API tools faq
paste
Advertisement
jonstond2

Archaeology (Anthropology)

jonstond2
Mar 14th, 2017
933
0
Never
Add comment
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 100.81 KB | None | 0 0
raw download clone embed print report
  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Archaeology is a historical social science concerned with study of past societies and cultures through material traces, called the archaeological record. These traces may have been left by early human ancestors, millions of years ago—or by contemporary people as recently as yesterday. Study may be text aided among literate societies; most of the human past, however, involved societies with no writing, what some call “prehistory.” Research involves examination of artifacts (objects of human manufacture), features (arrangements of artifacts, construction elements, or other items), ecofacts (naturally occurring items that inform about human lives, such as soils), and sites (locations in which one or more of the foregoing occur). Archaeological ethics promotes growing collaboration with descendant communities in framing research goals and techniques. For that reason, and because the research process commonly destroys the archaeological record, practitioners increasingly seek less invasive or destructive methods. In all cases, archaeologists employ systematic scientific methods for recovery and study of material remains, documenting as fully as possible the materials encountered along with the temporal (stratigraphic) and spatial (association) contexts in which they were found. Archaeology is inherently interdisciplinary, calling on expertise in such fields as geology, biology, ethnology, and history. Interpretive aims vary with the research project, and with the theoretical orientation of its directors. In that way, theory is central to archaeology. Although in many parts of the world, archaeology is a discipline unto itself, in the United States it is most commonly considered part of anthropology. Exceptions are classical archaeology, allied more closely with history and art history, and historical archaeology, often teamed in the United States with history and American studies.
  4.  
  5. Journals
  6.  
  7. Those among the more prominent archaeology journals are listed here. American Antiquity focuses on findings and theory in the New World north of Mexico; the American Journal of Archaeology treats the classical world. Antiquity is committed to relaying new applications of technology to archaeological findings, with less concern historically for disciplinary boundaries. Archaeologies attends particularly to the sociopolitics and contexts of archaeological practice around the world. The International Journal of Historical Archaeology is an outlet for historical archaeology inclusively defined, from those concerned with literate societies to ones that focus on the spread of capitalism. The Journal of Field Archaeology reports new archaeological data and interpretations. The Journal of Social Archaeology is avowedly critical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary in scope. Individual issues of World Archaeology focus on specific themes. Other journals center on particular specialties, such as Egyptology or the application of scientific methods. Articles of archaeological interest also appear regularly in journals of wider disciplinary scope, such as the American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
  8.  
  9. American Antiquity.
  10. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  11. Established in 1935, this is one of two flagship journals of the Society for American Archaeology and emphasizes findings and theory in North American archaeology; the other is Latin American Antiquity, founded in 1990, which focuses on the Americas south of the Rio Grande.
  12. Find this resource:
  13. American Journal of Archaeology.
  14. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  15. The flagship journal of the Archaeological Institute of America focuses on the archaeology of the Mediterranean world, while its other publication, Archaeology, is geared to a wider audience and has broader coverage.
  16. Find this resource:
  17. Antiquity.
  18. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  19. Published by the Antiquity Trust since 1927, this journal was meant to reach both scholarly and lay audiences. Founding editor O. G. S. Crawford defined its scope as the entire human past.
  20. Find this resource:
  21. Archaeologies.
  22. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  23. The World Archaeological Congress has published this journal since 2003, succeeding the World Archaeological Bulletin (1987–2001).
  24. Find this resource:
  25. International Journal of Historical Archaeology.
  26. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  27. Founded in 1997, the journal is a wide-ranging outlet for historical archaeology anywhere in the world.
  28. Find this resource:
  29. Journal of Field Archaeology.
  30. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  31. From its first issue in 1974, this journal has focused on the presentation of archaeological data and interpretations from all time periods and parts of the world.
  32. Find this resource:
  33. Journal of Social Archaeology.
  34. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  35. Established in 2001, this journal is avowedly critical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary in its focus and draws on archaeological issues from all parts of the world.
  36. Find this resource:
  37. World Archaeology.
  38. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  39. Since 1969, this journal has solicited articles offering contrasting or complementary perspectives on prechosen themes and debates of current archaeological interest.
  40. Find this resource:
  41. Textbooks
  42.  
  43. Those learning about the past and how archaeological research is done will want to look at the kinds of overviews that textbooks have to offer. Textbooks in archaeology take two forms. Either they emphasize archaeological theory and method, or they are syntheses of world prehistory, as Fagan 2009 is. Occasionally, authors combine both, as Crabtree and Campana 2005 has done. Zimmerman and Green 2003, Feder 2008, Renfrew and Bahn 2008, and Ashmore and Sharer 2010 provide detailed coverage of method and theory by authors with varying points of view. Those considering a career in cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology will find Neumann and Sanford 2001 particularly helpful, because it discusses legal frameworks as well as methods shaping CRM research in the United States.
  44.  
  45. Ashmore, Wendy, and Robert J. Sharer. 2010. Discovering our past: A brief introduction to archaeology. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  46. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  47. Concise coverage of theory and method that follows the process of archaeological research from formulation of problem through survey, excavation, analysis, and publication. The authors mix processualist, postprocessualist, and feminist perspectives.
  48. Find this resource:
  49. Crabtree, Pam J., and Douglas V. Campana. 2005. Exploring prehistory: How archaeology reveals our past. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  50. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  51. Integrates an analysis of world prehistory with discussions of methods and techniques.
  52. Find this resource:
  53. Fagan, Brian. 2009. People of the earth: An introduction to world prehistory. 13th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  54. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55. This extended review of cultures and societies of the past around the world has become the standard over the last thirty years.
  56. Find this resource:
  57. Feder, Kenneth L. 2008. Linking to the past: A brief introduction to archaeology. 2d ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  58. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  59. A lively overview of archaeological method and theory, relating studies of modern material culture to inferences about the past. The author’s perspective is cultural evolution.
  60. Find this resource:
  61. Neumann, Thomas W., and Robert M. Sanford. 2001. Practicing archaeology: A training manual for cultural resource management archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  62. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  63. A well-regarded, comprehensive review of CRM law and the methods archaeologists pursue in CRM.
  64. Find this resource:
  65. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. 2008. Archaeology: Theories, methods, and practice. 5th ed. London and New York: Thames & Hudson.
  66. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  67. Examines archaeological methods and theories as well as scientific and technological applications to the analysis and interpretation of evidence from past societies.
  68. Find this resource:
  69. Zimmerman, Larry J., and William Green, eds. 2003. Archaeologist’s toolkit. 7 vols. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  70. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  71. This boxed set includes volumes on research design, archaeological survey, excavation, artifact study, archaeobiology, curating, and reporting archaeological findings to multiple audiences.
  72. Find this resource:
  73. Anthologies
  74.  
  75. Periodically, archaeologists gather together collections of published works on a theme from diverse sources. At other times, they solicit original statements on particular subjects. Bintliff 2004, Feinman and Price 2001, Hodder 2001, Ellis 2000, and Maschner and Chippendale 2005 are collections of commissioned articles that differ from one another in topics chosen. Preucel and Hodder 1996, Preucel and Mrozowski 2010, and Thomas 2000 assemble previously published articles that reflect the editors’ views about the most-critical issues at the times the volumes were assembled.
  76.  
  77. Bintliff, John, ed. 2004. A companion to archaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  78. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  79. This volume of commissioned articles, technical yet accessible, shows the diversity of contemporary archaeological research from the perspective of twenty-seven practitioners.
  80. Find this resource:
  81. Ellis, Linda, ed. 2000. Archaeological method and theory: An encyclopedia. New York: Garland.
  82. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  83. Contributions in the volume reflect methodological concerns from archaeological site formation, discovery, excavation, and conservation to analysis of finds, data management, theory and area studies, legislation, and biographies. Useful subject and name indices are included, as well as a subject guide and list of articles by contributor.
  84. Find this resource:
  85. Feinman, Gary M., and T. Douglas Price, eds. 2001. Archaeology at the millennium: A sourcebook. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
  86. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-72611-3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  87. This forward-looking volume was commissioned for the millennium to show the multifaceted contributions of archaeology as well as its place in the sciences and humanities. There are stock-taking statements about established research areas from paleoanthropology to understanding states and empires. The editors provide useful overviews and a programmatic statement for the future.
  88. Find this resource:
  89. Hodder, Ian, ed. 2001. Archaeological theory today. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
  90. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  91. A volume of commissioned articles that explore the current status of archaeological theory and that reflect archaeology’s new openness and willingness to engage in wider debates, such as the relevance of culture of social change and the role of contingent local events in comparison with long-term processes of evolution.
  92. Find this resource:
  93. Maschner, Herbert D. G., and Christopher Chippendale, eds. 2005. Archaeological methods. 2 vols. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  94. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  95. The thirty-four chapters of the collection cover topics that include demography, regional analysis, geoarchaeology, craft production, historical archaeology, and trade and exchange. Most useful are the discussions of field and analytical methods.
  96. Find this resource:
  97. Preucel, Robert W., and Ian Hodder, eds. 1996. Contemporary archaeology in theory: A reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  98. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  99. A collection of previously published articles that explore key topics and debates in archaeology during the 1980s and 1990s: ecological relations, political economy, sociocultural evolution, meaning and practice, feminism and gender, the past as power, and responses of the Other.
