As a social science, historical archaeology’s goals are to systematically investigate, describe, and explain human activities in the past through the study of material culture, broadly conceived. As one of the humanities, historical archaeology seeks knowledge of the past in order to gain insight into the human condition. As a practice, historical archaeology in the United States is situated within the private sector in CRM firms, the government sector at all levels of government, and the academic sector, although it is weakly represented in the latter. Because so much historical archaeology is done as public archaeology that is funded or mandated by legal requirements, it is meant to provide public benefits. Therefore, its goals must reach beyond professional research goals toward the needs of the many participants and the public who use and value it. Public benefits involve not only the knowledge and understanding gained through research, but also the use of sites and collections for such purposes as entertainment, education, community cohesion, and economic development.
Research goals of historical archaeology include preservation and site interpretation, historical supplementation, reconstructions of past life ways, understanding modernization and globalization, and contributions to archaeological science. Each of these is particularly challenging in a discipline that often struggles to be truly interdisciplinary.
Partly due to its development in tandem with historic preservation and historic places, historical archaeology is often used to document architectural and landscape details for management and public interpretation. Excavated artifacts also provide information for historic furnishing specialists who select material for display, for example, in historic house museums.
Historical archaeology supplements history in the sense that it can fill in gaps created by biased and incomplete records. Archaeology, often, may correct history derived from documents by providing alternative questions and interpretations. Supplementing history by filling in gaps calls attention to those gaps and to an appreciation of their importance. The goal of supplementation, then, is more usefully thought of as historical challenge. History thus supplemented is history re-conceptualized.
The details of everyday life must be considered in the reconstruction of lifeways, which can be thought of as historical ethnography. There are parallel goals with prehistoric archaeology in describing life in the past in terms of foodways, settlement patterns, domestic life, economic relationships, social structure, and ideology.
The reconstruction of past cultures and lifeways and the description of processes such as acculturation or Creolization and frontier adaptation intersect with global processes of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism and contribute to the histories of disenfranchised people as well as to those of the privileged. Thus, understanding modernization and globalization is a goal that is firmly embedded in the approach that sees the investigation of capitalism as a useful unifying approach in the discipline.
As historical archaeology was being defined professionally, there were high hopes for its potential as a laboratory for anthropology, particularly concerning processes such as colonization and acculturation. Potential for consideration of such processes continues to expand in the discipline. The idea of colonization, for example, may be dissected into dynamically related packages of power, domination, hegemonic negotiation, and resistance on many levels. Acculturation or Creolization, as it more accurately may be conceptualized, may be investigated as complicated economic, political, and symbolic negotiations.
Historical archaeology has been used as a laboratory for more general archaeological science to be perfected through ethnoarchaeology and a ‘science of material culture’. At times, similar goals have been expressed for modern material culture studies. Such work includes tests of seriation, refuse patterning as a mirror of ethnicity, status indicators, and the observation and prediction of the effects of formation processes upon the archaeological record. Some historical archaeologists work to develop methods that will further the aims of prehistory and contribute to cross-cultural research, particularly among complex societies.
World History
