Archaeology’s quest for a seat at the high table of anthropology

Between 1900 and 1970, American archaeologists perceived themselves as second-class anthropologists because the archaeological record suggested little not already known ethnographically, archaeology served anthropology by testing ethnologically derived models of cultural evolution, the archaeological record was ethnologically incomplete as a result of poor preservation, and archaeologists used but did not write anthropological theory. Ethnologists of the period agreed with these points and regularly reminded archaeologists of their limited role in anthropology. A few archaeologists claimed in the 1950s that archaeology could contribute to anthropological theory but they were ignored. The claim was reiterated by new archaeologists of the 1960s, and by the 1970s worries about the poor preservation of the archaeological record had softened. However, most archaeologists after 1970 (and before 1990) used anthropological theory and did not write new theory on the basis of archaeological data. The root cause of American archaeology’s ninety-year absence from anthropology’s high table of theory seems to be the discipline-wide retention of the ninety-year old belief that archaeology is prehistoric ethnology and the (unnecessary and constraining) corollary that archaeologists must use anthropological theory to explain the archaeological record.     

Old dogs and new tricks: Recent developments in our understanding of the human–dog relationship

The reemergence of cognitive studies in comparative psychology and ethology, coupled with ongoing archaeological discoveries and recent advances in genomics, have contributed to the current explosion of scientific interest in dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). The long and complex evolution of a human-dog relationship is explored from the differing perspectives of ethology, cognitive sciences, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and paleoanthropology. Our understanding of dogs is again shedding light on human cognitive evolution and the complex, and at times controversial, process of domestication.     

The Archaeology of Regions: From Discrete Analytical Toolkit to Ubiquitous Spatial Perspective

In the 1970s and 1980s, regional analysis was an influential part of archaeological research, providing a discrete set of geographical tools inspired by a processual epistemological and interpretive perspective. With the advent of new technologies, new methods, and new paradigms, archaeological research on regional space has undergone significant changes. This article reviews the state of regional archaeology, beginning with a consideration of its history and a discussion of the fundamental issues facing regional investigations before focusing on developments over the last several years. On one hand, the diversification of archaeological theory has created new paradigms for thinking about human relationships with one another and with the physical environment across regional space; in this regard, historical ecology, landscape archaeology, and evolutionary theory have been particularly influential in recent years. This has led to a corresponding diversification of the traditional methods of regional analysis. Most notably, the advent of powerful digital technologies has introduced new tools, especially those from the geographic information sciences, that build on the quantitative methods of past approaches. The investigation of regional data is no longer based on a discrete toolkit of simple mathematical and graphical procedures for representing spatial relationships. Instead, regional archaeology has matured into a diversity of multiscalar spatial and geostatistical techniques that inform many areas of archaeological inquiry.     

Framing the past: situating the archaeological in photographs

Archaeology continually reproduces its own images. Speaking archaeology’s visual language is one way we prove membership in the discipline. Many aspects of this visual language have become so naturalized within archaeological representation as to be almost unquestionable: the cleaning of the site, the use of scale, and particular framings and perspectives. How, then, is the production of particular photographic images of archaeology related to the practice of archaeology? Does archaeology look a certain way (in photographs) or are archaeologists reproducing an archaeology according to the way it is thought it should look? Using examples of early photographs from Latin American archaeological expeditions, this article investigates not only photography as an applied technology for scientific recording, but also its power to situate archaeological knowledge. Drawing on recent reflective and critical developments in both the history of archaeology and visual anthropology, it uses five focal points – trace, objectivity and authenticity, sight/site, still lifes, and still lives – to argue that early-twentieth-century archaeological photographs of Latin America participated in the generation of an ‘authentic’ past rather than simply paid testament to it.     

The Invention of Prehistory and the Rediscovery of Europe: Exploring the Intellectual Roots of Gordon Childe’s ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (1936)

Journal of World Prehistory - This article re-examines the ‘neolithic revolution’—Gordon Childe’s great contribution to prehistoric archaeology. Childe first articulated his...     

