Key Terms

Anthropology – the holistic study of humankind from biological, cultural and social perspectives

Archaeological record – artifacts, layers of soil, structural remains, etc found on archaeological site that when put together enables us to reconstruct past human behaviour

Archaeology – the study of past human behaviour through material remains

Band – small societies of mobile, egalitarian, hunter-gatherer peoples

Chiefdom – societies based on rank; not egalitarian

Cultural diffusion – the observation that ideas, technologies, and artifacts can move from one place to another, from one culture to another

Cultural relativity – the position that no culture is intrinsically better than any other

Cultural process – the underlying “why” of culture –fueled New Archaeology interested in relationships between the social, economic, and environmental forces that drive society

Determinism – the notion that specific identifiable factors ‘determine’ the direction of culture and history

Emic- participation in culture

Etic – scientific observer

Functionalism – a theoretical approach that emphasizes the adaptive function of cultural traits; see an analogy between the elements of a given culture and the organs of a living creature: the parts work together as a whole

Middle Range theory – ideas that help up link the things that we dig up with the processes that created them

New Archeology [ NO ‘A’] – a movement involving mostly north American archaeologists that emphasized using the scientific method and qualification to study cultural processes rather than mere chronology

Occam ’s razor – the simplest answer is most likely correct

Post-modernism – philosophy that rejects the traditional structure of scientific structure and scientific theory itself

Post-processualism – critical reaction to the functionalism of the New Archaeology that insists that people have a role in creating their own history and culture (includes feminist, neo-Marxist, contextual archaeology)

Processual Archaeology – approach favoured by archaeologists of the New Archeology

Provenience – the actual place where the artifact was found

Scientific method – a way of answering research questions by systematically testing hypothesis using carefully selected data

Segmentary society – a basically egalitarian social group ordered by kinship

What is theory?

• An explanation of phenomenon
• Body of theory; body of thought, school of thought, intellectual underpinnings guiding principles

-         isms -         set of explanations and rules for investigation -         method <-> theory (methods can’t survive without theory and vice versa) -         ~ paradigm (set of beliefs or suggestions of how science should be done and are subject to major shifts)

• theory is always something applied
• not entirely dogmatic

Enlightenment and rise of middle class

-         held basic principles
-         opposed degeneration
-         didn’t account for variation
-         classical antiquity not superior to northern Europe
-         all humans are intelligent
-         change was a continual progression subject to natural law
n      extends to culture
n      cultural evolution through classifiable stages
-         progress through rational thought, not god

Three Classifications of Artifacts (Binford):

Techomic à related specifically to the tasks of coping with the environment

Socio-Techonic à those objects that reinforce group bonds among a society

Ideotechnic à those items that express and reinforce symbolic and religious belief

State – denotes highly complex, populous societies administrated by a tax-supported burocracy, police force, and justice system

 Key People

V Gordon Childe – Australian born archaeologist known for his interpretations of European and Near Eastern prehistory that emphasized the role of class conflict in the creation of history

à Great Britain; hybrid vigor; empirical testing; prehistoric lifeways

à 1930

• Diffusion mechanism of change
• Successful diffusion where cultures absourb
• Marxism and economic trends
• Revolutions
• Some people cannot develop technology forthemselves
• Scar Brae Functional Approach

Kathleen Kenyon – a pioneer of stratigraphic archaeological excavation in the Near East

Karl Marx – 19^th century German philosopher, historian, sociologist, and revolutionary à history driven by conflict of social classes

Anaconda:  1^st archaeologist
-         recorded and investigated ancient ruins and material
-         only treasure drawn

Elman Service – american anthropologiast who devised a system to classify societies based on their complexity

John Aubrey à Stonehenge and Avebury

Olof Ruebeck à used relative depth in investigation of Viking Tombs; realized differences in age

Galileo and Newton à scientific laws

Linnaeus (1735) à Humans in the natural world

Buffon (1749) àspecies change

Lemarck (late 18^h century) à inheritance of acquired traits

Cuvier (later 18^th c), and Lyell (1830) à geology and catastrophism

3 age system, Dugdale (1656)

Douglas Stewart:  culture from simple à complex (theoretical model)

Nicholas Mahudal à 3 Age system (1734) à people still lacked methods to prove the progression

