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Anthropological Archaeology
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How can the disintegration of ecosystems, the foundation of life on Earth, be halted and these critical systems be rehabilitated? For scholars, the action list is long: increase the pool of expertise by engaging all relevant knowledge communities, collect rapidly disappearing data, analyze with both familiar and new methods, and apply the results of actionable science to policy and practice. This enormously complex and urgent activity requires an integrated research framework with the flexibility to accommodate the global diversity of places, peoples, and processes and to examine future options. Based on evidence of environmental change and human activity, the framework termed historical ecology assembles tools to construct an evidence-validated, open-ended narrative of the evolution and transformation of specific ecosystems and landscapes. Welcoming knowledge from scholars and communities of both heritage and practice, this comprehensive and systemic understanding offers insights, models, and ideas for the durable future of contemporary landscapes. The article evaluates how practitioners could adjust aspects of practice and improve access to policy makers, and the discussion applies to regions and localities everywhere.
We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.
We live in an age characterized by increasing environmental, social, economic, and political uncertainty. Human societies face significant challenges, ranging from climate change to food security, biodiversity declines and extinction, and political instability. In response, scientists, policy makers, and the general public are seeking new interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches to evaluate and identify meaningful solutions to these global challenges. Underrecognized among these challenges is the disappearing record of past environmental change, which can be key to surviving the future. Historical sciences such as archaeology access the past to provide long-term perspectives on past human ecodynamics: the interaction between human social and cultural systems and climate and environment. Such studies shed light on how we arrived at the present day and help us search for sustainable trajectories toward the future. Here, we highlight contributions by archaeology—the study of the human past—to interdisciplinary research programs designed to evaluate current social and environmental challenges and contribute to solutions for the future. The past is a multimillennial experiment in human ecodynamics, and, together with our transdisciplinary colleagues, archaeology is well positioned to uncover the lessons of that experiment.
As we pass into an age of the Anthropocene, archaeologists, as scholars of other disciplines, are driven to consider how this physical and ideological climate change affects our craft, or how archaeology can contribute with knowledge and insight of significance in a shifting world. Basing its arguments on research conducted on marine debris and drift beaches in northern Norway and Iceland, the aim of this article is to imagine what kind of alternative ways of doing and thinking archaeology the current climate is calling for. With reference to this material, which conspicuously manifests both obstacles and promises for an ‘Anthropocene archaeology’, the article will question the worth of some perspectives traditionally considered essential to our discipline, while simultaneously building on confidence in a sincerely archaeological imagination.
This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5)human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal
in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the
highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges
will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although
new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest payoff will derive from investments that provide sophisticated
research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several
decades.
Archaeology is a source of essential data regarding the fundamental nature of human societies. Researchers across the behavioral and social sciences use archeological data in framing foundational arguments. Archaeological evidence frequently undergirds debate on contemporary issues. We propose here to answer “What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges?” The question arose as we sought to develop recommendations for investments in computational infrastructure that would enable the discipline to address its most compelling questions. Absent a list of these questions, we undertook to develop our own.
Previous evaluations of postprocessual archaeology have regarded it more as a critique of processual archaeology than as a viable research program. Today this statement needs to be modified to account for the diversity of frameworks that have grown up within and adjacent to the early postprocessual formulations. These new approaches include various admixtures of structural Marxism, poststructuralism, critical theory, and feminism. Significant philosophical differences separate some of these positions, but rather than being debilitating, the active exploration of these areas holds out new possibilities and prospects both for linking archaeology more securely to the other social sciences and for making unique contributions to the nature of social theory.
Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.
A major research problem in anthropology is the origin of the state and its bureaucratic form of governance. Of particular importance for evaluating theories of state origins are cases of primary state formation, whereby a first-generation state evolves without contact with any preexisting states. A general model of this process, the territorial-expansion model, is presented and assessed with archaeological data from six areas where primary states emerged in antiquity: Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. In each case, the evidence shows a close correspondence in time between the first appearance of state institutions and the earliest expansion of the state's political-economic control to regions lying more than a day's round-trip from the capital. Although additional research will add detail and clarity to the empirical record, the results to date are consistent with the territorial-expansion model, which argues that the success of such long-distance expansion not only demanded the bureaucratization of central authority but also helped provide the resources necessary to underwrite this administrative transformation.
