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Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology

Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology . MWF 9:00-9:55AM 008 Life Sciences Bldg. Classical and Other Text-based Archaeologies. Where to place the beginnings of archaeology? Interest in material remains Deliberate use of material culture to learn about the past

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Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology

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  1. Anth 321WIntellectual Background of Archaeology MWF 9:00-9:55AM 008 Life Sciences Bldg

  2. Classical and Other Text-based Archaeologies • Where to place the beginnings of archaeology? • Interest in material remains • Deliberate use of material culture to learn about the past • All human groups seem interested in their own past. • Yet different cultures perceive of time in distinct ways. • Even different archaeologists exhibit distinct conceptualizations of time. • British place older periods on top • US place older period on bottom • We cannot assume that all cultures conceive of time in the same way. • Perhaps we also need to consider other conceptualizations of time when making interpretations?

  3. Objects “out of time” • Projectile points, stone pipes, and native copper tools found in 15th and 16th C eastern North America. • Medieval European peasants collected stone celts and projectile points discovered while farming. • Maya kept jade heirlooms recovered from old tombs. • Aztecs kept Olmec figurines.

  4. People seek to explain their landscapes • This includes monuments • Medieval Europe: Burial mounds associated with supernaturals, giants, and historical people • Aztecs: performed rituals at Teotihuacan. Where the gods established cosmic order. • Inca: large stones were deities and ancestors transformed into stones. • Egyptian priests: interpreted a fossilized forest as charred bones of a giant serpent. • While there is a common recognition and explanation of “objects out of time” there is not a consistent interest in attempting to learn from these things.

  5. Egypt and Mesopotamia • Objects out of time came to be valued as sources of information about the past. • Egypt 1900-1700 BC Twelfth Dynasty craftsmen emulated earlier art styles. Khaemwesc later cleared ancient religious buildings near Memphis to restore old cults. • Iraq: King Nabonidus (556-539 BC) excavated and studied ruins to restore ancient cults. Bel-Shalti-Nannar, the daughter of Nabonidus established the earliest museum of antiquities. • In both cases, the interest was in the recovery of information about a glorious past. • Eras closer to the time of creation, sacred prototypes of civilization, closer to the cosmic drama of creation.

  6. Greeks distinguished Historia from Archaiologia. • Historiaentailed a recording of events from the recent past based on recollections of living individuals. Documentation of the Persian Wars. • Archaiologiainvolves the study of the remote past based on myths, legends, and material remains. • Accurate memories of the bronze age • Speculative chronologies about the origins of the universe. • Cyclical, steady state, degeneration, and progress. • No systematic efforts to recover and study remains “out of time”

  7. 1) World of recent origin • 2) Physical world in a state of degeneration and decay from God’s creation. • 3) Humanity created in Garden of Eden, located in Middle East. People spread to other parts of the world after expulsion from Garden and after Noah’s flood. • 4) Natural for standards of human conduct to decline over time. • 5) History of the world was a succession of unique events. • Medieval scholars and artists not aware of changes in material culture since classical time.

  8. Possibilism and Determinism • Trigger describes how geographic possibilism helped him avoid the trap of environmental determinism that plagued early processualism. Environment sets limits and offers possibilities for personal and cultural development. Yet, humans can selectively respond to any factor in a number of ways. How a people react and develop is a function of the choices they make in response to their environment. Paul Vidal de La Blache(1903) Tableau de la Geographie de la France

  9. Comparison and cross-cultural research • Early comparisons focused on a search for regularities between cultures. • Kingship • Irregular aspects of culture were essentially ignored. • Variation in the nature of rulership

  10. Trigger’s Conclusion • No theoretical formulation involving a narrow range of causal factors will likely account for the totality of human behavior or material expressions • Comparative approach required consideration of idiosyncrasies and similarities • Theoretical conclusion: processual and postprocessual approaches based on antithetical positions, but they are complementary

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