Archaeological Theory - Science topic

Dear Abubakar Muhammad thank you for this "very open question", my answer will not probably give you one direction but anyway...

As Andy Reymann said, it's depending on your artifacts (pottery, glass beads, cowries, and slags). I suggest you look different theories for instance: theory of Central place (Walter Christaller) because your artifacts are movable and can be integrated into a system of exchange. But don't forget: sometimes people moved with their technology and sometimes goods moved without crafters... You can look at the historical materialism of Marx and their criticism. You can also look works of Alain Gallay and his team and McIntosh couples in Niger Inland Delta, the works of Nic David, Judy Sterner and Scott McEachern in Mandara Mounts and Sukur.

Keep in mind: there is no (or not yet) theory can explain the complexity of human society and if you found this theory, be careful it's probably a religious theory...

This looks like a terrific conference! I will distribute to colleagues and students. Good luck!~

The most accurate method full dating last exposure would be OSL. It will work on some cristalline structures such as quartz oe feldspar. 

Nevertheless methods and techniques should match the requirements and boundaries of its environment. The best would be contacting an analysis lab for advice.

In ethnographic and archaeological research there are many studies tying to identify regularities in architecture associated with particular environments or economies. Much of the archaeological literature, and a few ethnographic approaches, also address outside use spaces, and issues of mobility and larger landscape perspectives on settlement patterns. Because architecture, hearths,  outdoor work areas, etc. provide the critical structure of archaeological sites (helping understand the distribution of other classes of archaeological remains-i.e., tools, pots, food remains, etc), there is a long tradition of trying to better understand regularities in house forms and compound structure. There also is a vast ethnoarchaeological literature where researchers study living groups of people to better understand the behaviors and events that occur in association with architecture, to better develop ways of interpreting the archaeological record. I'm not sure whether there is any anthropological consensus on "theory" regarding traditional architecture, but there is a large literature. Rappaport's "theoretical" syntheses of some indigenous architecture is fairly cursory and simplistic from an anthropological perspective. A comparable study is by Douglas Fraser (see below), but again from an anthropological perspective it is descriptive and not analytical, as well as simplistic, but there are lots of illustrations. Most of the references I've listed are edited volumes addressing these anthropological questions from many perspectives. There are important references to additional studies in all of these. Several do present  the state of archaeological theory on these issues. A few seminal works include: 

Kroll, Ellen M. & T. Douglas Price (eds), 1991. The Interpretation of Archaeological Spatial Patterning. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Plenum Press, New York. 

Kent, Susan (ed), 1987. Method and Theory for Activity Area Research: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach. Columbia University Press, New York. 

Kent, Susan (ed), 1990. Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study. New Directions in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Graham, Martha, 1994. Mobile Farmers: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach to Settlement Organization Among the Raramuri of Northwestern Mexico.  Ethnoarchaeology Series 3. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor.

Horne, Lee, 1994. Village Spaces: Settlement and Society in Northeastern Iran. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.

Rossignol, Jaqueline and LuAnn Wandsnider (eds), 1992. Space, Time, and Archaeological Landscapes. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Plenum Press, New York. 

Cameron, Catherine M and Steve A. Tomka (eds), 1993. Abandonment and Settlement of REgions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches. New Directions in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Allison, Penelope M. (ed), 1999. The Archeology of Household Activities. Routledge, New York.

Fraser, Douglas, 1968. Village Planning in the Primitive World. Planing and Cities, Columbia University. George Braziller, New York. 

Two edited volumes that address ethnogenesis at length are John Terrell's Archaeology, Language, and History: Essays On Culture and Ethnicity, and Jonathan Hill's History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. The former includes good reviews of the concept, the latter mostly contains cases that illustrate a broader usage than the original Russian one.

Although my own publications on neo-Indian ethnogenesis arguably fall within the "rapidly, and self-consciously" mode you mention, I see those two characteristics as fully consistent with the Barthian perspective that Richard Jenkins describes as the basic anthropological model of ethnicity. We don't need ethnogenesis to label those two things apart from other processes of change. 

I lean toward reserving ethnogenesis to the processes causing a change of identity tht is marked by a new ethnonym. Even better, ethnogenesis labels those circumstances in which a new social group and identity emerge together through either fusion or fission. Purists like John Moore only allow cases of fusion to be labeled ethnogenesis. 

Dear Alexandra, I know nothing similar to your case, but I've seen several examples of physical limits made just under the tumulus walls around some dolmens in France, during excavations. They look like a small dug trough or a line of small stones and they show the original drawing on the ground made by the Neolithic architect planning to build his monument. But in your case, the feature is different.

Chloe,

Its interesting that when I first started off in archaeology we wanted to send some carbon samples from northern Florida for C14 dating. We were told that the analytical company did not have a baseline for that area. I don't know how familiar you are with the process, but above-ground atomic testing in the 1950s spread radioactive isotopes across the globe in varying amounts, depending on wind, distance, etc. Each area had to be tested to determine the natural background radiation in that area in order to calibrate the results.

