Glossary

Ethnoarchaeology The study of cultural material (such as pots, weapons, and tools), the understanding of how and why these materials were used, and interpretations of what they were used for.

Ethnography The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

Material culture The counterpart of verbal culture and learned behavior that refers to physical objects from the past - together they constitute human activity.

Middle-range research Study of how people use objects and structures and the human behaviors associated with this use.

Uniformitarianism The theory that all geologic phenomena may be explained as the result of existing forces having operated uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time.

Ethnoarchaeology is ethnographic field work designed to contribute to archaeological interpretation. It has also been called action archaeology, living archaeology, or archaeological ethnography. Archaeologists study the material traces of past human behavior; ethno-archaeologists study the material traces of ongoing human behavior, so that archaeologists can better infer past human behavior from material patterns. Ethnoarchaeological studies may address questions at one or more levels, including the artifact (e. g., manufacture and use), the site (e. g., spatial distribution of features), and the process (e. g., exchange, seasonal mobility). Direct behavioral observations, informant accounts and explanations, previous anthropological or sociological studies, and historical documents may all be available to the ethnoarchaeologist, allowing a more detailed and nuanced look at the relationships between human activities and artifacts.

Archaeologists often use data collected from living people to formulate hypotheses and interpret archaeological patterns. Ethnographic accounts and ethnographic museum collections are often incorporated into archaeological studies, but relevant information may come from many fields, including sociocultural anthropology, history, linguistics, sociology, geography, and economics. This other work used by archaeologists is distinguished from ethnoarchaeology by its research design. Data originally collected for nonarchaeological applications is usually too vague about the material culture or spatial distribution of activities. For example, ethnographers may provide some information on diet and food preparation but fail to describe the vessels and utensils used and the resulting material evidence of food preparation, such as wear on tools and the refuse produced. Archaeologists are then forced to guess what the material patterns should be from these activities. The term ‘ethnoarchaeology’ is restricted here to fieldwork conducted explicitly for archaeologists, because only then will archaeological issues be adequately addressed and data collected in a way that relates to archaeological data.

Ethnoarchaeology is one of several areas of study that improve archaeological inference, grouped by Lewis Binford into ‘middle-range research’. Middle-range research is essentially the study of cause and effect; archaeologists observe end products, such as artifacts, features, and spatial patterns, and infer the events or behaviors that created them. Links or correlates (as defined by Michael Schiffer) between dynamic events and activities and their static material traces can be formulated either by observing the ongoing behavior of others, as in ethnoarchaeology, or by mimicking the behavior in experiments under controlled conditions, as in experimental archaeology. Using these correlates requires the uniformitarian assumption that our observations can apply to other time periods because the processes we see in the present operated in a similar way in the past. The notion of uniformitarianism became widely accepted in geology in the first half of the nineteenth century and is now common in archaeology, although, the extent to which human behavior is consistent across time and space is still hotly debated.

To complicate matters, the end product or archaeological record is created by multiple processes, and archaeologists often find remains that only indirectly reflect the particular human behavior they have chosen to study. Middle-range research, therefore, also includes the study of formation processes of the archaeological record, perhaps best known from the work of Michael Schiffer. Formation processes include both cultural processes, such as those studied by ethnoarchaeologists, and natural processes, such as sediment deposition and erosion. These processes can alter and rearrange material remains at any point during archaeological site formation. Some ethno-archaeologists focus on particular behaviors of interest, such as house construction, stone tool manufacture, or food sharing, that occur early in the site formation process. Other ethnoarchaeologists address how materials enter the archaeological record through activities such as discard and house abandonment and how they are transformed by cultural processes such as trampling and construction, later in the site formation process. Research on formation processes is similar in some ways to taphonomy, the subdiscipline of palaeontology that addresses how organisms become part of the fossil record.