  100. Find this resource:
  101. Preucel, Robert W., and Stephen A. Mrozowski, eds. 2010. Contemporary archaeology in theory: The new pragmatism. Chichester, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  102. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  103. A collection of previously published articles that deal with issues prominent from the mid-1990s into the first decade of the 21st century: landscapes, spaces, and natures; agency, meaning, and practice; sexuality, embodiment, and personhood; race, class, and ethnicity; materiality, memory, and historical silence; colonialism, empire, and nationalism; heritage, patrimony, and social justices; and media, museums, and publics.
  104. Find this resource:
  105. Thomas, Julian, ed. 2000. Interpretive archaeology: A reader. London and New York: Leicester Univ. Press.
  106. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  107. A collection of reprinted articles that are concerned broadly with polarities of postprocessual archaeologies: on the character of archaeology; interpretation, inference, and epistemology; social relations, power, and ideology; feminism, queer theory, and the body; material culture; archaeology, critique, and the construction of identity; and space and landscape.
  108. Find this resource:
  109. Historical Foundations
  110.  
  111. Archaeology has multiple origins rooted in curiosity about the human past. Studies of the classical civilizations in the Mediterranean, for example, are largely text based, and archaeological evidence is used to amplify understanding of texts. Antiquarians and collectors were more interested in objects and ruins thought to be remnants of the human past, although they also often sought explanations of these materials in myths and historical texts. Prehistoric archaeology emerged in the early 19th century, with the development of techniques for distinguishing remains that dated to different periods of time in Scandinavia. As Trigger 2006 points out, this “made possible the comprehensive study of prehistory.” By 1859, prehistoric archaeologists had shown conclusively that human beings were contemporary with extinct animals, thereby expanding the temporal sweep of human history before the advent of writing. Historians of archaeology often write internalist (self-contained) intellectual histories of the field, as done in Trigger 2006 and Willey and Sabloff 1993; in recent years, Kehoe 1998 and others have written externalist accounts that place the development of archaeology in the sociopolitical contexts in which it occurred. Historians of the discipline frequently periodize the development of archaeological thought in the 20th century in terms of the topics that follow here; these are not mutually exclusive or necessarily sequential perspectives: culture history, cultural evolutionist, processualist, postprocessualist, Marxist, and feminist perspectives. Patterson 2003 treats English-speaking archaeologists’ responses to Karl Marx in the 20th century; O’Brien, et al. 2005 reviews the development of processualist archaeology over the last fifty years. Current trends are treated in the section titled Theory.
  112.  
  113. Kehoe, Alice B. 1998. The land of prehistory: A critical history of American archaeology. New York: Routledge.
  114. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  115. An externalist account that calls into question the objectivity of research usually attributed to archaeologists of the Americas. Instead, in this lively account, the author situates these activities in their social milieu, shaped by Manifest Destiny, and challenges the concept of prehistory.
  116. Find this resource:
  117. O’Brien, Michael J., R. Lee Lyman, and Michael Brian Schiffer. 2005. Archaeology as a process: Processualism and its progeny. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press.
  118. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  119. The authors trace the intellectual history of research groups involved in the development of processual archaeological thought and its spin-offs in the United States since the 1960s.
  120. Find this resource:
  121. Patterson, Thomas C. 2003. Marx’s ghost: Conversations with archaeologists. Oxford: Berg.
  122. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  123. This book considers how Anglophone archaeologists have engaged, appropriated, ignored, or actively repressed the ideas of Karl Marx in their model building and interpretations during the 20th century.
  124. Find this resource:
  125. Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A history of archaeological thought. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  126. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  127. The most comprehensive history of the development of archaeological thought, which includes an extensive, useful annotated bibliography.
  128. Find this resource:
  129. Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 1993. A history of American archaeology. 3d ed. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
  130. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  131. Surveys the practice of pre-Columbian archaeology in the Americas from the colonial period to the present.
  132. Find this resource:
  133. Culture History
  134.  
  135. The initial goal in all archaeological investigations is to establish the distributions of cultural forms in time and space and their interrelationships. As Trigger 2006 (pp. 211–313), cited under Historical Foundations, points out, these fundamentally descriptive practices have their origins in European prehistoric archaeology as it developed in the late 19th century; Childe 1928 crystallized these developments in European archaeology. The methodology was appropriated and expanded by North American archaeologists, as observed in Lyman, et al. 1997a and Lyman, et al. 1997b. Central to culture history are artifact typologies and seriation and stratigraphy as means of ordering cultural types in time and space. An important offshoot of culture history was the direct historical approach developed in Kidder 1916, which sought to link backward from historically documented cultures to those of more-remote times in the past.
  136.  
  137. Childe, V. Gordon. 1928. The Danube in prehistory. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  138. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  139. The most detailed cultural synthesis produced by Childe. In the preface (pp. v–vi), the author defines an archaeological culture as a complex of “certain types of remains—pots, implements, ornamentation, burial rites, house forms—constantly recurring together.”
  140. Find this resource:
  141. Kidder, Alfred V. 1916. Archaeological explorations at Pecos, New Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2:119–123.
  142. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2.3.119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  143. This is an early example of the direct historical approach in archaeology, developed by Kidder and other culture historians, which is a methodology that extrapolates backward in the same region from historically documented cultures to those of the deep past. It presumes that change is slow, gradual, and continuous, and that cultures closer together in time are more similar to one another.
  144. Find this resource:
  145. Lyman, R. Lee, Michael J. O’Brien, and Robert C. Dunnell, eds. 1997a. Americanist culture history: Fundamentals of time, space, and form. New York: Plenum.
  146. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. The editors bring together and introduce a collection of thirty-nine articles that lay out “key concepts and analytical techniques” of culture history that appeared between 1907 and 1971.
  148. Find this resource:
  149. Lyman, R. Lee, Michael J. O’Brien, and Robert C. Dunnell. 1997b. The rise and fall of culture history. New York: Plenum.
  150. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  151. The authors outline the origins and development of culture history in the Americas.
  152. Find this resource:
  153. Cultural Evolutionist Perspectives
  154.  
  155. At the same time that culture historians placed great emphasis on historical contingency and cultural specificity, some archaeologists sought cross-cultural regularities in trajectories of social development that could be ascribed to natural laws of change. For the most part, they saw change as a process that transcended particular historical and cultural contexts. Childe 1936 argues that key changes were revolutions that occurred relatively rapidly, and Adams 1966 highlights similarities in the rise of states in two widely studied regions. Willey and Phillips 1958 includes areas of the New World where food production and states did not develop. MacNeish 1964 and Flannery 1972 contend that the key changes described by Childe were gradual and evolutionary, rather than rapid and revolutionary as Childe inferred. Feinman and Marcus 1998 offers updated views about the nature and pace of state formation, from an evolutionary perspective.
  156.  
  157. Adams, Robert McC. 1966. The evolution of urban society: Early Mesopotamia and prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine.
  158. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  159. Starting from ecological and subsistence bases of pre-state societies in Mesopotamia and central Mexico, Adams highlights cultural evolutionary similarities in the transition from theocratic to more-secular political control and ultimately to emergence of trade- and tribute-based states.
  160. Find this resource:
  161. Childe, V. Gordon. 1936. Man makes himself. London: Watts.
  162. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  163. In this work, Childe argues that two of the three great transformations in human history—the Neolithic (i.e., the food-producing) revolution and the urban revolution (the formation of class-stratified and state-based societies and the rise of cities)—were relatively rapid events driven by political and economic changes in different parts of the world. The book is an extended dialogue between Childe the cultural evolutionist and Childe the Marxist.
  164. Find this resource:
  165. Feinman, Gary M., and Joyce Marcus, eds. 1998. Archaic states. Santa Fe, NM: SAR.
  166. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  167. Emphasizing the instability and diversity of early states, the authors of this volume employ a cultural evolutionary framework to compare similarities and differences in the operation and structure of cases in Egypt, the Near East, Mesoamerica, Peru, and the Indus Valley.
  168. Find this resource:
  169. Flannery, Kent V. 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399–426.
  170. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.es.03.110172.002151Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  171. The author combines a cultural evolutionist succession of stages of sociopolitical complexity—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—with a conceptual framework based on systems theory, in which social complexity increases when groups within the society do not play by the customary rules and upset the established social equilibrium.
  172. Find this resource:
  173. MacNeish, Richard S. 1964. Origins of New World civilization. Scientific American 211.5: 29–37.
  174. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican1164-29Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  175. In contrast to Childe 1936 and Willey and Phillips 1958, MacNeish argues that agriculture was adopted slowly instead of rapidly—transforming the subsistence economy—and that the appearance of permanent villages was far less important in the diverse developmental trajectories of New World societies and cultures.
  176. Find this resource:
  177. Willey, Gordon R., and Philip Phillips. 1958. Method and theory in American archaeology. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  178. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. The book compares culture-historical sequences in the New World, pointing out interregional parallels in cultural development. While the authors avoided using the term cultural evolution, they organized and discussed the sequence parallels in terms of a succession of cultural stages defined by economic, political, and religious changes, such as the appearance of agricultural villages, the appearance of craft specialization, and the rise of elites centered around temples.