Thus you are correct, we do not yet know what come chemical or metallic compounds are doing to archaeological samples or how modern materials degrade into other things. Do certain chemicals bind with magnetic ferric ions, thus nullifying or changing magnetic resonance dating? Are chemical compounds destroying blood collagen that we could extract from projectile points? What about the effects on enzymes we extract from pottery to tell us what was cooked in them? I don't think we can even begin to answer these questions yet. Often, archaeology is about catching up with technology, that is why we reserve samples for future, as yet undiscovered, methods.

Dear all,

Picasso seeing the paintings from Lascaux said, that we didn' t learn anything more since that time.

I believe that "art" and the idea of an Artist is rather new in the cultural development.

Before it was an intrinsic necessity to do this to stay in communication with all the nature and its dimensions, not regarding if now we still understand them or not. But it could be learned again. And anyhow seen the many billions of rockpictures existing and what they tell, so it is one of the greatest libraries of mankind.

- How come we do not try to decipher what our ancestors were thinking is worth while to transmit.

If you do not mind i ask our RG-friends how the think about it...

Is this event over? I would be interested.

Methodology is not normally a term applied to writing a book (as opposed, say, to doing field or laboratory research), or at least not that sort of a book. 

In a sense the book 'Human Universals' is a "review" of the literature.  They are written all the time in many fields (n psychology, sociology, and of course anthropology). But there is no standard methodology for writing a book about cultural or biological universals. Brown did search the term 'universals' to go through various published journal indexes that listed references for further investigation.  

 In particular, aside from the anthropological evidence for cultural and biological universals, Brown paid attention to the evidence in psychology and evolutionary psychology.  

He also drew on his own field experiences in Brunei, Bali, Mexico, and of course the US--hence he relied on the comparative method.  That in turn was much supplemented by a long interest in world ethnography.  He had prepared for field work in Latin America.  He studied with Africanists (Leo Kuper, M.G. Smith, Victor Turner) to learn British Social Anthro, and thereby read a lot of African ethnography.  All this adds up to the comparative method.

 There is a section of my book where Brown discusses how he assessed the universality of problematic cases for universals and he dealt with the quantitative issue of absolute vs near universals. Much of this is not dignified with the term methodology but is standard method across many fields as part of what constitutes objective or scientific writing.

Brown followed in the footsteps of Murdock and others who had focused on the study of universals, but produced a more nuanced account of universals that had been neglected by the majority of anthropologists who tended to focus on cultural differences.  

Of course Brown does not deny tremendous cultural variation and differences throughout the world.   But the neglect of cultural and biological universals often led anthropologists to 'exoticize' humans in various regions of the world, reducing the ability to empathize with the so-called 'other.'   Anthropologists must emphasize both the similarities and differences of people and societies they investigate to produce a more comprehensive understanding of humanity.  

Abrazos Debora, 

I'm glad that Tom Headland weighed in, he has great longitudinal data for the Agta. I'm sure you are familiar with the second edition of Nancy Howell's "Demography of the Dobe !Kung" (2000, Aldine de Gruyter, New York) and Kim Hill and M. A. Hurtado's "Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People", 1996, Aldine de Gruyter, New York. You probably also have looked at Renee Pennington's Hunter-gatherer demography chapter that compares soem published data in Panter-Brick, C., R. H. Layton, and P. Rowley-Conway (eds), Hunter-Gatherers: An  Interdisciplinary Perspective, pp.170-204, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge You should look at Karen and my Pume paper (2007 Karen L. Kramer and Russell D. Greaves. Changing patterns of infant mortality and fertility among Pumé foragers and horticulturalists. American Anthropologist 109 (4):713-726; or the Spanish version:  2010 Karen L. Kramer and Russell D. Greaves. Cambios en los patrones de mortalidad infantil y fertilidad entre cazadores-recolectores y horticultores Pumé: implicaciones para el crecimiento poblacional y desarrollo sostenible. Antropológica 54 (113):5-41.) Paula Ivey studied Efe ("Pygmy") women and allocare in the mid 1990s, she may have some demographic data, you can say that I suggested you contact her (piveyhen@hsph.harvard.edu). If that email does not work I can get you in contact with her another way. Although the Semai data in Alan Fix's study were agricultural at the time of his work, they were a former hunter-gatherers group: A. G. Fix, 1977. The Demography of the Semai Senoi. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Anthropological Paper N0. 62, Ann Arbor. Did you have a chance to ask  Karen about references when you saw her at CHAGS? 

you can also run carbon, hydrogen and sulfur stable isotopes analyses on amber to show the origin (e.g., DOI 10.2478/v10003-009-0001-9)

Thanks this class is on Architecture, so I was needing dimensions, also I hope to through the part about how Longhouses were metaphors for our cultures and societies,

I am Cherokee and Sicilian, I am told Cherokee runs in me on both parents.  Thank you so much for speaking up.. If you have any more info you could help with I would be greatly appreciated. My personal email is cattybrat@yahoo.com and my college email is dbramble-kaneko1@gulls.salisbury.edu

Have a very blessed day and may this lovely new rise of the sun bring you great joy and prosperity.

