Archaeological Interpretation and Reconstruction
Lesson Objectives: Compare ethnographic analogy, ethnoarchaeology,
and experimental archaeology; understand practical applications of archaeology,
reconstruction of past human systems and the biases therein.
After we know what we have, where it is, how old it is, and have tabulated all the specimens and done the description, we next must work on explanation, interpretation, and reconstruction of past human lifeways. What do these mean? Essentially the what and where and when are used to try to determine the how and the why.
What is analogy, and why must we use it to explain the past? It is figuring out the unknown by beginning with the known, and we use it because it is the best and often only way we can explain the behavior of people who are not here to explain it themselves (or even to explain it in an alternative way if we want another view beyond that of the people themselves). Three different uses of analogy in archaeology are called ethnographic analogy, ethnoarchaeology, and experimental archaeology.
What do we mean by ethnographic analogy? This means explaining the archaeological evidence in terms of behavior recorded in the historic and ethnographic record. The advantage is that human behavior in countless types of cultures all over the world has been recorded in ethnographic and historical documents. The disadvantages are that such records are of course always biased, and that the culture you are investigating archaeologically may not be related to any known culture. Another disadvantage is that history and ethnography do not include very much about material culture, which is what you are digging. The records might describe pyramids or clothing or houses, but not what the garbage looks like or where it is deposited.
What classic example of ethnographic analogy is described in your book (p. 170-71)? Lewis Binford, a major archaeological theorist, encountered at midwestern late prehistoric sites many pit features filled with charred wood and corncobs that he reasoned would have produced a lot of smoke. To figure out what they were for, he read through the literature about Native Americans in this region and found that they processed deer hides by drying and smoking them over small smoldering fire pits during historic times; he reasoned that this activity could be traced back in time to the sites dating A.D. 1000 that he was excavating (Binford 1967).
Does this mean that all such pits found in the eastern U.S. were for hide smoking? At the San Luis mission site in Tallahassee, archaeologists excavated the large Apalachee Indian council house that we know from historic documents was the political center of the native town, not far from the Spanish church and other colonial buildings. The council house is now reconstructed and wonderful to visit because you can see the huge circular building with the very tall thatched roof in downtown Tallahassee. Large postmolds in a big circle delimited the building in the ground, and around the inside there were small postmolds indicating what the historic documents say were sitting and sleeping platforms. Under these were pits full of charred corncobs that would have made lots of smoke. Were they processing hides? The Spanish documents say they were making smoke to keep out mosquitoes, and it makes more sense, given the public function of the building and the abundance of bugs in Florida! When we find corncob-filled pits at prehistoric sites in the northwest Florida area we can suggest they were similarly for bug control. This kind of specific analogy can work very well, in these two cases, because there is clear cultural continuity from the prehistoric archaeological record forward into historic times.
What if there is no continuous or appropriate cultural record into historic time? We can use more general analogies, such as with cultures in similar environmental settings and sociopolitical organizations. Sometimes this is better than historic cultures in the same area for interpreting remains of foraging peoples in the more distant past. So, for example, during the Archaic, some 5,000-8,000 years ago in Florida, we know people were hunting and gathering modern species. To understand their remains we might not want to use historic documents describing complex chiefly sedentary societies supported by maize agriculture that were first encountered by the Spanish; these evolved thousands of years later than the Archaic and were very differently organized. Examining the ethnographic records of hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world in similar forested warm temperate environments might give us better clues to the prehistoric adaptation. General analogy of this type is common in archaeological interpretation, but is more risky.
Uncritical use of the ethnographic record is a common abuse. There are so few hunter-gatherers left that those who are well-studied are subjected to this kind of analogy all the time. The !Kung foragers (San or Ju/hoansi) of South Africa, made famous in The Hunters, the classic 1957 anthropology movie that many of you have seen, are often used in analogies to explain Archaic sites in the eastern U.S. (mainly because archaeologists now in practice saw that movie during their training!). This is usually inappropriate, since the southern African Kalahari desert is enormously different in environment and cultural adaptation from the wet, forested climate we had here after the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age). European Paleolithic cultures tens of thousands of years old have been explained using Australian aboriginal cultures, with the justification that, well, the latter are “still” in the Stone Age! This unilineal model of cultural evolution, nicely diagrammed on p. 172 in the book, assumes every society has to pass through stages of complexity and some, like the native Australians, who never did develop agriculture, are assumed to be moving far more slowly than the superior Europeans! You can see this attitude all the time with the sensational geographic shows showing “Stone Age” people or our “living ancestors” (oxymoronic or just moronic phrase!).