Evaluating Community Archaeology in the UK

Abstract

Does community archaeology work? In the UK over the last decade, there has been a boom in projects utilising the popular phrase 'community archaeology'. These projects can take many different forms and have ranged from the public face of research and developer-funded programmes to projects run by museums, archaeological units, universities, and archaeological societies. Community archaeology also encapsulates those projects run by communities themselves or in dialogue between 'professional' and 'amateur' groups and individuals. Many of these projects are driven by a desire for archaeology to meet a range of perceived educational and social values in bringing about knowledge and awareness of the past in the present. These are often claimed as successful outputs of community projects. This paper argues that appropriate criteria and methodologies for evaluating the efficacy of these projects have yet to be designed. What is community archaeology for? Who is it for? And is it effectively meeting its targets? Focusing on the authors' experiences of directing community archaeology projects, together with the ongoing research assessing the efficacy of community archaeology projects in the UK, this paper aims to set out two possible methodologies: one of self-reflexivity, and one of ethnoarchaeological analysis for evaluating what community archaeology actually does for communities themselves.     

Project SAMPHIRE: Crowd Sourcing Maritime Archaeology data off Scotland's West Coast

Perhaps the greatest barrier to effective management of underwater cultural heritage is the lack of data on the nature and location of offshore archaeological resources. This is a problem shared with terrestrial archaeology, but is particularly acute due to the limitations of survey techniques in the underwater environment. In Scotland <15% of known ship losses from the last 200 years have been located and the record is far less comprehensive for earlier periods, verging on a near total data gap. Most known archaeological sites in Scottish waters have been discovered through large-scale sonar survey of relatively low resolution and a considerable bias has been introduced in the archaeological record; this has favored the discovery and documentation of larger and more recent, often upstanding, metal shipwrecks. This article presents the methods and results from a three-year project designed to reduce this bias by demonstrating large-scale prospecting for maritime archaeology through a community-based crowd-sourcing approach. Project SAMPHIRE (the Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research and Education Project) was geographically focused on the west coast of the Scottish mainland and was undertaken between 2013 and 2015, resulting in a large number of new archaeological discoveries, including shipwrecks, aircraft, and other material of a much more varied nature than what is typically found through large-scale hydrographic surveys.     

Places in Interaction: The National Archaeological Park Project as an Integrated Approach to Public Archaeology in China

The aim of this paper is to re-examine how concepts of public archaeology have been established and developed in varying social and political contexts in China, and how the recent national archaeological park project is structured as an important approach for improving public-archaeology relationships and promoting the public uses of archaeology. Since all archaeological activities in China are exclusively regulated by the state, all archaeological resources are administered for the benefit of the public. As such, concepts of public archaeology demonstrate the efforts of Chinese archaeologists to re-evaluate public-archaeology relationships and uses of archaeology through public engagement as well as archaeological communications with the public. The national archaeological park project was launched in 2006 to expand the practice of archaeology with the creation of archaeological communications, public space, and community-driven programmes. The project facilitates multiple perspectives on public archaeology practice through public education, community cohesion, re-creation of public space, and local economic development.     

Un-Disciplining Archaeology

We can think of a kind of archaeological colonialism in terms of the exportation of metropolitan theories and/or methodologies to peripheral countries/regions, or in the way metropolitan academic institutions/archaeologists conduct archaeology in peripheral countries/regions. But even if we manage to stop those kinds of colonial bonds, archaeology would remain being an imperial weapon. And, moreover, it can be said that colonialism is not dependant on the overseas provenance of archaeologies and/or theories. Beyond theoretical and methodological variability, it is archaeology itself what happens to recapitulate colonialist relationships; and this seems to happen even when archaeology is openly and deliberately oriented towards indigenous peoples?? empowerment, social justice, and peace. It seems that theoretical and methodological paradigms and political intentions operate at a surface level, while colonialism is equipped with stronger streams operating below the floor where archaeologists stand. What is there below our feet, making us move in one direction even when we walk in the other? Neither being the theories, neither the methods, nor the political intentions and nationality, what is that hidden force that govern the sense of archaeology in the contemporary post-colonial world? My argument is that the hidden force it is not hidden at all, but remains unseen because it is too obvious. The disciplinary framework of archaeology itself -that is, its basic subject matter and method??beyond the theoretical and methodological paradigms and the political orientation in which we aim to proceed, or our nationality or whatever, recapitulates coloniality. Without implying that theoretical and methodological debate within archaeological discipline is in vain, I dedicate this piece to write not within, but about the discipline. In short, this will include talking about disciplining, its recapitulation in post-disciplinary contexts, and the implied proposal of un-disciplining archaeology.     