In this introduction to the special edition, we argue that the theories of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce have the potential to bridge some of the deepest divides in archaeology. We also demonstrate that the adoption of an extreme ‘anti-representational’ position in thing-centred turns in the discipline is misguided, as scholars recognize diverse modalities of representation beyond symbols and immaterial signifiers. By combining the insights of Peircean semiotics, assemblage theory, and new approaches inspired by the ontological turn, we rehabilitate representation as a fundamental material process in the exercise of agency and the making and transformation of ‘meaningfully constituted worlds.’ Mobilizing theories on semiotic ideologies in particular, we further contend that the material worlds assembled through representational processes can often be harmful, unjust, contradictory, challenged and potentially reconfigured. Ultimately, as a semiotic science in its own right, archaeology must devise new ways to analyse the mediated representations of the past subjects they study. The diverse articles of this issue have made an important contribution exploring this central problem in archaeological research.
Collective action theory, as formulated in the social sciences, posits rational social actors who regularly assess the actions of others to inform their own decisions to cooperate. In anthropological archaeology, collective action theory is now being used to investigate the dynamics of large-scale polities of the past. Building on the work of Margaret Levi, collective action theorists argue that the more principals (rulers) depended on the populace for labor, tribute, or other revenues, the greater the agency (or “voice”) a population had in negotiating public benefits. In this review, we evaluate collective action theory, situating it in relation to existing theoretical approaches that address cooperation, consensus building, and nonelite agency in the past. We draw specific attention to the importance of analyzing agency at multiple scales as well as how institutions articulate shared interests and order sociopolitical and economic interaction. Finally, we argue for a new synthesis of political economy approaches with collective action theory. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 46 is October 21, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provided the initial impetus for explicitly ontological research in archaeology. Their impact on archaeologists, however, has been quite different. What I call the “metaphysical archaeologists” trace their genealogy from Latour, though they are now equally influenced by “new materialism” and the “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2015). They have introduced an alternative metaphysical orthodoxy to archaeology. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro and colleagues have authorized the return of the grand ethnographic analogy to archaeology, particularly in the case of animism. A second, quite different tendency inspired by these same anthropologists is to engage with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice. I suggest that a point of convergence between the metaphysical and the latter anthropological approaches exists in their focus on the concept of alterity. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 45 is October 21, 2016. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
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The Forum article “Grand Challenges for Archaeology” (Kintigh et al. 2014) defines a number of leading research topics derived from a crowd-sourcing report and parsed by a panel of archaeologists. The questions focus on scientific subjects with high funding potential, amenable
to addressing contemporary problems. Although the grand challenges put forth do represent many of the key issues being pursued by archaeologists today, I argue that they will impact a more limited audience than envisioned by the authors due to their emphasis on transhistorical processes and
their lack of emphasis on the larger social and political implications of our research.
Spanish
El artículo del Foro “Desafíos Grandes para la Arqueología” (Kintigh et al. 2014) define un número de tópicos de investigación que se derivaron
de un informe que utilizó colaboración abierta distribuida (o crowdsourcing) y fue analizado por un panel de arqueólogos. Las preguntas se enfocan en temas científicos con alto potencial de financiación y propensos a tratar problemas contemporáneos.
Aunque los desafíos grandes adelantados representan muchos de los temas claves seguidos por los arqueólogos hoy en día, sostengo que impactarán una audiencia más limitada de lo previsto por los autores dado su enfoque en procesos transhistóricos y
su falta de enfoque en las implicaciones sociales y políticas mayores de nuestras investigaciones.
After a brief review of the recent history of Americanist archaeology, an attempt is made to discern trends in the current literature. Three critical issues are identified: 1) the lack of any comprehensive theory; 2) the failure of the so-called new archaeology to produce substantive results; and 3) the rise of publicly generated archaeology. While some progress is evident in resolving the problems associated with each issue, the overriding trend is toward increased empirical grounding at all levels. The coincidence of massive new funding for archaeological research and the separation of the discipline into two groups of professionals during a period of theoretical uncertainty has potentially serious effects on both academic and public archaeology sectors. The resolution of theoretical issues and the integration of academic and public archaeology are seen as the critical challenges facing current Americanist archaeology.