What is ethnoarchaeology? Archaeologists developed this method to counteract some of the abuses of ethnographic analogy. It means that the archaeologist is doing the ethnography, studying living peoples, with special attention to the relationship of behavior and the material remains. Your book mentions Longacre and Ayres’s (1968) study of a recently abandoned Apache house, which is still a classic. They looked at the stuff lying around and tried to reconstruct what they thought had gone on there and the composition of the family. They did a pretty good job, as measured by later obtaining direct information on the family itself. Another classic is Lewis Binford’s (1981) study of the Nunamiut, an “Eskimo” people with whom he lived and studied. Though in the 20th century they used guns and other modern items, he reasoned that some of their hunting behavior would retain more traditional aspects, and he described, for example, the butchering of animals and deposition of different kinds of bones in different ways. This could be compared with ancient Arctic hunter-gatherer cultures or other cold-climate peoples such as Europeans during the Ice Age. Are there fewer biases in ethnoarchaeology than in ethnographic analogy? Probably not fewer, just different kinds. Binford, for example, was far less interested in the activities of women among the Nunamiut, though their domestic work arguably leaves at least an equal amount, if not more, of an archaeological record than men’s activities.
What is experimental archaeology? Sometimes also called actualistic studies, this is the attempt to replicate past human behavior, usually specific technologies. Flintknapping is an especially popular form. Other experiments have included recruiting large groups of people to build mounds or earthworks with basketloads of dirt and recording how long it took, how many worker-hours and so on; recreating native houses out of local raw materials; or making pottery out of local clay from the riverbank and coiling it and using prehistoric techniques and designs. Some experiments have had participants living in recreated ancient villages for a set period of time just to see what it was like and what they could learn. This is very different from a Survivor type of television show. Participants would have the knowledge of past technologies, food sources, and so on.
Since we are trying to emphasize really practical applications of archaeology in this class, we might mention that archaeologists, familiar with all kinds of past technologies, would be very useful in getting along after major disasters, when there is no electricity or other power sources we are used to having at the flick of a switch.
What kinds of human behavior can be reconstructed from the archaeological evidence? The easiest kinds of things to see are those technological/environmental aspects of culture that the cultural materialist perspective perceive as the major constraints structuring cultural systems. We can see what artifact manufacturing methods and raw materials were used, what people ate, where they lived, and how old the sites are. We can do settlement pattern archaeology and see how different kinds of sites, say, camps and villages, are arranged across the landscape, and cultural ecology, relating the cultural behavior to the kinds of natural (and even social) environments the sites are in. This is the major reason that most archaeologists, especially those who do fieldwork often, are cultural materialists, interpreting everything in terms of environments and technology. Because this is what we CAN do best; it is much more difficult to see social behavior, and even more so to find ideological systems, what the people believed.
Even with techno-environmental issues, we could be very mistaken. We can reconstruct prehistoric diet from the animal bones preserved at the site, but are remains of everything people ate left in their garbage pile? What if some garbage is treated differently, perhaps disposed of farther away because it smells? Does your trash can reflect everything you ate today? If you got fast food on the way to class, we will never know that from your own kitchen garbage. There are many sources of error even for the easier task of interpreting past technology and subsistence (making a living, using environmental resources).
What ways are used to reconstruct past social systems? We have to look for material evidence of social relationships, of political power and economic systems. Your book does a fine treatment of using settlement patterns to reconstruct such issues (pp. 183-193). What would be obvious material clues to social status? Wealth items or lack of them, differential treatment of burials, different house sizes; we could list many. Processual or scientific archaeologists have been looking for decades at the social dimensions of mortuary practices, the way the treatment of the dead reflects not only the rank or status of the dead person but also the family and other kin ties and relationships and statuses of the living (not to mention their religious or other belief systems). Studies that can trace raw materials or finished artifacts back to their sources can document economic patterns of how the items move around the map, showing various kinds of interaction. When we get Florida conch shells in 1,700-year-old human burials in Ohio mounds, we know somehow these rare items were of great importance to make it that far. But can we say that people came from Ohio to Florida to collect them like tourists do today? Or could they move north in what we call a down-the-line (domino effect) fashion? This is harder to reconstruct in prehistory.
Can we ever reconstruct past belief systems and ritual? This is the hardest to do, especially in prehistoric times, without any written record of what people were thinking and believing. Postprocessual archaeologists really emphasize social and ideological issues too. The discussion in your book of the famous Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük is an excellent introduction to the exciting work going on there lately, which reinterprets older excavations in light of new findings. Instead of seeing rooms with images of bulls and women as ceremonial shrines, the reinterpretation is that regular dwelling places might be decorated with such images. Are they deities or other important spiritual figures? How can we tell? In this classroom, how many people are wearing or carrying an artifact with a bull image on it? Do those images reflect your ideological system? Yes, because the USF team logo is Rocky the Bull, and you are presumably rooting for sports teams and generally supporting the totem of your school. But does it mean you worship bulls? If we had no written record to explain this, what would we say when we excavated such items? “Must be ceremonial?”