  180. Find this resource:
  181. Processualist Perspectives
  182.  
  183. From the standpoint of their advocates, processualist perspectives in archaeology developed in the 1960s as a critique of culture history and in establishing a “New Archaeology.” Debates about what that archaeology should look like are embodied in Binford and Binford 1968; Flannery 1968; Flannery 1973; Watson, et al. 1971; Wylie 2002; and Leone 1972. All of these authors agreed in arguing that archaeology should be recast as a science that involved hypothesis testing, causal explanations of change, generalizations, ecological approaches, and the use of statistical and computational techniques to handle large databases. A parallel critique of culture history, called “analytical archaeology,” was developed in England by David Clarke (Clarke 1968). While the Americans affirmed that archaeology was part of anthropology, Clarke and his students argued that archaeology is a discipline unto itself.
  184.  
  185. Binford, Sally R., and Lewis R. Binford, eds. 1968. New perspectives in archaeology. Chicago: Aldine.
  186. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  187. This is the landmark expression of the utility of processualist perspectives in archaeology. Multiple authors apply processualist principles in analyses of specific cases.
  188. Find this resource:
  189. Clarke, David L. 1968. Analytical archaeology. London: Methuen.
  190. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  191. The author examines components of the archaeological record at scales from the attributes of individual artifacts to entire settlements and beyond. The book is concerned with clarifying units of archaeological analysis viewed as systems of interacting parts rather than as trait lists, discerning regularities among them, and, at the largest scale, formulating what Clarke called “technocomplexes,” which he saw as responses to environmental and/or technological conditions.
  192. Find this resource:
  193. Flannery, Kent V. 1968. Archeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica. In Anthropological archeology in the Americas. Edited by Betty J. Meggers, 67–87. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington.
  194. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  195. Flannery is one of the chief proponents of systems theory approaches in archaeology. In this article, he adopts the concepts and idiom of systems theory—positive and negative feedback, fixed components interacting with one another and with the whole, and equilibrium—to examine how a relatively minor subsistence activity coupled with genetic changes, which increased the productivity of maize, underpinned the slow development of agriculture in Mexico.
  196. Find this resource:
  197. Flannery, Kent V. 1973. Archeology with a capital S. In Research and theory in current archeology. Edited by Charles L. Redman, 47–53. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
  198. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  199. In this article, Flannery points to the existence of several mutually distinct processualist perspectives, one rooted in systems theory and another in the hypothetico-deductive reasoning of logical positivism.
  200. Find this resource:
  201. Leone, Mark P., ed. 1972. Contemporary archaeology: A guide to theory and contributions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press.
  202. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  203. This volume brings together seminal papers, mostly from the 1960s, for the formation of the New Archaeology, which later came to be known as processual archaeology.
  204. Find this resource:
  205. Watson, Patty Jo, Steven A. LeBlanc, and Charles L. Redman. 1971. Explanation in archaeology: An explicitly scientific approach. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
  206. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  207. This widely consulted volume was the first comprehensive statement about scientific methods required to pose and test hypotheses about how ancient peoples lived.
  208. Find this resource:
  209. Wylie, Alison. 2002. The conceptual core of the New Archaeology. In Thinking from things: Essays in the philosophy of archaeology. By Alison Wylie, 57–77. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  210. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. The author, trained as a philosopher of science, dissects the epistemological underpinnings of processual archaeology.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. Postprocessualist Perspectives
  214.  
  215. This is an “umbrella term” that refers to a diverse array of reactions to processualism: structuralist, post-structualist, symbolic, critical theoretical, and phenomenological approaches are a few of the more prominent ones. All share uneasiness with the processual archaeologists’ search for general laws and the denial of the relevance of historical contingency. Hodder 1982 is an early and influential expression of these reactions. Hodder 1985 and Preucel 1995 provide two alternative and concise characterizations of postprocessual archaeology, separated by a decade. Shanks and Tilley 1987 and Hodder, et al. 1995 are extended considerations of the breadth of the questions and issues raised by postprocessual archaeology. Yoffee and Sherratt 1993 is a direct critique both of postprocessual and processual archaeology. While Marxist and feminist perspectives on archaeology are sometimes included in postprocessual archaeology, they arguably have distinct roots in dialogues between archaeology and the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
  216.  
  217. Hodder, Ian, ed. 1982. Symbolic and structural archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  218. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558252Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  219. This volume is widely cited as representing an early, if not the first, break with processualism. The contributors present philosophical arguments embedded in discussions of specific data sets and their symbolic or structural interpretation.
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Hodder, Ian. 1985. Postprocessual archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:1–26.
  222. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  223. This essay is concerned with the broad outlines of postprocessual archaeology according to one of its principal advocates: the social and historical contexts of symbolic production and implications of material culture studies for studying the human past.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Hodder, Ian, Michael Shanks, Alexandra Alexandri, et al., eds. 1995. Interpreting archaeology: Finding meaning in the past. London: Routledge.
  226. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  227. The contributors discuss a range of topics: philosophical issues, the origins of meaning and cognition, how the past is interpreted and presented, the connections between archaeology and history, and material culture. They provide a constructive comparison with Hodder 1982 in the kinds of questions posed by postprocessual archaeologists.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Preucel, Robert. 1995. The postprocessual condition. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 3.2: 147–175.
  230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. The author examines the dialogues that emerged between the early formulations of postprocessual perspectives and structural Marxism, critical theory, post-structuralism, and feminism.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilley. 1987. Re-constructing archaeology: Theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  234. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  235. This volume challenges the practices both of culture history and processual archaeology; it is concerned with overcoming the separation of theoretical argument and archaeological practice. The authors explicitly advocate a social archaeology that is philosophically and politically informed, and that sees artifacts “as part of a social world of past and present that is charged with meaning.”
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Yoffee, Norman, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. 1993. Archaeological theory: Who sets the agenda? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  238. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511720277Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. The contributors critique the sometimes naive positivism of processual archaeologists, on the one hand, and the oftentimes unsupported speculations of postprocessual archaeologists about ancient meanings and intentions, on the other.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Marxist Perspectives
  242.  
  243. More explicitly than many processual and postprocessual archaeologists, Marxist archaeologists recognize the fundamental unity of the corporeal and social dimensions of human beings, who walk, talk, are enmeshed in complicated relations with one another, and create needs that are satisfied by labor. Childe 1950 is an influential statement of class and state formation. Spriggs 1984 and Patterson 1994 bring together scholarly thought from around the world. McGuire 1992 and Chapman 2003 synthesize how Marxist theory informs the practice of archaeology. All of the authors recognize that at different times and places, social relations become exploitative in the sense that the members of one group lived off the productive activities of others. As a result, they often focus on issues of social inequality and social hierarchy and how these are reproduced by states.
  244.  
  245. Chapman, Robert. 2003. Archaeologies of complexity. London: Routledge.
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. The book explains the often-ambiguous terms “complexity,” “hierarchy,” and “inequality” and provides a critical account of influential Anglo-American archaeological research on these topics since the 1960s.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Childe, V. Gordon. 1950. The urban revolution. Town Planning Review 21.1: 2–17.
  250. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  251. A precocious and still widely cited formulation of class and state formation in early civilizations, by this Australian prehistoric archaeologist who was much inspired by Marxist social thought.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. McGuire, Randall. 1992. A Marxist archaeology. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. One of the first efforts to explore systematically the relationship between Marxist social thought and the theory and practice of archaeology.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Patterson, Thomas C. 1994. Social archaeology in Latin America: An appreciation. American Antiquity 59.3: 531–537.
  258. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. The author examines the ways in which Latin American social archaeologists have continued concerted exploration of relations between Marxist social thought, the interpretation of archaeological evidence, and the reconstruction of societies from the earliest times to the present.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Spriggs, Matthew, ed. 1984. Marxist perspectives in archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  262. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. The volume is an early attempt to explore the utility of different strands of Marxist social thought for interpreting archaeological evidence in order to reconstruct the social relations from diverse settings and time periods in the past.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Feminist Perspectives
  266.  
  267. Feminist perspectives in archaeology are an outgrowth of the women’s movement of the 1960s, which was concerned with issues such as women’s active roles in society, the existence of gender hierarchy, and parity in the workplace. Among the first considerations of a gendered archaeology involved “finding” women in the archaeological record and addressing stereotypes that cast women as passive, powerless, or absent altogether. With fuller incorporation of feminist theory, feminist archaeology became increasingly concerned with redressing the inequities of all marginalized groups, not just women. Gero and Conkey 1991 and Walde and Willows 1991 are watershed considerations of the potentials for feminist theory in archaeological practice, raising issues that have continued to be explored. Brumfiel 1992 draws on feminist theory to challenge processualism directly as inadequate for understanding the human experience. Nelson, et al. 1994 focuses specifically on job equity in archaeology; Nelson 2006 assesses how feminist theory has shaped archaeological findings and practices in the early 21st century. Conkey and Wylie 2007 updates the positions advanced by scholars in the early 1990s.
  268.  
  269. Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. 1992. Breaking and entering the ecosystem—gender, class, and faction steal the show. American Anthropologist 94.3: 551–566.