Food and the middle ages

The study of food in the middle ages attracted much interest among antiquarians from the eighteenth century on. New perspectives came with the growth of social and economic history. Over the last two decades, re-evaluations of historical sources, along with contributions from other disciplines, especially archaeology, the archaeological sciences, anthropology and sociology, have changed the possibilities for this area of research. The study of cooking, of cuisine and its cultural context, as much as food production and the material conditions of life, is now central to developing our understanding of consumption. This paper explores new possibilities for the study of taste and demotic cuisine, food and virtue, the association of women with food, and the role of food in society and in cultural change.     

考古学的中国深度:张忠培先生的文化演进论

张忠培先生始终深入田野考古,坚持"让材料牵着鼻子走",在系统构建考古学文化谱系的基础上,提出了既符合中国具体实际又体现人类共同规律的文化演进论。张忠培先生在坚实而高水准的实践起点上,不断开拓学术生长点,构建起了宏大的学术体系,创造性地开展和领导了田野考古实践工作,为中国考古学奠定了坚实的基础,科学地发现和表述了蕴含着中国文化基因的谱系结构,展现出考古学的中国深度。     

Walter Taylor and the history of American archaeology

Walter Taylor’s place in the history of archaeology is well secured. Not only is he noted for his uncredited anticipation of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the 1960s and 1970s in his infamous book A Study of Archeology, but he is also well-known for committing professional suicide by short-sightedly attacking numerous key figures in American archaeology for their methodological shortfalls, and yet never publishing a report utilizing his controversial method. Although these statements have inundated the historical literature on American archaeology, they are received wisdom rather than the reality of Taylor’s contributions to the field. Many aspects of Taylor’s conjunctive approach were at odds with the stated aims of processual archaeology. Although Taylor did not live up to his critics’ (or his own) demands for a grand display of his approach, he did on several occasions demonstrate its potential. The irony of Taylor in the history of archaeology is not that he was uncredited for his prescience or that his attacks on the archaeological establishment were a naïve failure; but rather that he receives too much credit for what he didn’t do, and not enough for what he did.     

Thinking Through Networks: A Review of Formal Network Methods in Archaeology

This review aims to expose the potential of formal network methods for archaeology by tracing the origins of the academic traditions, network models, and techniques that have been most influential to archaeologists. A brief discussion of graph theoretic applications in archaeology reveals how graph visualization and analysis was used since the 1960s in a very similar way to later network analysis applications, but did not seem to have influenced the more widespread adoption of network techniques over the past decade. These recent archaeological applications have been strongly influenced by two academic traditions, social network analysis and sociophysics. The most influential and promising techniques and models adopted from these traditions are critically discussed. This review reveals some general trends which are considered to be the result of two critical issues that will need to be addressed in future archaeological network analysis: (1) a general unawareness of the historicity and diversity of formal network methods both within and outside the archaeological discipline has resulted in a very limited methodological scope; (2) the adoption or development of network methods has very rarely been driven by specific archaeological research questions and is dominated by a few popular models and techniques, which has in some cases resulted in a routinized explanatory process. This review illustrates, however, the great potential of formal network methods for archaeology and argues that, if this potential is to be applied in a critical way, a broad multidisciplinary scope is necessary and specific archaeological research contexts should dominate applications.     

