will explore these philosophies and realize how one must do both to do good work.
What are the several goals of archaeology?
1. Description of the record of the past and sequences of culture history—finding
out what happened.
2. Determining how, even why things happened; function and cultural
processes of change or lack of change and past human systems.
3. Trying to achieve the view of the past people as to why and how they
did things, what was significant to them—an emic or postprocessual
archaeology.
4. Reconstructing and interpreting the past, especially in terms of
practical applications.
5. Preservation of the evidence of the past for the benefit of all.
Scientific archaeology is done by testing hypotheses, looking at form and function, proceeding in a self-correcting fashion, as explained in your book on page 11. It tries to see both synchronic and diachronic views, or at one point in time and through time.
What jobs can you have if you are an archaeologist?
The professionalization of archaeology has included expansion into several
areas of the workplace. Besides the traditional academic and museum
curatorial or research positions, there are jobs in federal, state,
and local agencies as cultural resources managers, private archaeology
companies who do research and compliance work in advance of proposed
construction, and educators, interpreters, and others who bring archaeology
to the public more intensively. It is not very possible any more to
be a lone, isolated researcher in the lab or field with no connection
to the wider goals of public archaeology; modern professional ethics
require a knowledge of how the research relates to the wider society.
There are many professional associations: one important
one is the Register
of Professional Archaeologists (RPA, formerly the Society of Professional
Archaeologists or SOPA), which sets standards and ethics. Two other
major national groups are the Society
for American Archaeology (SAA) and the Archaeological
Institute of America (AIA). State, local, and regional societies
abound. Most have open membership to anyone who abides by the ethical
principles and goals, and most have websites describing how to join.
Modern professional archaeological concerns are well stated in our Seven Principles that are being emphasized in this class. These include the obligation to publish, not only for the scientific audience but for the public; the obligation to work with the people whose ancestors one is researching; the need to understand the many stakeholders in reconstructions and interpretations of the human past; and the view that archaeology must be socially relevant and produce information that can be useful in addressing real-world human problems.