  270. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1992.94.3.02a00020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. This highly influential article applied feminist and other sensibilities to attack head-on the shortcomings of the obsession of processual archaeologists with big questions and generalizations over large sweeps of time. In contrast, the author points to the insights to be gained from closer attention to the intricate day-to-day social dynamics that occur within historically specific, hierarchically organized societies and how these are manifest in the archaeological record.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Conkey, Margaret W., and Alison Wylie, eds. 2007. Doing archaeology as a feminist. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14.3: 209–216.
  274. DOI: 10.1007/s10816-007-9034-4Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. This essay and others in this journal issue point to the disassociation of gender archaeology and feminist scholarship and activism. They examine what is to be gained by linking these resources more systematically. This publication also provides a useful comparison with, and in contrast to, Gero and Conkey 1991 and Walde and Willows 1991.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey, eds. 1991. Engendering archaeology: Women and prehistory. Oxford: Blackwell.
  278. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. The editors of this path-breaking, foundational volume asked authors to reconsider their customary areas of research as if gender really mattered. The importance of this contribution is that it inspired, and continues to inspire, many others to ask the same question of their own research.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Nelson, Margaret C., Sarah M. Nelson, and Alison Wylie, eds. 1994. Equity issues for women in archeology. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 5. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
  282. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  283. The chapters in this volume assess job parity and equity in the archaeological profession in the late 20th century. Many of the issues raised persist.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Nelson, Sarah, ed. 2006. Handbook of gender in archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. This ambitious stock taking synthesizes findings of what we know about women in past societies as well as the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological frameworks that have been deployed toward honing the understanding of those findings. It provides a useful comparison with Gero and Conkey 1991 and Walde and Willows 1991.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Walde, Dale, and Noreen D. Willows, eds. 1991. The archaeology of gender: Proceedings of the twenty-second annual conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary. Calgary, AB.
  290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  291. The sixty-eight chapters in this volume and the more than 300 individuals who attended the 1989 conference at which they were presented captured the breadth of interest in gender issues in archaeology at the time.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Theory
  294.  
  295. If we take theories as attempts to encompass and explain, in a systematic manner, knowledge about some particular aspect of the world of experience, then the entries in this section represent prominent, recent attempts to understand fields of experience that were previously ignored or underappreciated by archaeologists. Wylie 2002 critically considers the philosophical groundings of previous and current archaeological theory. Pauketat and Meskell 2010 provides a programmatic projection for the future development of archaeological theory. Van Pool and Van Pool 2003 and Funari, et al. 2005 bring together archaeologists with contrasting perspectives on how archaeology is and should be practiced in the early 21st century. Topics considered in the foregoing works include those highlighted in this section, especially as developments within and beyond the topics treated in the section on historical foundations: Social Archaeology, Behavioral Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology, Evolutionary Archaeology, Settlement Archaeology, the Archaeology and Households and Communities, Landscape Archaeology, Heritage Archaeology, Identity, Social Inequalities, Materiality, and Agency and Practice Theory.
  296.  
  297. Funari, Pedro P., Andrés Zarankin, and Emily Stovel, eds. 2005. Global archaeological theory: Contextual voices and contemporary thoughts. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
  298. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. This explicitly postprocessual collection reflects contemporary debates organized around five themes: theoretical issues, archaeological theory and methods in action, space and power in material culture, images as material discourse, and the construction of archaeological discourse.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Pauketat, Timothy R., and Lynn Meskell. 2010. Changing theoretical directions in American archaeology. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 193–219. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  302. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. The authors look at current trends in archaeological theory building and emphasize the productive articulation of distinct approaches such as landscape, materiality, and practice. They also situate archaeological theory and practice in global historical issues and with the concerns of indigenous and descendant communities.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Van Pool, Todd L., and Christine S. Van Pool, eds. 2003. Essential tensions in archaeological method and theory. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press.
  306. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. A collection of original papers providing critical assessment of contemporary issues in method and theory, illustrating such recurrent themes as the role of agency, materiality, and the social contexts in which archaeological research is planned and carried out.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from things: Essays in the philosophy of archaeology. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  310. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. Wylie, a philosopher of science as well as an archaeologist, examines how archaeologists know what they know, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence they have about past societies. Her goal is, in part, to explore ways in which various theoretical perspectives in the discipline might be reconciled or find common ground.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Social Archaeology
  314.  
  315. The idea of social archaeology—the social relations of the peoples who produced the artifacts and patterns studied by archaeologists—was first formulated in the 1930s, as Orser and Patterson 2004 notes. A resurgence of interest in social archaeology occurred in the wake of the processualists’ strong emphases on techno-environmentalism and long-term processes of change—e.g., critiques in Redman, et al. 1978 and Renfrew 1984. By the end of the 20th century, the concept was recuperated and expanded in the context of postprocessual, Marxist, and feminist writings to incorporate historical contingency, class and gender relations, and the contradictions created by social inequalities. Meskell and Preucel 2004 takes stock of social archaeology in the 21st century.
  316.  
  317. Meskell, Lynn, and Robert W. Preucel, eds. 2004. Companion to social archaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. This volume presents seventeen commissioned essays that deal with four major themes of social archaeology at the beginning of the 21st century: knowledges, identities, places, and politics.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Orser, Charles E., Jr., and Thomas C. Patterson. 2004. Introduction: V. Gordon Childe and the foundations of social archaeology. In Foundations of social archaeology: Selected writings of V. Gordon Childe. Edited by Thomas C. Patterson and Charles E. Orser Jr., 1–23. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  322. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. The authors survey the historical development of social archaeology, focusing on the seminal contributions of V. Gordon Childe from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Redman, Charles L., M. J. Berman, E. V. Curtin, W. T. Langhorn Jr., N. N. Versaggi, and J. C. Wanser, eds. 1978. Social archaeology: Beyond subsistence and dating. New York: Academic Press.
  326. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  327. While processual archaeologists initially argued that all aspects of human activity and culture were open to study, they focused increasingly on the environment, subsistence, and demography as the engines of change and on refining methods for their study. This volume offered case studies in the successful pursuit of a wider range of topics, especially those concerned with social relations.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Renfrew, Colin. 1984. Approaches to social archaeology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
  330. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. This collection of fourteen previously published papers begins with an introduction that defines social archaeology and the questions it might feasibly address: societies and space (the landscape of power); trade and interaction; authority, monuments, and the structure of preurban societies; the dynamics of continuous growth (i.e., systems thinking); and discontinuity and long-term change.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Behavioral Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology
  334.  
  335. While these are usually considered as distinct approaches, we combine them here because each of them focuses on behavior and its relation to the production of the archaeological record. Behavioral archaeologists study the relationship between human behavior and material data in the past and present. Ethnoarchaeologists undertake ethnographic studies to aid archaeological interpretation, especially involving how material items enter the archaeological record. For some, the difference between behavioral archaeology and ethnoarchaeology is that the former is concerned mainly with technology, site formation, the substitution of the culture concept with that of behavior, and largely eschewing culture, meaning, and cognition as important in the study of the archaeological record. In contrast, the latter often explicitly considers symbols and meanings as important for understanding material culture and the formation of the archaeological record. Hodder 1982 is an early contribution to ethnoarchaeology from a postprocessualist perspective. Kent 1987 discusses how ethnoarchaeology shapes archaeological method and theory. David and Kramer 2001 takes stock of ethnoarchaeology at the end of the 20th century. Skibo, et al. 1995 and Skibo and Schiffer 2008 critically situate behavioral archaeology in the wider context of current theory.
  336.  
  337. David, Nicholas, and Carol Kramer. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. The authors, leading ethnoarchaeologists, review the history of the approach, its expanding scope and relevance, and the theory, field methods, and ethics central to its pursuit. They see ethnoarchaeology as embracing processualist as well as postprocessualist perspectives.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Hodder, Ian. 1982. Symbols in action: Ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  342. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. The author examines the “archaeological” remains of contemporary peoples and shows how objects are used within particular culture contexts and carry symbolic expression into social interaction.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Kent, Susan, ed. 1987. Method and theory for activity area research: An ethnoarchaeological approach. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
  346. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Using case studies, the authors in this volume attempt to develop and refine methods, theories, and models for understanding the use of space in past societies. The editor views ethnoarchaeology as “the formulation and testing of archaeologically oriented methods, hypotheses, models, and theories with ethnographic data.”
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Skibo, James M., and Michael Brian Schiffer. 2008. People and things: A behavioral approach to material culture. New York: Springer.
  350. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. Using case studies and examples, the authors elaborate a theory for understanding the relations between people and things, while providing a critique of alternative perspectives—especially agency and practice theory, and evolutionary archaeology.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Skibo, James M., William H. Walker, and Axel E. Nielsen, eds. 1995. Expanding archaeology. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press.
  354. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. The contributors to this volume situate behavioral archaeology within contemporary archaeological approaches. They present areas of agreement and disagreement between behavioral archaeologists and proponents of other approaches—most notably historical, evolutionary, and postprocessual perspectives.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Evolutionary Archaeology
  358.  
