Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology

1. Anth 321WIntellectual Background of Archaeology MWF 9:00-9:55AM 008 Life Sciences Bldg

2. David Honeyboy EdwardsR.I.P. the oldest surviving member of the first generation of Delta blues singers, died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

3. Writing Diagnostic Breakdown • A = 8 • B = 4 • C = 6

4. Treatment of the question implied • In several cases, the question was defined but it was never stated that the question was to be discussed. • Tell the reader the subject of discussion and inform them that it will be discussed.

5. Artifacts • Misunderstanding of artifacts. • They are not just precious museum objects. • They do not have to “earn” their status or make mighty journeys to attain artifact-hood. • Essentially all material culture is composed of artifacts. This includes the extremely mundane and the elaborate or sacred.

6. Sedentary imperative • “Agriculture gives people the chance to become sedentary.”

7. Weak uses of the culture concept “Dirt is something that has come in contact with people and cultures.” “The soil could be a feature, such as a tunnel or a post mold, either directly constructed by the culture occupying the site, or representative of something the constructed that is no longer there.” “Art is a way for any culture to express itself…” “This information is extremely valuable to archaeologists because it presents a framework for how cultures behaved in the past.” Culture does not behave. People behave, and this produces culture.

8. Dirt is not an appropriate term for archaeology • Why? • Who says? • Where is this coming from? Speaking of appropriate terms… • “Dig site” = excavation. • What about survey?

9. Overstatements • “Without taking into account the context a particular item was found in, the item becomes useless to the scholarly world.” • “Everything we find in the dirt beneath our feet can provide infinite information regarding past cultures.” • “This research has decisively shown that dirt is not a cultural artifact.”

10. Tautologies • “On the other hand, dirt is dirt.” This says nothing. • “Digging down in a pit, the stratigraphy of the soil helps us identify the layers in which we find the artifacts.” • Tautologies are self referential, and generally mean nothing.

11. When to use “you” • “If you begin to claim that dirt is a cultural artifact then do you protect it?” • RESTRUCTURED • If dirt is defined as a cultural artifact, then is it necessary to protect soil? • “For example, a pot may be able to tell you where it’s from or what was mostly likely stored in it, but it cannot tell you what’s being farmed on the fields around the site.” • Only use “you” when addressing the reader specifically. Do not use “you” when considering an audience generally or when discussing society’s perception of something.

12. Utilize • Never needed. • Use always works instead. • Avoid scientistic phrasing. It is pompous, alienates readers, and adds nothing to the discussion.

13. That and which: which is it?

14. Preposition placement • “Dirt is one of the main materials an Archaeologist will encounter in the field.” • Stratigraphy from “dirt” is a huge pro in my book but there are also some cons to “dirt” • RESTRUCTURED • In my book, stratigraphy constitutes a huge pro to the assertion that dirt is a cultural artifact. However, there are also some cons.

15. Boiling emptiness • “The argument really boils down to…” • “Dirt really boils down to…”

16. Use of “we” in a discussion. • We will explore the pros and cons of considering dirt a cultural artifact. • Not accurate phrasing.

18. Processualism:Culture as extrasomatic adaptationChange not sui generis White Binford Ideology Economy Technology Environment

19. Anglo-American Marxist Archaeology • Marx is a starting point, not an end • Social relations are fundamental • Society is a whole, not parts • Contradiction and conflict are sources of change. The dialectic approach rejects the notion that society is a set of functional adaptations to external conditions. • Human action (praxis) is significant in creating history. Technological and environmental determinism are rejected. • People create knowledge, knowledge of the past depends on socio-political context. • Modern power relations are questioned.

20. Post-processual/Interpretive • Mosaic of theoretical positions and goals • No strict creed or intellectual messiah • What purposes are served by the creation of archaeological knowledge? Who is it for and how has it been used? • Material culture plays a role in how we make social relationships • Individuals must be a part of theories of material culture and social change • Archaeology has close explanatory ties with history

21. Processual and postprocessual dominated theoretical debate • Concepts that both positions excluded by both camps now appear important • Neither processual nor postprocessual are sharply defined approaches. They are clusters of related non overlapping positions.

22. The Great Theoretical Divide Postrocessual • Idealist • Postmodern • Romanticism • Romantics inspired by Herder celebrated diversity • Processual • Materialist • Modernism • Enlightenment • 19th C Evolutionists studied regularity

23. Darwinian or Evolutionary Archaeology • This approach seeks to explain both human behavior and the material culture observable in the archaeological record using the concepts of biological evolution. • Its principal contributions so far have been its freeing of evolutionary concepts in anthropology from the assumptions of unilinearity and teleological development that were associated with neoevolutionism.

24. Cognitive Archaeology • how innate factors influence human behavior • revival of what nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists called ‘psychic unity’

25. Other approaches • Behavioral archaeology (Shiffer) • New Marxist archaeology of Spain • Function does not preclude an interest in change (Evans-Pritchard1949, 1962) then new Marxism is similar to Evolutionary Archaeology • Cultural-historical revival (Kehoe)

26. The fact that different theoretical approaches are mutually comprehensible and selectively integrated indicates that these are not paradigms. • Paradigms are incommensurate—one paradigm cannot be clearly understood by someone working in the context of an alternate paradigm. • Treating theoretical orientations as paradigms encourages exclusion and polemic rather than comparison and synthesis.

27. All aspects of archaeological research are influenced by assumptions that constitute implicit theory. • Better to deal with these assumptions consciously than to leave them implicit. • High-level theory necessary for a mature self-critical discipline.

28. Trigger describes how geographic possibilism helped him avoid the trap of environmental determinism that plagued early processualism.

29. Comparison and cross-cultural research • Early comparisons focused on a search for regularities between cultures. • Kingship • Irregular aspects of culture were essentially ignored. • Variation in the nature of rulership

30. No theoretical formulation involving a narrow range of causal factors will likely account for the totality of human behavior or material expressions • Comparative approach required consideration of idiosyncrasies and similarities • Theoretical conclusion: processual and postprocessual approaches based on antithetical positions, but they are complementary