Anthropological Approaches...Interrupted by Fire and Finished Friday

Adding to the previous post, the remainder of influential ideas and approaches in anthropology.  This and the last post are not at all an exhaustive list, but I believe it does provide a general sense of the direction of the discipline.  On Friday, we'll recap a bit more and I'll emphasize those elements that remain common practice.

Approaches in Anthropology...so far

Just a quick overview of the theoretical approaches in anthropology that we've covered so far.  I'm going to try my best and distill the major points as well as those elements that remain with the discipline.

Diagnostics, Stratification and Zeppelin

Just a bit of a restatement or expansion of Mike's question and my response from class today.

The survey project I described used diagnostic pottery and projectile points to place the sites in the region into a basic temporal sequence.  What inferences was this based on?  Well, bear with my analogy again...

In the News: Early Pottery and Presidential Politics.

A couple of things caught my eye this week in the world of anthropology.

Burial of Joe

I'm in the unusual situation of my kids being occupied and me having run out of small projects to complete around the house.  So, I'll add another post in honor of the end of the 2012 season.

As we (who am I kidding? I didn't backfill, I made the students do it) backfilled the final excavation unit, it seemed appropriate to return something to the earth since we'd removed so many artifacts.  I give you that dedication.

Levels of Archaeological Theory

I made this point in class quickly, so I think it bears repeating.  In archaeology, one can conceive of at least three levels of archaeological theory (and these three levels weave into the three goals of archaeology we've talked about many times--culture history, reconstructing activities, explaining social change).

Put as simply as I can, theory refers to an interrelated set of models (which are themselves composed of hypotheses) that together form a coherent, relatively concise explanation for some phenomenon.  It is not a "hunch" or a "guess."

The first level of theory in archaeology focuses on establishing culture history, or arranging material culture in time and space. This is relatively "basic" theory in that it often relies on fairly straightforward principles like the law of association and superposition.

The second level of theory is sometimes called middle-range theory. I didn't use this term in class, but you should already be familiar with the concept.  Middle-range theory includes all those models and hypotheses used to reconstruct ancient human activities from the static remains of the archaeological record.  I've expanded further on the idea of middle range theory here...though I don't use the term "middle range."

The third (or, top?) level of theory is what we've recently been talking about in our discussion for models of the origins of the Neolithic. This sort of theory can be thought of as anthropological or sociological theory.  Theories that attempt to provide a guiding, consistent explanation for human behavior.  Different theoretical approaches, however, consider different variables as more important than others.  In this sense then, this level of archaeology theory is no different than what is used in sociology or cultural anthropology. 

Processual archaeology offers explanations based on variables like population density and environmental change.  Processualists see human society and culture as ultimately adaptive in nature.  Subsequently, processualists emphasize objective data, such as those that can indicate human population or subsistence.

Postprocessual archaeology, on the other hand, believe that only seeing human society as adaptive misses a major point about the human experience. They wold claim that humans are social and symbolic creatures, and so accordingly live in worlds differently mediated by meaning and are in dynamic social relationships with other humans.  For postprocessualism, to understand ancient humans, we need to take such considerations into account.  However, getting at symbols and social dynamics can be more difficult than getting at subsistence.  Because of this, postprocessualists are often less reliant on strictly objective data and rely on more holistic interpretations that look at entire assemblages of artifacts, trying to piece together an ancient big picture that may be very foreign to modern eyes (wow, that's a confusing sentence).

Despite this being the longest post on this blog to date, I've simplified this discussion tremendously.  However, theory is a critical aspect of any scientific endeavor and so, it's important to have some understanding of it to really get a handle on any scientific field. Also, it's just cool stuff to think about.  Thinking back to what got me hooked on anthropology, I'm pretty sure theoretical discussions are to blame.

Archaeological Inference Papers

All in all, I was pleased with the quality of the papers the class submitted yesterday.  While your well-done papers shows that many of you already "get" this, I just want to reiterate how central inference is to the archaeological process. As noted in the Torso and Oblong blog

For archaeological theory, one of the most important processes is the transformation of a living society into the remains that archaeologists encounter. Archaeologists must theoretically account for this in any inference that reconstructs some ancient behavior based on the static material remains of the present. Like other social scientists, archaeologists are interested in describing, understanding and sometimes explaining what human beings do. Like other social scientists, they seek to document the dynamic interplay of groups and individuals within their societal context.

Unluckily for archaeologists, they cannot actually observe people do what they do; even if that is what they want to study. By the very nature of the discipline, archaeologists are often left without living informants to tell them anything about how their particular society worked. Luckily for archaeologists, people have almost always lived in a sea of material culture. Projectile points, pots, wheels, masks, houses, temples, malls and iPads are just some of the almost infinite variety of material culture that makes human life as we know it possible. So, it is material culture that provides us our window onto the past dynamics of an ancient society--much of it remains after its makers and users are dead.

The papers you just handed in were your first forays into that intellectual process. Overall, nice job.