  359. Preucel 1999 suggests that archaeologists are employing neo-Darwinian ideas to build four major research directions in evolutionary archaeology: coevolution or “the interaction between social learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution”; behavioral ecology, which regards cultural change as the consequence of individual actors attempting to maximize particular energy capture and reproductive success; selectionism, which seeks a unified theory of the transmission of cultural and biological traits; and cognitive archaeology, or the evolution of human cognitive structures. In contrast to cultural evolutionism, evolutionary archaeology focuses specifically on applying neo-Darwinian principles. Teltser 1995 and Maschner 1996 focus on selectionism, while the latter also addresses cognitive archaeology. Trigger 1998 offers a different perspective for linking Darwinian thought and archaeology. O’Brien and Lyman 2000 and Shennan 2002 elaborate the productive role of selectionism in archaeological practice.
  360.  
  361. Maschner, Herbert D. G., ed. 1996. Darwinian archaeologies. New York: Plenum.
  362. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. The majority of twelve original contributions to this volume are concerned with elaborating a selectionist perspective; the remainder elaborate the concepts of cognitive modularity and hierarchization in human cognitive evolution.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. O’Brien, Michael J., and R. Lee Lyman. 2000. Applying evolutionary archaeology: A systematic approach. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. The authors examine the ontological and epistemological issues involved in efforts to bring a Darwinian evolutionary approach into archaeology. They then turn their attention to the methodological issues involved in using the fossil or archaeological record to examine evolutionary trajectories. They further argue that the choice of theory guides the selection of methods that will be used in the research.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Preucel, Robert W. 1999. Evolutionary archaeology: Theory and practice. Journal of Field Archaeology 26.1: 93–99.
  370. DOI: 10.2307/530628Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. This even-handed review points out the diversity of the research agendas of evolutionary archaeologists and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Shennan, Stephen. 2002. Genes, memes, and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames and Hudson.
  374. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. The author of this highly original book looks at human life histories as he develops a selectionist theory, which seeks to show that the transmission of information through time occurs not only through genetic inheritance, but also through a second system of (cultural) inheritance, whose units have been called “memes.”
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Teltser, Patrice A., ed. 1995. Evolutionary archaeology: Methodological issues. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
  378. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. The main thrust of the nine papers in this collection is to develop a selectionist perspective that asserts that Darwinian natural selection operates on human behavior and that it results in the persistence both of a series of alternative behaviors as well as the products of those behaviors.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Trigger, Bruce G. 1998. Archaeology and epistemology: Dialoguing across the Darwinian chasm. American Journal of Archaeology 102.1: 1–34.
  382. DOI: 10.2307/506135Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Recognizing productive use both of idealist and materialist epistemologies in studies of the transmission of human knowledge (culture and genes), the author advocates adopting a realist epistemology, which combines features of both, for studying subjectivity, agency, and the transmission of knowledge—an epistemology that would fill in the chasm separating the natural and human sciences.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Settlement Archaeology
  386.  
  387. Willey 1953 defined settlement patterns as “the way in which man disposed himself over the landscape on which he lived. It refers to dwellings, to their arrangement, and to the nature and disposition of other buildings pertaining to community life. These settlements reflect the natural environment, the level of technology on which the builders operated, and various institutions of social interaction and control which the culture maintained.” This definition is still widely followed, but the ramifications of the research have made settlement archaeology a mainstay of archaeological research, as Billman and Feinman 1999 shows. Culture historians, cultural evolutionists, and processual archaeologists found this approach perfectly suited to their studies of geographic regions. Adams 1965 uses settlement archaeology as a means for understanding a whole region through its settlements. Parsons 1972 is an early stock taking of settlement archaeology. Willey 2005 is a retrospective view on settlement archaeology since the 1950s. Settlement archaeology is a foundation of the archaeology of households and communities.
  388.  
  389. Adams, Robert McC. 1965. Land behind Baghdad: A history of settlement in the Diyala plains. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  390. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. This research serves as a foundational contribution to the organization, implementation, and interpretation of settlement pattern research.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Billman, Brian R., and Gary M. Feinman, eds. 1999. Settlement pattern studies in the Americas: Fifty years since Virú. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
  394. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  395. The authors and editors of this volume commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Virú Valley settlement survey in Willey 1953 with critical consideration of its methodological, theoretical, and interpretive legacy in subsequent studies in the Americas.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Parsons, Jeffrey T. 1972. Archaeological settlement patterns. Annual Review of Anthropology 1:127–150.
  398. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.01.100172.001015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. This critical synthesis of settlement pattern research is still widely cited today, even though it was published in the early 1970s. The author looks at the foundational research of settlement pattern studies and argues for the importance of this kind of investigation.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Willey, Gordon R. 1953. Prehistoric settlement patterns in the Virú Valley, Peru. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 155. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
  402. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403. This is the foundational monograph on settlement archaeology. The author reports the results of a settlement pattern survey on the north coast of Peru. More important, he lays the foundations for the theoretical value and methodology for conducting what has become a central feature of archaeological research programs around the world.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Willey, Gordon R. 2005. Settlement patterns in Americanist archaeology. In Structure and meaning in human settlements. Edited by Tony Atkin and Joseph Rykwert, 27–34. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
  406. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. This brief essay is Willey’s culminating reflection, published posthumously, on the importance of settlement pattern research.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Archaeology of Households and Communities
  410.  
  411. In the 1980s, developments in settlement archaeology and ecological anthropology as well as innovative works such as Flannery 1976 led archaeologists to focus systematically on households as fundamental units of society. Wilk and Rathje 1982 considers the theoretical premises and implications of an archaeology of households. Wilk and Ashmore 1988 extends the theoretical discussion and brings together case studies of its implementation. Kent 1990 focuses on the social units of households by examining domestic architecture. Barile and Brandon 2004 is an important compendium of applications of household studies by historical archaeologists. The study of households has also allowed archaeologists to study social organization at scales other than those of the ancient city or the polity. Building on the productivity of this approach has led, in turn, to studies of communities as larger social units than households, as in Canuto and Yaeger 2000, among others. Doing so facilitates analyses of settlements as social rather than simply physical entities.
  412.  
  413. Barile, Kerri S., and Jamie C. Brandon, eds. 2004. Household chores and household choices: Theorizing the domestic sphere in historical archaeology. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press.
  414. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. This volume brings together American historical archaeologists who discuss the applicability, productivity, and promise of household archaeology.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Canuto, Marcello A., and Jason Yaeger, eds. 2000. The archaeology of communities: A New World perspective. New York: Routledge.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. The essays in this volume bridge the gap between studies of ancient households and the societies in which they were constitutive parts. They argue that a community is more than simply an assemblage of households, that it has integrating dynamics that are distinct from those of individual households or larger social units. The arguments are illustrated with case studies from across the Americas.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Flannery, Kent V., ed. 1976. The early Mesoamerican village. New York: Academic Press.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. The articles in this landmark volume look at settlement data in units corresponding to household, village, region, and polity. They encouraged archaeologists to plan their research around such social units, which led archaeologists, especially Americanists, to conduct excavations of settlements in ways that exposed large living and working areas.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Kent, Susan, ed. 1990. Domestic architecture and the use of space: An interdisciplinary cross-cultural study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. The volume integrates the views of archaeologists, architects, ethnographers, and others who are approaching from different standpoints the relationship between domestic architecture and the use of space. As the editor notes, “Scholars have traditionally analyzed buildings and the use of space within buildings without analyzing the interaction between the two or how the interaction articulates with specific aspects.”
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Wilk, Richard R., and Wendy Ashmore, eds. 1988. Household and community in the Mesoamerican past. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
  430. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. This volume sought to synthesize some of the household studies in Mesoamerica and to stimulate further development of this approach in and beyond the region involved.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Wilk, Richard R., and William Rathje, eds. 1982. Archaeology of the household: Building a prehistory of domestic life. American Behavioral Scientist 25.6.
  434. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. This theme issue, which brought together archaeologists, ethnoarchaeologists, and cultural anthropologists, constitutes an early effort to show why analyses of households are productive and provide insights into how people lived their lives.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Landscape Archaeology
  438.  
  439. Landscape archaeology is concerned with the cumulative relations between people and the land on which they live. Archaeologists have approached these interactions from diverse standpoints, ranging from economic and ecological perspectives to symbolic and phenomenological understandings. Many see it as a complement to settlement archaeology, including the spaces between settlement traces and diffuse traces such as field systems, farms, or roads, along with unmodified parts of the terrain such as caves, forests, or springs. Crumley and Marquardt 1987 demonstrates the utility of bringing together diverse sources to understand long-term landscape change. Tilley 1994 and Bender 1998 are fundamental to the restudy of landscapes. Ashmore and Knapp 1999 brings together diverse theoretical perspectives and an international range of cases. Anschuetz, et al. 2001 proposes terminology and methods useful in landscape archaeology. David and Thomas 2008 provides a critical overview of landscape archaeology in the 21st century.
  440.  
  441. Anschuetz, Kurt F., Richard H. Wilshusen, and Cherie L. Scheick. 2001. An archaeology of landscapes: Perspectives and directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 9.2: 157–211.
