Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
whacky when they announce new discoveries … but you should perhaps give them a little slack. It’s a slow business… .
Archaeology: The Study of Ancient Societies
Archaeology studies ancient societies through their material remains, which you may know as artifacts. These artifacts number in the billions and pepper the globe, each a piece to the puzzle of our ancestors’ lives. Every arrowhead, every stone net-weight, every clay pipe-stem and shard of glass, every mud brick and gnawed bone and corroding sword have something to tell about the lives of past human societies, and the archaeologists’ job is to fit the puzzle back together.
Fitting the puzzle back together is a great challenge. Archaeology isn’t that technically difficult or even expensive (compared, to, say, nuclear physics or chemistry), but it takes a long time to do well. Because artifacts are so numerous, and archaeologists are eager to extract as much information from each object as possible, excavations of archaeological sites can take years, even generations.
Archaeological research has many goals but normally adheres to some common principles:
Establishing chronologies, or sequences of events in the ancient world, such as dating when things first happened (for example, the use of writing, farming, or fire)
Establishing a spatial understanding of the chronicled events, such as where the first writing, farming, or use of the wheel occurred, and what that can reveal about their invention
Understanding the evolution of ancient cultures through time so as to better understand why certain societies survived and others collapsed, or answer other large questions, such as what prompted the change from small-scale chiefdoms to large-scale civilizations
Archaeologists establish chronologies by carefully noting the age of artifacts recovered in excavations. They must carry excavations out carefully so they can record the exact position of artifacts; this care is critical to understanding the artifacts’ ages for many reasons (which you can read more about in Chapter 5).
Carefully recording where artifacts are found is another way to achieve spatial understanding. If a stone bowl came from a cave in southern Mexico, you don’t want to confuse it with one found in northern Peru (they’re both from the Western Hemisphere, but they were made by quite different cultures). This obvious logic extends all the way down to the centimeter, such that archaeologists work long hours carefully recovering artifacts with whisk brooms and other delicate instruments.
Archaeology and evolution
Evolution is characterized by change; so, to understand ancient cultural evolution, archaeologists often focus on what changed through time in the ancient society they’re investigating.
For example, around 10,000 years ago people in the Danube River valley of southeastern Europe were highly mobile foragers (hunter-gatherers) who left only short-lived campsites for archaeologists to discover. But by about 7,500 years ago, they were a rather sedentary people, living for generations at a time in riverside villages that you would normally associate with farming people. However, the folk of these villages, including the fascinating site of Lepenski Vir, weren’t full-time farmers; they continued to hunt and gather. Something, then, changed in their culture, and archaeologists want to know what it was.
Explaining how cultures changed through time is one of the most contentious issues in the field of anthropology. Many models have been proposed to account for cultural change, including
Cultural ecology: These approaches consider the most important changes in human culture to be traced back to ecological issues, such as food and water supply. These factors are certainly important, but some argue that cultural ecology misses the importance of factors such as religion and even the individual human, inappropriately turning people into “automatons” that simply react to environmental change.
Postmodernism: Postmodern approaches place a high value on the ability of such factors as gender, ideology, religion, myth, and the individual to change culture over time.
Economic change models: These approaches focus on the organization of labor and the negotiation of social inequalities (haves and have-nots) in society. They have been interesting and useful for some archaeological investigations, but don’t work for periods when ancient labor wasn’t organized as it is in the industrial world, and labor divisions and social inequalities weren’t very prominent (as in the many millions of years of foraging societies).
CULTURAL EVOLUTION
Combining the terms cultural and evolution is enough to make some anthropologists see red. That’s because for a long time (from the late 1800s through the 1950s), anthropology labored under a mistaken concept of how culture changed through time, crudely grafting Darwinian evolution to the concept of culture. When this mistaken view was overturned in the mid-20th century, many anthropologists also threw out an evolutionary approach to culture, a move that has many archaeologists — me included — a little steamed.
The mistaken idea was that all human societies were on a Darwinian track toward Civilization and that those that didn’t make it were — however unfortunately — simply being selected against or weeded out by the pitiless forces of nature. This idea roughly categorized foraging peoples (like Australian Aborigines, most Native Americans, and polar hunting folk) into the category of Savagery, followed by small-scale farmers (like the chiefdoms of Hawaii or New Guinea) in the category of Barbarism, which could only evolve into — and rightly should evolve into, according to the idea — Civilization. That Civilization was typified by the Victorian white male of London was a nuance that few Victorians noticed. This misconception of how culture changed (that all cultures were on the same track) was clearly and carefully used to justify colonial efforts worldwide that were considered beneficial; after all, Civilization was being brought to the Savages.
For many reasons, this theory revealed itself to be a flawed understanding: Human societies, it turns out, don’t have an automatic drive toward becoming white Victorian males. But this flaw isn’t enough to entirely ditch the concept that culture changes through time by an evolutionary process.
Archaeologists, deeply concerned with the change in cultures through time, have most carefully examined cultural change, and they are most convinced that it does change by an evolutionary process. Culture doesn’t ride on the genes — it’s taught by language. Every society has its own way of surviving, but the principles of evolution apply to culture in some important ways. I don’t dwell on them in this book, but if you’re interested, you may want to start with some more advanced readings in archaeology, such as textbooks that cover archaeological theory.
Archaeologists have proposed dozens of other lenses through which to envision and understand cultural change through time, and they’re fascinating (even the really whacky ones!). But none, in my view, has entirely explained everything, and in my experience, most archaeologists agree with me. Culture is complex, people are complex, and all kinds of events have happened in the past to shape cultural change. I say this in a few other places in this book: Single-factor models never seem to pan out.
More facets of archaeology
Like all the fields of anthropology, archaeology even has its own subfields; I describe two of the most important ones — dealing with the prehistoric and historic