The monumental architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico was constructed to convey, reinforce, and challenge ideas about social, ritual, and cosmological order. The concept of social memory can help clarify how architecture was employed in the transformation of Chacoan society at the beginning of the Late Bonito phase (A.D. 1100-1140). During the preceding century, Classic Bonito phase architecture expressed basic tenets of a Chacoan worldview - directionality, balanced dualism, and the canyon as a center place. At the beginning of the Late Bonito phase, confidence in the Chacoan ritual order was shaken by environmental and social developments. Leaders sought to re-formalize Chaco as a center place by instituting a new building scheme. Six new great houses were positioned on the landscape in a patterned, nested series of oppositional relationships. This re-formalization of the Chacoan landscape was legitimated through direct alignments and indirect architectural references to the Classic Bonito past. The new buildings were meant to bolster confidence in leaders and to attract followers by offering a combination of the familiar and the novel.
This paper seeks further to define the processes of the interpretation of meaning in archaeology and to explore the public role such interpretation might play. In contrast to postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, a hermeneutic debate is described that takes account of a critical perspective. An interpretive postprocessual archaeology needs to incorporate three components: a guarded objectivity of the data, hermeneutic procedures for inferring internal meanings, and reflexivity. The call for an interpretive position is related closely to new, more active roles that the archaeological past is filling in a multicultural world.
Theory in North American archaeology is characterized in terms of foci and approaches manifested in research issues, rather than in explicit or oppositional theoretical positions. While there are some clear-cut theoretical perspectives-evolutionary ecology, behavioral archaeology, and Darwinian archaeology-a large majority of North American archaeology fits a broad category here called "processual-plus." Among the major themes that crosscut many, or all of the approaches are interests in gender, agency/practice, symbols and meaning, material culture, and native perspectives. Gender archaeology is paradigmatic of processual-plus archaeology, in that it draws oil a diversity of theoretical approaches to address a common issue. Emphasis on agency and practice is an important development, though conceptions of agency tire too often linked to Western ideas of individuals and motivation. The vast majority of North American archaeology, including postprocessual approaches, is modern, not postmodern, in orientation. The relative dearth of theoretical argument positively contributes to diversity (aid dialogue, but it also may, cause North American theory, to receive inadequate attention and unfortunate misunderstandings of postmodernism.
It is argued that archaeology has made few contributions to the general field of anthropology with regard to explaining cultural similarities and differences. One major factor contributing to this lack is asserted to be the tendency to treat artifacts as equal and comparable traits which can be explained within a single model of culture change and modification. It is suggested that “material culture” can and does represent the structure of the total cultural system, and that explanations of differences and similarities between certain classes of material culture are inappropriate and inadequate as explanations for such observations within other classes of items. Similarly, change in the total cultural system must be viewed in an adaptive context both social and environmental, not whimsically viewed as the result of “influences,” “stimuli,” or even “migrations” between and among geographically defined units.
Three major functional sub-classes of material culture are discussed: technomic, socio-technic, and ideo-technic, as well as stylistic formal properties which cross-cut these categories. In general terms these recognized classes of materials are discussed with regard to the processes of change within each class.
Using the above distinctions in what is termed a systemic approach, the problem of the appearance and changing utilization of native copper in eastern North America is discussed. Hypotheses resulting from the application of the systemic approach are: (1) the initial appearance of native copper implements is in the context of the production of socio-technic items; (2) the increased production of socio-technic items in the late Archaic period is related to an increase in population following the shift to the exploitation of aquatic resources roughly coincident with the Nipissing high water stage of the ancestral Great Lakes; (3) this correlation is explicable in the increased selective pressures favoring material means of status communication once populations had increased to the point that personal recognition was no longer a workable basis for differential role behavior; (4) the general shift in later periods from formally “utilitarian” items to the manufacture of formally “nonutilitarian” items of copper is explicable in the postulated shift from purely egalitarian to increasingly nonegalitarian means of status attainment.