  442. DOI: 10.1023/A:1016621326415Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. The goal of this thoughtful article is to provide a common terminology and methodology for a landscape archaeology approach. The authors argue that the approach they advocate can “accommodate, if not integrate, contrasting theoretical perspectives.” Toward this end, they review the history and diverse developmental record of concepts and practice in landscape archaeology.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Ashmore, Wendy, and A. Bernard Knapp, eds. 1999. Archaeologies of landscape: Contemporary perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Following a theoretical and historical introduction by the editors, the contributors present case studies grounded in their own research and theoretical standpoints. The aim of the volume was to bring together authors with diverse backgrounds and points of view.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Bender, Barbara. 1998. Stonehenge: Making place. Oxford: Berg.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. In this engaging and theoretically important book, the author examines the famous site of Stonehenge as part of a landscape that changed through time and that, in recent years, has been the center of conflicting claims about its meaning and who owns it.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Crumley, Carole L., and William H. Marquardt, eds. 1987. Regional dynamics: Burgundian landscapes in historical perspective. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  454. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. The book is a synthesis of research design and findings from a project dealing with changes over several thousand years in the relations between the peoples of southern France and the landscapes they occupied and created.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. David, Bruno, and Julian Thomas, eds. 2008. Handbook of landscape archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. This volume will be a benchmark for the study of landscape archaeology in the future. Its sixty-five chapters are arranged in sections on historical perspectives, encountering humans—mapping place, thinking through landscapes, living landscapes—the body and the experience of place, characterizing landscapes, and diversities, inequalities, and power relations in landscapes.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: Places, paths and monuments. Oxford: Berg.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. In this path-breaking volume, Tilley combines numerous photographs with a narrative advocating a phenomenological (experiential) approach as a means for understanding the role of architecture and monuments in “socializing the landscape” and creating meaning in it.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Heritage Archaeology
  466.  
  467. The end of the 20th century was not only marked by a resurgence of nationalism, but also a concern for preservation of archaeological remains, damage from war, and repatriation movements around the world. These interests brought to the fore political and ethical issues of national, ethnic, religious, and regional heritage as well as repatriation. McBryde 1985 is an early foray into heritage archaeology. Kane 2003 focuses on the complicated relations between heritage archaeology and identity. Mathers, et al. 2005 stresses the ethical responsibility of heritage archaeologists in assigning significance to particular places. Meskell 1998 considers the impact of conflict on construction of heritage. Butler 2006 reviews the ideas of heritage and heritage value. Breglia 2006 examines public and private perspectives on heritage. Fitz Gibbon 2005 synthesizes heritage law and practices in the United States and Great Britain, especially as they affect museums.
  468.  
  469. Breglia, Lisa. 2006. Monumental ambivalence: The politics of heritage. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
  470. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. The author examines “heritage” from the perspective of public and private actors, and competition over economic and other benefits from controlling cultural patrimony. She draws illustrative material from Yucatán, Mexico.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Butler, Beverly. 2006. Heritage and the present past. In Handbook of material culture. Edited by Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 463–479. London: SAGE.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. The author reviews heritage studies and addresses the key questions of what constitutes heritage and heritage value. She organizes her arguments around two major headings: the historical approach or heritage in the Western imagination, and the memorial approach, which considers alternative and parallel heritages.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Fitz Gibbon, Kate, ed. 2005. Who owns the past? Cultural policy, cultural property, and the law. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. The contributors to this volume examine development of cultural property law and practices, principally with reference to museums in the United States and Great Britain. They consider such issues as the ethics of collecting and the antiquities trade.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Kane, Susan, ed. 2003. The politics of archaeology and identity in a global context. Colloquia and Conference Papers 7. Boston: Archaeological Institute of America.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. The authors of the essays in this volume are concerned with showing the mutually constitutive connections between heritage and identity, including nationalism.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Mathers, Clay, Timothy Darvill, and Barbara J. Little, eds. 2005. Heritage of value, archaeology of renown: Reshaping archaeological assessment and significance. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. The authors of the essays in this volume urge archaeologists to reconsider how the practice of archaeology, especially cultural resource management, assigns value differentially to places investigated. Drawing from cases around the world, they propose new theoretical and pragmatic approaches to assigning significance to archaeological sites.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. McBryde, Isabel, ed. 1985. Who owns the past? Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. The essays in this volume were early efforts to grapple with the issues of heritage, identity, and who controls their invocation.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Meskell, Lynn, ed. 1998. Archaeology under fire: Nationalism, politics, and heritage in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. London: Routledge.
  494. DOI: 10.4324/9780203259320Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. The contributors to this volume consider the archaeological record of the areas mentioned in the title and especially how heritage as embodied in the archaeological record constitutes severely contested political terrain. The hopeful prognosis is that discussions about such contestation can lead away from hostility to reconciliation and acceptance.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Identity
  498.  
  499. What social categories did people in the past deploy to distinguish differences and commonalities between individuals and groups? Archaeologists have grappled with such questions with increasing frequency and thoughtfulness since the late 1980s. The kinds of identities singled out have included class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Schortman 1989 tackles the need to distinguish the multiple identities held by the members of any society. Jones 1997 considers the thorny topic of ethnicity. Orser 2002 looks critically at the implication of racialized identities in the United States since colonial times. Meskell 2002 is a broad review of issues of politics and identity in archaeology. Geller 2009 offers a feminist critique of identity categorization.
  500.  
  501. Geller, Pamela A. 2009. Identity and difference: Complicating gender archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 38:65–81.
  502. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164414Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. The author challenges archaeologists’ categorization of gender, race, and sexuality, based on a feminist critique of the fixed dichotomization and oversimplification of such categories.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Jones, Siân. 1997. The archaeology of ethnicity: Constructing identities in the past and present. London: Routledge.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. Attempts to identify material remains with particular “peoples” have a long and controversial history in archaeology. In this book, Jones critiques past efforts and argues for considering ethnicity as a deeply complex, fluid form of identity, meriting changes in archaeological analyses and interpretation for their recognition.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Meskell, Lynn. 2002. The intersections of identity and politics in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:279–301.
  510. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511. The author examines the intersection in the early 1990s of concerns with how ancient lives were experienced in age, gender, and other social identities, with an archaeology shaped in the present by the politics and ethics surrounding representations of those social identities and who gets to write about them.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Orser, Charles E., Jr., ed. 2002. Race and the archaeology of identity. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press.
  514. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. The contributors to this volume are historical archaeologists who work in Anglophone America and are concerned with the interplay of racial categorization, institutionalized poverty, segregation, maintenance of social hierarchy, the construction of alternative identities, and how historical archaeology challenges mainstream histories of the region.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Schortman, Edward M. 1989. Interregional interaction in prehistory: The need for a new perspective. American Antiquity 54.1: 52–65.
  518. DOI: 10.2307/281331Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. Schortman argues in favor of shifting the focus of archaeologists from “spatially distinct cultures” to interactions among peoples within those cultures. His basic premise is that all interaction takes place between individuals and groups with established identities—for example, by wealth, age, or gender—that have behavioral expectations attached to them, and he offers examples that bear witness to the fruitfulness of his approach in multiple cultural settings.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Social Inequalities
  522.  
  523. Archaeologists employing cultural evolutionist and Marxist perspectives have longstanding interests in notions of hierarchical social, economic, and political organization. In the 1990s, historical archaeologists, in particular, began a closer, more concerted look at the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, and gender as expressions of those forms of social inequality that emerged with the development of capitalist civilization. McGuire and Paynter 1991, Mrozowski 2006, and Franklin and Paynter 2010 look at archaeological evidence of class stratification and other forms of social inequality in the United States. Delle, et al. 2000 examines the archaeology of capitalism and inequality.
  524.  
  525. Delle, James A., Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, eds. 2000. Lines that divide: Historical archaeologies of race, class, and gender. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.
  526. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. The contributors to this volume are concerned with the archaeology of capitalist development and with the ways in which landscapes and material culture are constitutive and representative of class, race, and gender divisions in American, African, and European societies during the ascendancy of capitalist civilization and its myriad forms.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Franklin, Maria, and Robert Paynter. 2010. Inequality and archaeology. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 94–130. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  530. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. The authors provide historical background to archaeology’s engagement with issues of race, class, and gender and highlight some of the directions taken in the 1990s toward making such engagement more systematic and effective.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. McGuire, Randall H., and Robert Paynter, eds. 1991. The archaeology of inequality. Oxford: Blackwell.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. The archaeologists writing in this volume use the evidence of landscape and material culture to examine various forms of inequality that existed within and among Euroamerican, African American, and Native American communities.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Mrozowski, Stephen A. 2006. The archaeology of class in urban America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. The author examines the processes of class formation in 18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, and 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts. Drawing from analyses of material culture and spatial practices as well as from evidence about environmental conditions and health, he argues that “the shifting ecologies of capitalism” shaped aspects of class, gender, and ethnicity in these cases.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Materiality
  542.  
  543. Materiality is not the same as material culture; rather, it is a concept that calls attention to the interaction of people and materials within culturally defined relationships. DeMarrais, et al. 2004 notes that archaeologists use the term materiality to address the characteristics of material objects, how people interact with the things of the world as agents, and how they are, in turn, shaped by those experiences. Miller 2005 and Meskell 2005 bring different perspectives and cases to archaeological studies of materiality.
  544.  