Discussion of past ideology and how to make testable hypotheses concerning the archaeological record is endless in archaeology. The Çatalhöyük project has a great website (Wolle 2002) where you can see cool discussions of whether the female figurines indicate goddess worship. [By the way, this is a reminder that website papers are due in two weeks at midterm {see Student Exercises section of this course design package}]. It is enormously difficult to arrive at prehistoric beliefs. By comparison, let us look at Western culture over the last 1,000 years, with its Christian focus. Images of the Virgin Mary are all over the place and presented in very different ways (though she usually has blue clothing!). Look at European religious painting, at Catholic icons such as the Virgin of Fatima or of Lourdes. Mexicans have the Virgin of Guadaloupe, based on a colonial tale of a lady appearing to a poor Indian peasant and telling him to get the bishop to build a church there, and making roses appear in the snow. This story was a great marketing device for the Church because the Virgin’s image appeared on the guy’s cloak, and she had Indian features, not to mention the blue outfit. The image is now enshrined over the altar in the famous church in Mexico City, in what is today a very Catholic country. All this imagery and devotion to the Virgin Mary, but is she a goddess, with any power? Are Catholics goddess worshippers, and do women therefore have a powerful position in the Catholic church? No, they are not even allowed to be priests. The sheer ubiquity of an image does not mean it has power in itself or can easily tell who had spiritual or social power.
What is archaeoastronomy? Just what it sounds like: looking for reflections of astronomical knowledge in the archaeological record. As we use patterns in the distribution of material culture to try to reconstruct past belief systems, we might see alignments of buildings or other constructions that reflect alignments of stars, planets, the sun, and the moon. With computer assistance we can now find out, say, where the sun was rising on the day of the summer solstice in A.D. 200, the date of our mound complex, and see if the mounds line up with this particular sunrise. Once you get archaeological features on a map you can play around with them to see such things. We know from ethnographic analogy and archaeology that the Maya gave great importance to the planet Venus, which guided many of their rituals and other activities; recent deciphering of the written texts now confirm this. Once there are written records, interpreting ideology becomes a little easier (depending upon what the people wrote!).
How can we summarize the different frameworks for interpreting the past? Though the book puts all of this into one chapter (chapter 9), we have been discussing these all along throughout the class. So this is a review before the midterm exam and also to help us understand the emphases in the second half of the class, where we will not simply go through the culture history of the whole world, 2 million years in a half-semester, but also will look at the scientific interpretations and how we might question their biases.
What are the mechanisms of culture change or stability? For a long time archaeology was doing only culture history, saying what happened and when, and explaining change through just simple assumptions of invention and diffusion. Invention or innovation might become accepted in the wider society and diffuse gradually out to other cultures. So you could trace a particular trait, such as building conical burial mounds or making red-painted pottery, from its point of origin and see how widespread it becomes in space and time. Trait lists are a hallmark of culture history explanations.
How is diffusion investigated? The book (p. 206) notes how diffusion is an elusive mechanism of culture change. In historic times we can clarify it by speaking of trade in material items, movement of ideas, and movements of people through migration, enslavement, invasion, and other more specific cultural processes, but these are harder to see in the prehistoric record. We cannot even use the term “exchange” because it might have been tribute to a ruler or gift-giving (in other words, one-sided). Sometimes mechanisms such as conquest can sometimes be seen very dramatically in prehistory, such as shown in the picture on p. 208 of the book, in which human skeletons are fallen sprawled in the remains of burned buildings at a site in ninth-century B.C. Iran. Pretty clearly something dramatic happened here! But most of the time even large-scale culture change such as population movements cannot be detected in the prehistoric record with great certainty.
How can we see archaeologically when culture change is caused by environmental change? The volcano covering Pompeii in A.D. 79 is a pretty clear example, not only from the deposits in the ground but from written records. A prehistoric example is noted in the book (p. 209) from eleventh-century Arizona. It is also mentioned that we can learn of environmental change that humans create, one of the most useful areas of archaeology, since we can see the effects upon society of such actions as deforestation and overutilizing other resources.
How do we tell if changes in natural ecosystems caused changes in human systems, or vice versa? Often it is impossible to look for causal explanations, and we are better off determining interrelated aspects of the whole system. What are systems models? Developed in cybernetics, engineering, and computing, such models identify interrelated parts and their operations. In a closed system, such as your air-conditioning, equilibrium is maintained through negative feedback. When the temperature rises the air kicks on until the thermostat shows it has reached the right point, then it goes off. A steady state is maintained by the response from the component parts.
