Archaeology and Prehistory

2. Archaeology and Prehistory • Archaeology is the study of the cultural evolution of humankind, using the material remains of past human behavior. • These material remains make up the archaeological record, the archives of the human past.

3. Archaeology and Prehistory • Archaeologists make a clear distinction between two major types of archaeology: • Text-aided archaeology is archaeology practiced with the aid of historical documents. • Prehistoric archaeology is the archaeology of ancient societies that were nonliterate.

4. The Beginnings of World Prehistory • Archibishop James Ussher calculated the date of the Creation - October 23, 4004 B.C. ~six thousand years for all of human history. • Uniformitarianism – Principle based on geological observations of gradual change over long periods of time through natural processes such as flooding and erosion.

5. The Beginnings of World Prehistory • Two major scientific developments now produced critical evidence for the antiquity of humankind: • Charles Darwin (1859) - On theOrigin of Species • Definitive proof of the contemporaneity of humans and extinct animals, documented conclusively by finds in gravels of the Somme River in northern France in the same year.

6. Who Needs the Past? • We may all share an interest in the past, but we think of it, and use it, in different ways, just as we have different perspectives on time. • Cyclical and Linear Time • Linear - Westerners think of the passage of the human past along a straight if branching, highway of time. • Nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck called this the “stream of time.”

7. Who Needs the Past? • Cyclical and Linear Time • Cyclical - Many non-Western societies, ancient and modern, think of time as a cyclical phenomenon. • The cyclical perspective stems from the passage of seasons and of heavenly bodies and from the close relationships between foragers and village farmers and their natural environments.

8. Who Needs the Past? • Written Records, Oral Traditions, and Archaeology • Most human societies of the past were nonliterate, which meant that they transmitted knowledge and history by word of mouth. • Written records are the most comprehensive source of information about the past. • Both written records and oral histories are subject to all kinds of bias.

9. Who Needs the Past? • Written Records, Oral Traditions, and Archaeology • But all too often the archaeologist and a local community have different interests in the past. • To the archaeologist, the past is scientific data to be studied with all the rigor of modern science. • To local people, the past is often highly personalized and the property of the ancestors.

10. Studying Culture and Culture Change • Culture is the distinctive adaptive system used by human beings. • Culture can be called a society’s traditional systems of belief and behavior, as understood by individuals and the members of social groups and as manifested in individual or collective behavior. • It is also part of our way of adapting to our environment.

11. Studying Culture and Culture Change • A cultural system is a complex system comprising a set of interacting variables—tools, burial customs, ways of getting food, religious beliefs, social organization, and so on—that function to maintain a community in a state of equilibrium with its environment. When one element in the system changes—say, hunting practices as the result of a prolonged drought—then reacting adjustments will occur in many other elements.

12. Studying Culture and Culture Change • It follows that no cultural system is ever static. It is always changing, and these processes of culture change are a primary focus of archaeological research. • Cultural process refers to the processes by which human societies changed in the past.

13. Primary Cultural Processes • Archaeologists generally agree on three primary cultural processes that figured importantly in world prehistory: • Invention • Diffusion • Migration

14. Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation • Climatic Change - The long cycles of cold and warm associated with the Ice Age occur on a millennial scale and have long-term effects on human existence. • Short-term climatic changes, such as the floods or droughts caused by El Niño episodes or the volcanic eruptions that dump ash into the atmosphere, had immediate impact on hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

15. Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation • Culture as Adaptation - Most archaeologists believe that human cultures are best interpreted as adaptations to the subsistence and ecological requirements of a locality.

16. Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation • Cultural Evolution and Cultural Ecology • Unilinear cultural evolution • Early Victorian social scientists believed human societies evolved in a simple, linear fashion, slowly ascending an evolutionary ladder of human progress toward that ultimate pinnacle, industrial civilization. • Multilinear cultural evolution • Cultural ecology - the core of multilinear evolutionary theory

17. Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation • Multilinear Evolution: Prestate and State-Organized Societies • Prestate societies are societies on a small scale, based on the community, band, or village. • Bands are associations of families of no more than 25 to 100 people. • Tribes are clusters of bands that are linked by clans.

18. Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation • Multilinear Evolution: Prestate and State-Organized Societies • Chiefdoms are still kin-based but more hierarchical, with power concentrated in the hands of kin leaders. • State-organized societies (civilizations) operate on a large scale with centralized political and social organization, class stratification, and intensive agriculture. They have complex political structures and many permanent government institutions, and they are based on notions of social inequality.

19. Theoretical Approaches: Evolutionary Ecology and Hunter-Gatherers • Evolutionary ecology is based on the proposition that variation in the behavior of individual organisms is shaped by natural selection. • Optimal foraging strategy argues that the most efficient foraging strategies adopted by human groups are those that produce the greatest return in energy relative to time and effort expended.

20. Theoretical Approaches: Evolutionary Ecology and Hunter-Gatherers • Optimal foraging strategy • Contingency model - exploitation of a food resource is independent of its abundance. • Prey model -The model predicts that foragers will exploit the highest-ranked prey should they encounter it, whereas lower-ranked items move in and out of the diet as rates of foraging return rise and fall within an area.

21. Theoretical Approaches: People as Agents of Change • People are agents of culture change, even if most of them remain anonymous, unseen figures in the obscurity of a preliterate past. • External and Internal Constraints - In recent years, archaeologists have distinguished between external constraints on culture change, such as environmental factors, and internal constraints, created by the actions of individuals and groups.

22. Theoretical Approaches: People as Agents of Change • A new generation of research is focusing on • ideologies, • human interactions, • gender relations, and • trade and exchange - combining processual and post-processual approaches to study both types of constraints and their influences on the past.