Sincerely,

Daniella

Even if the questions that are being asked may pertain to different characteristics of the natural material, it is important that natural materials are referenced in publications in a way that communicates the fundamental properties of that material, otherwise readers may misunderstand the significance of the materials studied or the questions being asked.  Mineralogy and lithology are two simple ways to identify materials; It also provides a way to link the archaeological study to regional studies of geology.

As an example with which I am personally familiar, referring to artifacts that are green hard stones all by the name of "jade" is misleading, even if many different lithologies are found to be in use in the same way that "true" jadeite-jade is used. Even if the archaeological or cultural use of green stones are considered similar to the use of jadeite jade, many green stones have vastly different material properties that will alter the complexity of the manufacturing process, the functionality of the final product, and the quality of that product. It will also alter how accessible the parent material is, which may cause the researcher to wonder about geologic sources and extraction techniques. Thus, the mineralogy and/or lithology may influence archaeological interpretations, and knowing this information at the onset of a study is valuable to both researcher and reader. 

For this reason, it should be important to researchers from diverse disciplines that study the same types of materials, albeit with different questions in mind, to utilize a common nomenclature; for example, identification of mineralogy and/or lithology is a basic and straightforward way to clarify many material properties of your artifact. Perhaps in the case of cryptocrystalline polymorphs of quartz, like chert versus chalcedony, the geologic vocabulary may not give much more information for asking archaeological questions. However, it will help clarify characteristics of the material for your readers, for example, which material is easier to manipulate or which is more durable. Furthermore, if you are interested in any provenance study of the artifacts, one cannot approach these questions without identifying the geologic origin of the material. 

although geologists may not ask the same questions, I would encourage collaborative efforts between archaeologists and geologists in order to identify materials according to one terminology. The researcher only has something to gain from making the research material more accessible to a wider audience.  

Its less about rejection of the ideas, and more about the way they appear to portray human beings, and the appropriateness and utility of the explanation.

So the political bit first.

Cultural change mostly has intentional agency involved in the shaping of the patterns of the typology. By intentional agency I mean that there might be conscious decisions making on the part of individuals. So changes in designs are often the results of lots of small incremental improvements made by individuals on previous designs. This is particularly true of functional stuff of course.

These intentionally based explanations portray human beings as active decision makers, consciously shaping their world and their lives .

Something like Cultural virus theory (or Darwinian cultural evolution) can suggest that people are NOT active decision makers. It can end up portraying people as passive bits of meat infected by cultural viruses and driven by their Darwinian drives. Lots of people think that human beings can be more than that.

So that is I think the more political side of things. Its a rejection of this idea of human beings. And lets be honest, such explanations of our behavior can be a bit offensive, and a bit callous at times.

Moreover, sometimes these explanations add nothing but a few buzz words. To say that an idea "spread like a virus" is just a sloppy analogy, and not an explanation. Its shallow. "Its an infectious idea, and probably reflects a conformist bias" isn't actually any better. Why not simply say "it was a long lasting fashion?" The reason saying "it was a fashion" or "it was a meme"is in fact fairly shallow is because we aren't actually pinpointing a mechanism, or providing a explanation, we are just describing a particular sort of pattern.

And this leads us to the really important empirical issue here: Its not always clear that something like Cultural Virus theory is in fact the right choice from a selection of many possible explanations.

Typological patterns can be generated in multiple ways. So for example the stability of a non-functional feature in ship construction might well be explicable by a conformist bias. But it might also be explicable as a spandrel (a by-product) of some other process, particularly a social process such as the pedagogical structure that apprentices work under, or a spandrel of engineering, or a status bias of people who commission ships, or a perceptual bias (as opposed to a conformist bias), or simply cultural inertia

What is required here is a demonstration of why the conformist bias might trump these other factors; ie, show how the psychological bias works on the ground in this particular case, and how that might generate the pattern.

The devil really is in the details here. That is why psychology experiments can end up being very elaborate, and why this stuff can get sloppy and meaningless in an archaeological contexts where often the behavior can only be inferred, and not observed.

In archaeological contexts, too often the mechanism is not shown to be in action, its assumed by the typological pattern. Its is again sloppiness.

Sometimes something like Cultural Virus theory or a Darwinian explanation can really do the business. It can provide mathematical rigor, and the ability to model population movements, transmission rates, etc. There are some really wonderful examples of this kind of work where genuine insight is gained. But too often, people have reached for things like cultural virus theory without any real justification, and they have promised but never really delivered..

And audiences are right to be skeptical of this.

Have a look through the recent issues of Historic Environment - the key journal for Australia ICOMOS www.icomos.org.au for a whole issue on sites associated with death. I think there maybe one in there, however, my library in is storage at the moment.