Descartes à law gov [??] nature; observation and investigation

Royal Society of London 1660 à observation, experimentation, classification

William Stuckly à relative dating (strata and dated coins)

Erik Pontoppidan (1744) à stratigraphy

Champollion, Rosetta Stone (1795) > Egyptology

Grotefend, cuneiform (1802) > Assyriology

Scandanavia à Thomsen 1816

• Relative dating through coins
• 3 age system

1807 – Danish Royal Commission of Antiquaries in response to nationalistic need following Napoleon’s attack

Thomson used material change to build chronology

Overlap of material use
-         additive growth
2 stone age
bronze age
iron age
assumes an evolution of culture
society advances through technological advances

Jens Worsaae 1847
-         Inspection for cons. Antiquatian monuments
-         Stop looting, protect context

1797 – Frere – megafauna and handaxes
-         figured people existed same time as animals

Boucher de Perthes
-         stratigraphic associations (1837)
-         catastrophism

Lyell 1833 Principles of Geology
-         uniformitarianism
-         geological processes occur at a relatively constant rate
-         Antiquity of Man 1863
-         Influenced Darwin and natural selection in 1859

Latel and Christy à created chronology of Paleolithic in France

Montillet (1876) à seriation, 1867 à universal stages

Lovick 1865 à Neolithic
à associating Paleolithic culture with cave art

1850s Spencer à progress = good

1851 BASTIAN – psychic unity

Tylor 1865 à first anthropologist at Oxford

Walter Taylor (dissatisfaction)

• study of archaeology
• rant about state of theory and practice
• felt archaeology had slackened field work and analysis standard

-         only interested in culture changed

-         failed to understand special context

• objected to def. of culture à material sweet of things
• culture an adaptive system
• archaeology is too particularistic  à should be working on synthesis of site groups (injuctive approach)
• largely ignored à seen as crank
• model stuck in fuctional mode à did not account for change

Morgan 1877 à less functional than Scandinavian archaeology

Priest 1833, Ancient War Cemetaries (best seller)

Squier and Davis 1845-47
-         scientific investigation more than 200 mounds
-         published 1848 by Smithsonian
-         associative native pottery and burials

Joseph Henry à first director of Smithsonian;
his adgenda:
-         debunk speculation about builders of mounds
-         antiquity of humans in Americas
-         synthesis of archaeology in the US 1956
-         Create conservative ethic
-         Salvage information about native Americans
-         Archaeology part of anthropology

Stevens and Catherwood:
-         Stevens rich adventuresome traveler
-         visits Petra in Jordan, sells story to paper
-         travel book becomes popular
-         hooked up with Catherwood (Scot artist and traveler)
-         1839 Stevens appointed diplomat in Central America
-         1840s 2 books:  “Incidents of Travel”

Daniel Wilson U of T 1862 à writes book agrees with Stevens à debunked unilineal evolution

Franz Boas – HISTORICAL PARTICUARISM
-         describe each culture in their own terms
-         ethnographic analogy – over-emphasied
 

Salvage – holistic approach

Thomas à did not believe mounds work of natives
à 2000 mounds explored
à proved himself wrong 1894

Bandolier and Cushing à direct historical approach

1896 Mason divided North America into cultural areas

1914 Holmes published “Archaeological Cultures” – static

Gobineau 1853-55 à inequity of human races

Morton “Crania Americana”

Lubock 1863-193_ à applied social Darwinism to archaeology

Skinner à first professional archaeologist in 1920s; New Zealand Moari culture

Ratzel à German ethnologist; diffusionist
-         influenced Boas
-         cultural relativism
-         historical particularism
-         regarded the past as culturally idiosyncratic
-         diffusion
WHR Rivers à early 20^th century South Pacific – pop’n movement and diffusion

Smith à hyperdiffusionist; everything came from Egypt

Schliemann à Troy; complex stratigraphy

Pitt Rivers à leave baulks for permanent stratigraphic record

Wheeler à 3D recording after WWII

Petrie à fine grained sereation method

Oscar Monteliuss à applied chronology to regional patterning; brke down period system further; core-periphery regional relationship; suggested Mesopotamia as cradle of civilization

Kossina à more influential synthesis; direct historical approach (1911); bio determinism and racial conservatism