Archaeological Site or Natural Marine Community? Excavation of a Submerged Shell Mound in Ninigret Pond,Rhode Island

ABSTRACT

Submerged shell midden sites and natural shell deposits can have similar characteristics and can be difficult to distinguish archaeologically. We excavated two test units from a large (at least 35 m×70 m) submerged shell mound in Fort Neck Cove in southern Rhode Island to assess whether it was natural or cultural in origin. This mound had been recognized as a potential archaeological feature as early as the 1970s. Excavation, radiocarbon dating, and subsequent laboratory analysis of excavated materials suggest that the mound was a natural oyster reef rather than a submerged archaeological site. No artifacts were found; there was no clear evidence for human modification of any shells; small species that would not have been targeted as food were present; and δ¹³C values of oyster shells from the mound were consistent with freshwater input into their growth environment, suggesting that they grew in an estuarine environment that did not exist prior to the inundation of the ponds. The stratigraphically oldest radiocarbon date we could obtain (430–190 cal BP, 2σ range), from 70 cm below the pond floor, placed deposition of shells at least 3,000 years after the inundation of the pond. The excavation methods that we used and the process of testing, irrespective of whether the feature is cultural, are valuable contributions to the methodological literature on submerged site archaeology and help provide insight for other researchers working to discern natural from cultural shell midden sites.     

The Stones of Contention: The Role of Archaeological Heritage in Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Archaeology plays a fundamental role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The practice of archaeology in Israel is embedded in the national identity construction discourse and has severe repercussions on domestic politics. From archaeological remains it is demanded to give proof of precedence and legitimate claims over land. The relation between nationalism and archaeology is a topic that became increasingly popular in scholarly works of the past 20 years. The full UNESCO membership of Palestine is projecting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a globalized dimension, but at the same time the heritage of humanity’s politics reinforces the nation-states concept and could pave the way to new political scenarios.     

Questions of Complexity and Scale in Explanations for Cultural Transitions in the Pleistocene: A Case Study from the Early Upper Paleolithic

Matching scales of observation and explanation is an essential challenge for archaeology, Paleolithic archaeology in particular. This paper presents a case study from the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) in the Eastern Mediterranean to illustrate some of the scalar issues in explaining transitions in the Pleistocene. The cultural sequence at Üça??zl? Cave I documents both continuity and change in a range of behaviors over approximately 12 ky. The sequence spans the transition from one EUP cultural unit, the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) to another one, the Ahmarian. There is evidence for changes in lithic technology and retouched tool forms, human diets, and the role of the site within a regional land use system, but few if any of these changes are closely timed with the shift from one archaeological “culture” to another. In this particular case, local and regional transitions seem to be largely unconnected. However, considering the local situations allows a more precise focus on what the broader cultural transition represents and how it might be studied.     

A statistical view for Chinese zooarchaeology: from the Neolithic to Pre-Han periods

More than 80 years have passed since zooarchaeology first began in China in the early 1930s. Currently, this discipline is one of the most active fields in Chinese archaeology, engaging with other sub-disciplines such as archaeogenetics, archaeobotany, and stable isotopic studies. But how did we end up like this? This paper explores this question by surveying existing zooarchaeological publications from the Neolithic to Pre-Han periods (c. 8000–202 bc). Results show that journals are the most popular publishing type, followed by archaeological reports. Postgraduate theses are also taken into account. With consideration of publication numbers, three chronological periods can be recognised. These phases are associated with political/social events of the twentieth century in China. While the majority of articles concern basic identification, there has been an increasing interest on human-animal interactions during recent years. In addition, while central China is the overwhelming focus of zooarchaeological research, some areas may have been overlooked.     

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

Small Things Forgotten Now Included, or What Else Do Things Deserve?

We have turned to things, it is argued in different contexts by social and cultural scholars. The previously neglected stuff of life is back and now deserves to be embraced and included in our histories and democracies. This paper discusses our efforts to include these others and seeks to reflect on how some of our gestures of inclusion may not be as humble and tolerant as we like to argue. With reference to an ongoing archaeological research of a recently abandoned herring station in Iceland??s northwest the paper discusses how the archaeological remembering of this site, and its inclusion in historical narration, can in fact easily result in the active forgetting of things, their fragmented and discontinuous memory and their utter silence.