In an open system, which most are, there might be perturbations of the system, positive feedback that stimulates changes in the other components. The book describes (p. 211) the classic archaeological model by Kent Flannery of the origins of plant domestication in Mexico. We can draw the system on the BlackBoard, showing the component parts in different connected boxes (or look at the ones in the book, p. 212-213). The yearly round of hunter-gatherers includes obtaining various resources. One of them, maize, was apparently very responsive to human action and easily able to change genetically to become a more important component in the system, a bigger box. Archaeologists want to see which systems are in a steady state and which change and how and why. But systems models have been criticized for not dealing with causality at all, just naming and connecting the parts. We will look at this again when we talk about the origins of food production.
What are multilinear evolutionary models? They are explanations of culture change that recognize more than one “prime mover” or single cause, and emphasize various factors, natural and cultural. We can also look at internalist vs. externalist models for change, that is, from within, such as corruption in the political system or revolution, or without, such as climate shifts or earthquakes.
What do we mean by prehistoric cultural ecology and adaptation? Systems models that include the natural ecosystem in which cultures exist and how the social systems relate to the natural components. Cultural adaptation to natural conditions can change when the environment changes, or not. Often change comes NOT because people wanted to do something different all of a sudden (since culture is inherently conservative or resistant to change), but because they want to keep doing what they are doing in the face of external change. When will we find an energy source that is not finite but renewable? Right now, when we know there will soon be no oil left in the earth? No, probably when it is mostly gone and people still want to keep driving and using the electricity, so we will finally throw lots of money at solar and wind and other power sources.
All cultural systems are not necessarily adaptive. Many are NOT, and this is part of the reason why cultures become extinct. Others maintain an identity while changing radically. Besides the natural environment, cultures must deal with the social environment: who else is living nearby, where are potential mates and family, what are the total pressures on the resources, and other demographic variables.
What about ideological variables connected with adaptation? Cultural materialists often think that ideology too is structured by technoenvironmental conditions. The sacred cows of India are a classic example. An emic explanation of why beef is not eaten and cows can roam the street at will is that they are sacred in the belief system. An etic, materialist view might be that they are more economically valuable alive, to provide labor pulling plows, dung for fuel, milk, and other resources that otherwise would be missing in this poor country. Another example we can use, from the past, is the ideological explanation for the location of the Aztec state in ancient Mexico, that an eagle appearing on a cactus plant led the people to settle where they did, in the middle of an apparently unhealthy, marshy lake. Today you can see the eagle and cactus on the Mexican flag, and when you fly into Mexico City you land on the solidified, gelled remains of the filled-in lake. A materialist explanation of the location for the prehistoric capital is that it shows strategic genius. Connected only by easily defendable causeways to the surrounding land, and situated in the center of the central valley of the country, this native capitol’s location was part of the military and political strategy ideal for the founding of an empire.
Does cultural materialism explain all human adaptations, even ideological?
No. Often they are criticized for being too functional, too capitalist
and efficient. Humans do many things that are inefficient. There are
many belief systems that seem completely maladaptive. The Shakers, for
example, were a Protestant, millennial-type sect of the eighteenth century
who had some beliefs that led them to become extinct: they did not believe
in sex!
Postprocessual archaeologists like to point out that more than economic
and environmental factors influence human behavior and that some are
not efficient or rational. An important area of inquiry lately is to
recognize the individual human actors in the past, to look for specific
human agency and decision-making by persons who are not just facelessly
grouped within the systems model boxes, but real people choosing to
do this or believe that. However, it is very difficult to do this in
prehistory, but easier when there are historic records to document things.
Many of the hypotheses deriving from postprocessual models are untestable.
An example I can recount from my excavations two years ago involves an unusual feature we found within a shell midden. Among the bone bits, potsherds, and other species of shells and black soil making up the midden matrix was an unusual pile of sunray venus clamshells, about a dozen of them, maybe 6" long each. These are long, slender shells, and they were nested inside each other and standing on end and arrayed in an arc, like a necklace, but they were not pierced. Upon seeing this unusual feature we of course said, “must be ceremonial!” Then I remembered the night before we had eaten in a restaurant and entertained a visiting archaeologist, talking on and on after dinner. My 11-year-old of course got bored and began taking the little containers of butter (actually it was called whipped spread!), little tubs, and stacking them into pyramids and inverted pyramids that fell down and went up again until they were all over the floor. This gave me the idea that our sunray clamshell feature must have been a kid playing and leaving toys out on the floor when it was time to go! This proposition is not testable at the present time, but I just know it has potential.
Can there be alternate, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the same material record at the same site? Of course. How much depends upon who is doing the interpreting? Would only a mother who has picked up the darn toys a million times come up with such a hypothesis? Why not a father in our culture? How many different interpretations of this feature can you think up? [good time for some class discussion and maybe I can get new ideas for my report on the site with this feature!]