Investigating Isotopic Niche Space: Using rKIN for Stable Isotope Studies in Archaeology

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Archaeological applications of stable isotope data have become increasingly prevalent, and the use of these data continues to expand rapidly....     

数字考古的理论与实践

我国的文物考古工作经历数十年的发展,取得了丰硕的成果,积累了极为丰富的实物和资料,为了适应信息时代的要求,综合运用各种信息开展考古学研究和文物保护工作,必须充分     

中国考古学的觉醒与理论革命——关于考古学走向成熟的若干思考

中国考古学走向成熟的重要标志在于三个转变,即:在考古学基本理论方面,存在着从简单地层学向考古层位学转变的过程;在研究方面存在着从长于描述向深度研究转变的例证;在学科的作用方面存在着从补经证史向谱写历史篇章转变的客观事实。     

Psychic Archaeology: Theory,Method, and Mythology

Abstract

In contemporary society the growth of mystical, occult religious cults is providing the public with new interpretations about prehistory, human evolution, and ancient civilizations. One spiritualistic search for the human past is named psychic archaeology and it preaches the gospel that traditional field archaeology is limited, obsolete, and largely useless because it has not been getting the right answers about antiquity. The doctrine continues that the truth about man's cultural origins is obtained from psychic mediums who have the occult power actually to visit prehistoric times in visions and to exchange messages with the spirit world. These psychic mediums are widely believed to have the ability to dowse for artifacts and in various ways communicate with the ghosts of the dead. One looks in vain to the professional journals for discussions of the fallacies of psychic archaeology, and. Partly because of the lack of a professional response to the occult challenge, these new religious movements have grown unchecked despite errors, anachronisms, and false premises in their astonishing claims about the origin and development of human society. This review article is concerned especially with recent publications of Jeffrey Goodman, Hans Holzer, and David Zink, along with a few other earlier authors; their books are cited in the text and in the footnotes.     

A History of Normative Theory in Americanist Archaeology

Efforts in the 1960s to demonstrate the value of the new archaeology involved showing that the competing culture-history paradigm was inferior. One allegedly weak plank in that paradigm had to do with how culture historians viewed culture—as a set of ideas transmitted in the form of ideal norms or mental templates. Lewis Binford referred to this view as normative theory. In archaeology that view was manifest in the equation of artifact types with prehistoric norms—an equation that, according to Binford, the culture historians had made so that they could track the flow of ideas through time and thus write culture history. Culture historians regularly subscribed to cultural transmission as the theoretical backdrop for their artifact-based chronometers such as seriation and the direct historical approach, but with few exceptions they perceived only a weak relationship between norms and artifact types. It was not until 1960, in a paper by James Gifford, that what Binford labeled as normative theory appeared in anything approaching a complete form. Ironically, the first applications of normative theory were products of the new archaeologists, not the culture historians.     

Evolutionary Ecology,Resource Depression,and Niche Construction Theory: Applications to Central California Hunter-Gatherers and Mimbres-Mogollon Agriculturalists

Evolutionary ecology is a theoretical framework that has been widely applied to problems in human evolution and prehistory. Because the approach often focuses on how behavioral adjustments to changing socio-ecological conditions create novel selective pressures that in turn drive other changes in morphology and behavior, it draws on the same evolutionary logic that underlies niche construction theory. We illustrate here the important role that niche construction has played in archaeological applications of evolutionary ecology with two detailed case studies: one from Late Holocene hunter-gatherer populations in Central California and one from Mimbres-Mogollon agriculturalists in New Mexico. These examples illustrate that evolutionary ecology-based approaches, with an emphasis on formal predictive modeling, allow for the incorporation of niche construction as it affects model parameters with reference to specific problems involving past behavior. Further modeling and empirical applications will expand the synergies between these complementary approaches and advance our understanding of the human past.     

论神祇生态位关系与民间信仰生态系统的平衡

一、引言 早在原始社会,宗教就与文明的曙光一起来到人间,并形成以万物有灵为基础的宗教崇拜。进入阶级社会后,中国在夏商时期虽然也出现了诸如上帝、天帝这类至高无上的统一神,但这仍是一个具有功能性特征的概念。在民众的观念里,仅仅只有一个天帝是无法应对人世间事无巨细的各种繁琐祈求。原始社会的各种宗教信仰被保留下来,佛道祀神也不断进入民间信仰的万神殿。     

Theory,Disciplinary Perspectives and the Archaeology of Later Medieval England

Abstract

In the year 2000, a lead canister and a penny of Henry III were recovered during a watching brief on a site in Colchester which is within 13 m of the find spots of two 13th-century coin hoards buried in similar canisters. While the container found in 2000 may have held a third such hoard (later recovered), it may also have been used as a floor safe. The site has connections with the Colchester Jewry, who were probably the principal agents in the handling of money and deposition of hoards on this site. The single penny may be simply a coin lost on a site where money changed hands in large quantities, or (speculatively) the only survival from a recovered hoard.     

Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands

The article considers the importance of frontier studies in historical archaeology and discusses applicability of some of the concepts deriving from postcolonial theories for a better understanding of human relationships in the frontier zones. The conditions of frontiers and borderlands are compared with the characteristics of the “Third Space” described by Homi Bhabha as a realm of negotiation, translation and remaking. It is argued that concepts developed in postcolonial theories, such as “Third Space,” “in-betweeness” or hybridity, are useful not only to address cultural and social processes in borderlands that were created by colonial empires. They are also an apt way to conceptualize relationships in frontiers that lacked colonial stigma. To illustrate this point, two different historical examples of borderlands are scrutinized in this paper: the medieval frontier region that emerged between Denmark and the Northwestern Slavic area and the creation of the colonial frontier in Northeastern America through the establishment of the Praying Indian Towns.     

Maroon Archaeology Is Public Archaeology

Researchers of the contemporary past have sought to be instrumental in public dialogue about how artifacts speak to heritage matters relevant to living communities and decision-making polities (Emberling and Hanson, Catastophe!: the looting and destruction of Iraq’s past, 2008; Gibbon, Who owns the past?: cultural policy, cultural property, and the law, 2005; Mullins, Places in mind: public archaeology as applied anthropology, 2004; Renfrew, Loot, legitimacy and ownership: the ethical crisis in archaeology, 2000; Skeates, Debating the archaeological heritage, 2000). This approach has made archaeology a public endeavor that serves the needs of inquisitive researchers, as well as those groups of individuals whose lives may be directly affected by the excavation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological remains. This paper will broadly assess how the archaeology of Maroons—tribal communities of runaway slave descendants—has affected the application of scholarly research in the former Dutch territory of Suriname, SA. The shift in relevance is due to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights 2007 judgment that allows Suriname Maroons to assert decision-making authority on matters of land management and development in ancestral and contemporary habitat. Vital to this endeavor is, Maroon involvement in archaeological research and more importantly, an overhaul in Surinamese antiquity laws.     

The Direct Historical Approach, Analogical Reasoning, and Theory in Americanist Archaeology

Prior to the early 1950s, Americanist archaeologists, given their interest in chronology, routinely searched for direct historical connections between ethnographically documented cultures and archaeological cultures. In those instances where clear evolutionary connections existed between ethnographic and prehistoric cultures, the ethnic affinities of the latter could be assessed, chronologies of prehistoric cultures could be built, and ethnographic descendant cultures could be used as analogs of prehistoric ancestral cultures. The latter became known as specific historical analogy, and it stands in contrast to general comparative analogy, in which no detectable evolutionary connection exists between archaeological subjects and ethnographic sources. The theory underpinning the use of specific historical analogs is Darwinian evolutionism, or descent with modification; thus similarities between ethnographic sources and archaeological subjects are homologous. By midcentury, with the problem of chronology behind them, archaeologists began to address anthropological concerns. Darwinian evolutionism was replaced by the theory of orthogenesis as an explanation of culture change, and concomitantly specific historical analogy was replaced by general comparative analogy, in which similarities between ethnographic sources and archaeological subjects are the result of convergence. For over a century anthropologists and archaeologists have mixed elements of the two theories.     

民族考古与华南民族史、文化史的考古学重建——《南方文物》“民族考古”专栏主持辞

一．略说民族考古学 “民族考古”曾是人文社会科学研究中一个有争议的范畴,它的学科定位、性质、方法、领域及学术史等问题,有许多不同的看法。其实,“民族考古”（ethnoarchaeology）的性质已经明白地表现在字面上了,它就是民族学（ethnology）和考古学（archaeology）的组合,这一组合源于美国的人类学学术传统。     

The Archaeology of Poverty and the Poverty of Archaeology

In this Editor’s Introduction to this Special Contribution, I explore some central issues surrounding the archaeology of poverty and ponder why it has taken historical archaeologists so long to “discover” poverty as a research topic.