  545. DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds. 2004. Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. The contributors to this volume bring diverse theoretical perspectives to bear on major changes in the human past, including the emergence of sedentism, domestication, and social inequality, and how each of these relates to changes in cognition, symbolic expression, and technological innovation.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Meskell, Lynn, ed. 2005. Archaeologies of materiality. Oxford: Blackwell.
  550. DOI: 10.1002/9780470774052Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Using substantive case studies from diverse times and places, the authors document a material universe that shapes daily human experience of landscape, ritual, technology, embodiment, and heritage.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  554. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  555. The contributors to this volume consider a diverse array of topics, from art to technology to finance, to show the different ways in which materiality is understood and the implications of these differences for understanding how immaterial interlaces with the material worlds in which we live.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Agency and Practice Theory
  558.  
  559. In the early 21st century, many archaeologists have turned explicitly to consideration of how individuals and groups affect the society around them. Through the concept of agency, archaeologists acknowledge that people have intentions, make decisions, and act on the result. Practice theory focuses attention on those acts, and how repeated practices often have material signatures that shape the archaeological record by mapping social relations. Dobres and Robb 2000 is foundational. Pauketat 2001 sees agency and practice as concepts to move beyond behavioral and evolutionary approaches to the past. Saitta 2007 demonstrates the pertinence of archaeology to understanding diverse forms of social struggle and resistance. Mills and Walker 2008 discusses the intersection of agency, practice theory, and an emerging literature on memory building.
  560.  
  561. Dobres, Marcia-Anne, and John Robb, eds. 2000. Agency in archaeology. London: Routledge.
  562. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. In this path-breaking collection of essays, the contributors, who have diverse theoretical standpoints, argue for the importance of moving beyond structural or environmental explanations of change to consider how individuals and groups played prominent and recognizable roles in changing the societies in which they lived, that is, in making their own history.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Mills, Barbara J., and William H. Walker, eds. 2008. Memory work: Archaeologies of material practices. Santa Fe, NM: SAR.
  566. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  567. The contributors to this volume explore the relation of materiality and practices in producing detectable archaeological evidence of memory formation and building.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2001. Practice and history in archaeology: An emerging paradigm. Anthropological Theory 1.1: 73–98.
  570. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  571. Pauketat asserts that recognition of agency and the practices by which subjects act points to the replacement of “behavior” and “evolution” as explanatory frameworks for culture change with “practice” and “history.”
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Saitta, Dean. 2007. The archaeology of collective action. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida.
  574. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. Saitta examines the success of archaeologists at reconstructing forms of collective social action such as strikes. In so doing, he reveals the present-day implications of these acts of resistance to social inequalities in the past.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Putting Theory into Practice
  578.  
  579. As indicated in Textbooks, archaeologists consistently draw on theory to inform the conduct of their research. This section highlights some approaches that are well established in archaeology, and some that are taking new directions and/or expanding from established ones. Among the former are historical, classical, and cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology. Some of the new directions and innovations are indigenous, postcolonial, public, and collaborative archaeologies, as well as issues of repatriation and reaching beyond the discipline. Ashmore, et al. 2010 looks at what archaeologists do in the early 21st century and offers programmatic statements about problems that will need to be addressed in the near future.
  580.  
  581. Ashmore, Wendy, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, eds. 2010. Voices in American archaeology. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. This volume was commissioned to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for American Archaeology. Contributors were invited to address issues faced in contemporary archaeology, to assess current responses, and to make programmatic statements about the future. It is intended to stimulate discussion rather than to provide authoritative answers.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Historical Archaeology
  586.  
  587. Historical archaeology has been defined in different ways. For Funari, et al. 1999, it is the archaeology of literate societies; for others, it is the archaeology of settler colonies and colonists; for Hall and Silliman 2006, it is the archaeology of world capitalism in its diverse manifestations. Paynter 2000 calls for closer collaboration between historical archaeologists, on the one hand, and cultural and archaeological anthropologists, on the other. Hicks and Beaudry 2006 is a guide to current debates and issues.
  588.  
  589. Funari, Pedro P., Martin A. Hall, and Siân Jones, eds. 1999. Historical archaeology: Back from the edge. London: Routledge.
  590. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  591. The contributors to this volume view historical archaeology as encompassing study of all past societies with documentary evidence. They avoid universalizing concepts such as colonialism, power, and identity, preferring instead to emphasize local manifestations of these and other phenomena.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Hall, Martin, and Stephen W. Silliman, eds. 2006. Historical archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. The topics by the contributors to this volume include dimensions of practice, themes and interpretation, and world systems and local living.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Hicks, Dan, and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. 2006. The Cambridge companion to historical archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  598. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. Drawing from case studies around the world, this volume provides an overview of the field of historical archaeology, viewed as the period 1500 CE to the present. The topics covered include archaeology and history, key themes in historical archaeology, historical archaeology and material culture, historical archaeology and landscapes, and historical archaeology and buildings.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Paynter, Robert W. 2000. Historical and anthropological archaeology: Forging alliances. Journal of Archaeological Research 8.3: 169–217.
  602. DOI: 10.1023/A:1009455104130Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. In this theoretical article, the author reviews the contributions of historical archaeology to understanding class, state, race, and gender processes in North America.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Classical Archaeology
  606.  
  607. As Morris 2000 observes, classical archaeology has traditionally involved the study of Greek and Roman artifacts, with the aim of showing how Greco-Roman culture was expressed in material terms and the connections between their aesthetic and literary dimensions. The two items highlighted here take stock of changing directions in the field. While Morris 2000 focuses on the recent history of classical archaeology, Davis 2001 is a call for greater collaboration between classical and anthropological archaeologists.
  608.  
  609. Davis, Jack L. 2001. Classical archaeology and anthropological archaeology in North America: A meeting of minds at the millennium? In Archaeology at the millennium: A sourcebook. Edited by Gary M. Feinman and T. Douglas Price, 415–437. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
  610. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-72611-3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  611. In this essay, the author argues that the institutional structures of teaching classical and anthropological archaeology in the United States reproduce the fragmentation of knowledge about past societies. He considers the benefits that would accrue to both if there were greater communication between them.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Morris, Ian. 2000. Classical archaeology. In A companion to archaeology. Edited by John Bintliff, 253–271. Oxford: Blackwell.
  614. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. The author argues that classical archaeology as traditionally defined has undergone a series of changes since the 1980s. These include increased concern with the socioeconomic conditions of the Mediterranean world, and issues of world history instead of a focus on Greek and Roman cultures as foundational to Western civilization.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Cultural Resource Management Archaeology
  618.  
  619. CRM archaeology accounts for much archaeological research around the world. It has undergone considerable expansion in the United States since the 1970s, stemming from legislation and regulation about the environmental and cultural impact of development projects such as roads, dams, and other construction projects. CRM employs more than 90 percent of the archaeologists in the United States. A useful textbook on CRM archaeology is Neumann and Sanford 2001 (cited under Textbooks). The two items cited here provide different perspectives on CRM archaeology today. King 2002 critiques CRM archaeology and how legislative regulations have been, and are still, implemented. Sebastian and Lipe 2010 combines historical and programmatic views on CRM archaeology. Sources on CRM in and beyond the United States can be found on the web at Archnet—Cultural Resource Management, with leads to treaties, resources, and opportunities.
  620.  
  621. Archnet—Cultural Resource Management.
  622. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  623. Provides information on international treaties as well as organizations involved in CRM and heritage protection worldwide.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. King, Thomas F. 2002. Thinking about cultural resource management: Essays from the edge. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  626. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  627. The author is a longstanding practitioner of CRM archaeology. This highly readable account is simultaneously amusing, insightful, and serious.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Sebastian, Lynne, and William D. Lipe, eds. 2010. Archaeology and cultural resource management. Santa Fe, NM: SAR.
  630. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  631. The contributors to this volume consider how CRM archaeology has contributed to our understanding of America’s past, with the goal of stimulating debate on how to make CRM programs “yield both better archaeology and better public policy.”
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Indigenous Archaeology
  634.  
  635. By the close of the 20th century, indigenous peoples whose histories had been the subject of archaeological research were increasingly adamant about ethics and unfairness of archaeologists claiming to write their pasts for them. From Australia to Africa to the Americas, these concerns have given rise to an indigenous archaeology, in which native peoples are full partners in the key decisions about heritage, cultural resource management, and the practice of archaeology. Watkins 2000 is a classic source for understanding the issues that underpinned the rise of indigenous archaeology in the United States and elsewhere. Smith and Wobst 2005 prominently incorporates indigenous voices. Silliman 2008 emphasizes the role of archaeological field schools as arenas for collaboration. Bruchac, et al. 2010 brings together new and previously published articles from around the world.
  636.  
  637. Bruchac, Margaret, Siobhan M. Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, eds. 2010. Indigenous archaeologies: A reader on decolonization. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
  638. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. Working relationships with indigenous peoples and collaborative research projects have become increasingly frequent in archaeology. This anthology brings together articles, original and reprinted, by authors from Africa, Russia, Australia, and North America, many of which are not easily available elsewhere.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Silliman, Stephen, ed. 2008. Collaborating at the trowel’s edge: Teaching and learning in indigenous archaeology. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
  642. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  643. In this volume, eighteen contributors, many of them Native Americans, review the current state of collaborative indigenous archaeology in North America, with a particular focus on the role of field schools. This is an important complement to works cited under Textbooks.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Smith, Claire, and H. Martin Wobst, eds. 2005. Indigenous archaeologies: Decolonizing theory and practice. London: Routledge.