DHA à cultural cohesion; archeological record; why things are now

Kidder à basket maker culture; pre-ceramic; stratigraphic excavation
-  1924 put forward a chronology of regional synthesis in southwest archaeology

Kroeber and Spier à Boasians; did seriation of ceramic

Gladwins à Kidder did not take into account regional differences; different cultural traditions

• Dendritic à different branches
• Complex cultural histories

McKern à Midwestern taxonomic method (1932) – single component site

Frederica de Laguna

Jaquetta Hawkes

Linneaus:  5 races à subspecies

3 reasons for difference: random mutation, conquest/trade, adaption

Graham Clark 1930s and 40s
Influenced by:

1. Scandanavian traditions – Miles Burkitt à the goal of archaeology should be to reconstruct past lifeways
2. British Social Anthropology à structural functionalism
3. Human geographers à Crawford; aerial photography (Wessex from the air)

à Fox – sites and vegetation

4. Godwin à palynology – environmental changes during Mesolithic/Neolithic

à archaeology should look like ethnography

à archaeology best suited to reconstruct economy

Hawke Hierarchy

• Ascending scale in difficulty in what archaeology can deal with
• Organized functionally
• Operationalized theory at Star Carr
• Good opportunity for Clarke to put his theory into practice
• Published first text on world prehistory (see Fagan)

Smith and Wittenburg

SMITH

• First archaeologist of Museum of Man
• Worked first in Kentucky
• Wrote it like ethnography
• Later worked in Canada
• Trained Wittenburg

WITTENBURG

• Direct historic approach
• Ethnographic perspective for Iroquois sites

Julian Steward

• cultural evolutionist
• seasonal rounds
• multi-diciplinary

Braidwood
 relative between Neolithic agriculture and eco zones

Macneish

• settlement studies Tehuacan

Gordon Willey

• father of settlement studies
• big geographic patterns
• integ. Social-political and landscape à Viru Valley, project Peru

Influences:

• Griffin (grad supervisor)
• Lower great lakes
• Binford felt Griffin unwilling to generalize
• Lack of imperial scientific rigor
• Objected to normative definition of culture
• Diffusion aquatic view of culture

Lewis Binford – founding father of New Archaeology

-         “Archaeology as Anthropology” (1962) – in American Antiquity

Spalding à mentor; quantitative methods; scientific; willing to generalize; statistic analysis of style

Carl Hempel - hypothesis deduction – general law à logical positivism

White à Hempel-logical positivist

David Clarke

• British version of processualism
• More jargon new terms
• Systemize language of numbers

Binford and Clark

• quantitative methods
• imperialism
• standardized and replicable
• scientific method

Clark à the use of scientific method no more turns archaeology into a science than a wooden log makes a  man a tree

• hypothesis- should be testable and fallible
• observation
• conclusion à goal to establish covering laws

Systems theory

• cultures as adaptation
• organic analogy
• Clark à culture is an intercommuinicating system of entities
• Cybernetics and ecological systems
• Lent itself well to generalizing
• Seems testable
• Basic Principles:

1. adapted to external environment

-         climate

-         soil types

-         social environment

2. archaeological correlates of subsystem

-         chemical sourcing

-         labour/activity

3. systems can be modeled
4. system wants to be in homeostasis à balance; feedback mechanisms
5. substance interdependent

since we've been doin an awful lot of this lately (actually alot less than we used to....we should really get on it)....

ok so i still don't know how to do that lj cut business, but i think i've got bold and  italic (hehe!) figured out!  but im just dumb otherwise....

oh and ps to all you INCREDIBLY geeky computer geeks out there,   does anyone have the CDKEY to WIndows XP home edition??  this guy i know, he MUST have a bootlegged version of windows or something (which in my opinion is FUCKED), but windows has been fucked on his comp for 8 months cuz he cant load it without this key that they are asking for....  weird.....

so either i find the key for him or ATTEMPT to find MY windows disk within my horrible mess!!  DONT MAKE ME DO IT!

and now that i am *actually* smarter and know how to use this damn lj, i have SOOOOOOOOOOOOO many funny pictures. huh. im such a geek. anywho, easter is soon, so in that case, here is the best pic ever:

EASTER IS CANCELLED:

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!

what a sick sense of humour, i love it. happy easter all.