A new paradigm is emerging in archaeology herein dubbed ‘historical processualism’. A review of three contemporary approaches to the study of the past – neo-Darwinism, cognitive-processualism, and agency theory – suggests that the standard notions of ‘behavior’ and ‘evolution’ are being replaced in archaeological explanations by ‘practice’ and ‘history’. Behavioral analogies, commonly used to construct inferences about ‘why’ cultures changed, are problematic. In their place, archaeologists should substitute the study of cultural practices – what people did and how they negotiated their views of others and of their own pasts – as these were and are the actual processes of cultural change. The emphasis on practice entails the elevation of historical explanations, in the process altering the questions that archaeologists ask and the data that they must gather to address those questions. The importance of this paradigmatic shift is exemplified by contrasting contemporary explanations of Mississippian pottery and political change in the pre-Columbian American midcontinent.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. Abstract I survey recent literature about early cities in the regional traditions of Southwest Asia, Egypt, South Asia, China, Mesoamerica, Andean South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Greece, and Rome. Major themes include the importance of the orizing individuals and their practices, interests, and emotions; the extent to which the first cities were deliberately created rather than merely emerging as by-products of increasing sociopolitical complexity; internal structure of cities and the interplay of top-down planning and bottom-up self-organization; social, economic, and political relations between cities and their hinterlands; interactions of cities with their physi cal environments; and the difficult "city-state" concept. Some axes or dimensions for describing settlements are proposed as better than typological concepts.
This article was presented as the second annual Distinguished Lecture in Archeology at the 89th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 30, 1990, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
This essay was delivered as the Distinguished Lecture to the 86th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 21, 1987, at Chicago, Illinois.
The Predynastic of Egypt, spanning an interval from ca. 4000 to 3050 B.C., was an eventful period. After the inception of food production in the Nile Valley at least a millennium before, it was the time when the identity of Egyptian society was forged. Egypt was settled by refugees from the deserts of the eastern Sahara and the southern Levant, fleeing from mid-Holocene droughts, and became a melting pot of indigenous Nilotes and desert herders, part-time cultivators, and hunters. Within a millennium, an increasing dependence on agriculture led to sedentary life and, in some cases, to the development of sizable communities. By 4000 B.C., the settled communities had also developed a distinct division of labor between men and women and ritual and religious beliefs in which women, grain, fertility, and death were salient and interrelated elements. The Predynastic communities were also faced by the most destabilizing factor of agricultural economy, namely, fluctuations of yield. Attempts to dampen the fluctuations through interregional integration led to the emergence of community representatives and eventually chiefs. Legitimation of the status of chiefs through affiliation with the traditional and supernatural power associated with women, fertility, and death and the acquisition of exotic goods stimulated trade and an industry in funerary goods. Enlargement of economic units through alliances, with occasional incidences of fighting, especially after 3600 B.C., led to the rise of a state society governed by supreme rulers. The wedding of the funerary cult of Late Predynastic Egypt with political power and military might was the basis for the most fascinating aspects of Ancient Egypt—religion and kingship.
Over the last several decades new sets of information have provided a more detailed understanding of the rise and character of the Indus Civilization as well as its decline and decentralization. This article begins with a summary of the major historical developments in the archaeology of the Indus Valley Tradition and a definition of terms found in the literature. A general discussion of the environmental setting and certain preconditions for the rise of urban and state-level society is followed by a summary of the major aspects of the Harappan Phase of the Indus Valley Tradition. This summary includes discussions of settlement patterns, subsistence, architecture, trade and exchange, specialized crafts, language, religion, and social organization. The Localization Era or decentralization of the urban centers is also addressed.
Suggested explanations for the eclipse of the Indus Civilization (2500–1900 B.C.) are reviewed, along with a description of the culture history that accompanies the abandonment of Mohenjo-daro and many other Mature Harappan settlements. New data are presented from Mohenjo-daro which suggest that the process of change that brought about the eventual abandonment of the site began in the later part of the third millennium B.C. Settlement data from the ancient Sarasvati River, Gujarat, and northwestern India suggest that there was no general eclipse but a process of deurbanization and a shift eastward in the general distribution of the population.
Egypt''s cultural evolution between 4000 and 2000 B.C. is reviewed in and related to methodological and theoretical issues in contemporary archaeology. Recent archaeological evidence from the Nile Delta is analyzed in the context of the cultural integration of the Nile Valley and Delta after about 3200 B.C.
Letter to the Editor
- Gumerman
What is cognitive archaeology?
- Hodder
Counterpoint: archaeology is anthropology
- Kelly
Point: archaeology as an Academic discipline
- Wiseman