  646. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  647. This the first book in which the majority of the essays were written by indigenous authors, writing about issues ranging from repatriation, ethics, and identity to social justice and human rights.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Watkins, Joe. 2000. Indigenous archaeology: American Indian values and scientific practice. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  650. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. Writing with wit and insight, Watkins combines the perspective of a highly trained professional archaeologist with that of a Native American.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Postcolonial Archaeology
  654.  
  655. Archaeology developed in the context of Euroamerican colonialism and imperialism and consequently around the world played a significant role in the construction of discourses about colonial and indigenous peoples. Applying postcolonial notions of hybridity, which refers to the transcultural categories forged in colonial encounters, postcolonial archaeology exposes the ambiguity of those categories. Examining colonial discourses lays bare the essentialism, reductionism, and oversimplification of many analytical categories. Clarifying the impact that hybridity and essentialism have had on archaeological discourses affords us insight into the dangers of repeating the errors of the past in the present and in the future, and opportunities not to do so. Lilley 2000 examines the archaeopolitics of Native claims and how these have joined the practice of archaeology with those of ethnography and oral history, transforming them into collaborative archaeology in the process. Liebmann and Rizvi 2008 and Lydon and Rizvi 2010 bring together authors from around the world, many of whom represent indigenous and minority communities in disadvantaged countries.
  656.  
  657. Liebmann, Matthew, and Uzma Z. Rizvi, eds. 2008. Archaeology and the postcolonial critique. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  658. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  659. The authors in this volume critically assess the politics and practice of archaeology globally. They assess the utility of the “postcolonial critiques” that have appeared since the 1970s to examine what has changed about the practice of archaeology in the “post” era, to clarify how these changes affect our understanding of the interplay between the global and the local and to decolonize the profession.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Lilley, Ian, ed. 2000. Native title and the transformation of archaeology in the postcolonial world. Oceania Monographs 50. Sydney, Australia: Univ. of Sydney Press.
  662. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  663. The contributors draw on case studies from Canada, South Africa, Australia, and the Pacific islands.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Lydon, Jane, and Uzma Z. Rivzi, eds. 2010. Handbook on postcolonialism and archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
  666. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  667. In their effort to strip the profession of its heritage in colonialist, nationalist, and imperialist practices, the authors chart future research directions, focusing on the importance of comparative and interdisciplinary investigations, embracing multiplicities of standpoints and voices, and delving deeply and self-reflexively into their own theories and practices, in an effort to redress global inequities in the ways archaeology is practiced.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Public and Collaborative Archaeology
  670.  
  671. In today’s crisis-ridden world marked by wars, collapsed states, the deepest economic recessions in eighty years (since the Great Depression of the 1930s), and resurgent nationalisms in their more abhorrent forms, archaeologists increasingly call for active engagement with, and participation with, contemporary community issues. This would not have been possible with the “scientific neutrality” asserted by the New Archaeologists of the 1960s and 1970s. Besides genuinely collaborative projects with descendant communities, the kinds of engagement they have in mind include critiquing the presuppositions, social relations, and practices of our own societies, how they came to be, and how they impinge on, and interact with, those of other communities; exposing publicly how analytical categories or beliefs—such as the superiority of civilization or the inevitability of social inequality—are constructed and maintained; and heeding the calls of those who want archaeological research that genuinely promotes issues of social and environmental justice at home and abroad rather than reproducing existing inequalities. McGuire 2008 argues that archaeology is an inherently political activity. Sabloff 2008 contends that archaeology can be important to understanding and ameliorating contemporary problems. Silliman and Ferguson 2010 argues that archaeological collaboration can take a number of different forms. Little and Shackel 2007 and Little and Zimmerman 2010 contend that archaeologists necessarily engage with multiple publics.
  672.  
  673. Little, Barbara J., and Larry J. Zimmerman. 2010. In the public interest: Creating a more activist, civically engaged archaeology. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 131–159. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  674. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. The authors survey the articulation of archaeologists with multiple publics and argue that they have potential opportunities to apply their expertise to vexing issues of everyday life today, from community building to graffiti to homelessness.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Little, Barbara J., and Paul A. Shackel, eds. 2007. Archaeology as a tool of civic engagement. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
  678. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  679. The archaeologists writing in this volume are committed to active engagement in community life, challenging their colleagues to use their skills for promoting social justice.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. McGuire, Randall H. 2008. Archaeology as political action. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  682. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  683. The author elaborates a theoretically informed framework to show how archaeology can contribute to a more humane world by constructing meaningful histories for and with local communities and challenging the legacies of colonialism and class struggle.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Sabloff, Jeremy A. 2008. Archaeology matters: Action archaeology in the modern world. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
  686. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  687. Sabloff challenges archaeologists to go beyond understanding the past and to engage actively in today’s struggles for social equality and social justice.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Silliman, Stephen W., and T. J. Ferguson. 2010. Consultation and collaboration with descendant communities. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 48–72. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  690. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691. The authors examine ethical, theoretical, and methodological dimensions of collaborative efforts.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Repatriation
  694.  
  695. Concerns with heritage management, the illegal trafficking in antiquities, and questions about “who owns the past?” have provoked increased attention to returning material remains to national governments as well as indigenous peoples. These have been longstanding issues for objects in art museums, such as the Parthenon sculptures (the Elgin Marbles). By the end of the 20th century, repatriation to indigenous peoples had become prominent, as the calls by Native Americans were increasingly heard in the halls of legislative bodies in North America—e.g., the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress. Fine-Dare 2002 is the classic work on how repatriation legislation came about in the United States. Wilcox 2010 looks at the transformation of relations between archaeologists and indigenous people in the United States since passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA).
  696.  
  697. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
  698. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  699. The author reviews the cultural reasons to justify the appropriation of Native American remains and then outlines the sequence of incidents, laws, and shifts in attitudes since the 19th century that have informed the “repatriation movement” in the United States. The second part of the book is devoted to NAGPRA, passed by the US Congress in 1990.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Wilcox, Michael. 2010. NAGPRA and indigenous peoples: The social context and controversies, and the transformation of American archaeology. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 178–192. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  702. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  703. In this spirited chapter, the author examines closely how the passage and implementation of NAGPRA have altered relations between archaeologists and indigenous peoples.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Interdisciplinarity
  706.  
  707. Archaeologists have long depended on the expertise of scholars in other disciplines. In the 21st century, truly interdisciplinary studies—as opposed to less integrated, multidisciplinary inquiries—are increasingly coming to the fore. They require continuous collaboration and reflexivity. The subject of interdisciplinarity and the use of methods and techniques from other fields are also mentioned briefly in Textbooks and Anthologies. This is one arena in which the distinctions between various perspectives in archaeology are blurred. The authors of Piperno and Pearsall 1998 apply their expertise in paleobotany to archaeological models for the emergence and development of agricultural production in the American tropics. Hodder 2000 takes an explicitly postprocessualist perspective and brings to the fore issues about who has the authority to interpret the past. Dincauze 2000 argues that borrowing methods from other disciplines requires a critical appreciation of their theoretical underpinnings in those fields, and that the methods chosen must be appropriate to the kinds of evidence available in each case and whether they can sustain particular kinds of inferences. Buikstra and Beck 2006 explores the development of the interdisciplinary practices of bioarchaeology. Zeder, et al. 2010 argues that interdisciplinary methods in archaeology expand the range of questions that archaeologists can ask.
  708.  
  709. Buikstra, Jane E., and Lane E. Beck, eds. 2006. Bioarchaeology: The contextual analysis of human remains. Boston: Academic Press.
  710. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711. The authors in this edited volume explore the nuances of bioarchaeology and its practice at the beginning of the 21st century, in topics ranging from its historical roots through mortuary analyses, DNA, and bone chemistry analyses to repatriation.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Dincauze, Dena L. 2000. Environmental archaeology: Principles and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  714. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607837Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  715. The author surveys a wide variety of techniques and methods developed in other fields that are applied in archaeology.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Hodder, Ian, ed. 2000. Towards reflexive method in archaeology: The example of Çatalhöyük. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
  718. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  719. This is an early expression of the growing literature about interdisciplinarity at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. The forty-five authors bring perspectives from multiple field and laboratory disciplines to bear on questions ranging from recovery and recording to data analyses, conservation, and public presentation.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Piperno, Dolores, and Deborah Pearsall. 1998. The origins of agriculture in the lowland neotropics. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  722. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  723. The authors’ findings challenge the primacy of such development in more-arid climates of the Near East, highland Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Zeder, Melinda, Jane E. Buikstra, and Sander van der Leeuw. 2010. Interdisciplinary studies in archaeology. In Voices in American archaeology. Edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy T. Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills, 220–269. Washington, DC: SAA Press.
  726. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  727. The authors are problem oriented, focusing on methods for studying human interactions with plants and animals as well as techniques for studying the human body.
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement
Public Pastes
Advertisement
We use cookies for various purposes including analytics. By continuing to use Pastebin, you agree to our use of cookies as described in the Cookies Policy.  OK, I Understand
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!