Anthropology For Dummies. Cameron M. Smith
Prehistoric archaeology
The earliest writing systems go back to about 6,000 years ago, and the entire period between that time and the time of the first stone tools (the first artifacts), around three million years ago, is called prehistory.
Prehistoric archaeology studies this period with many of the same concerns as historic-period archaeologists. However, some aspects of prehistoric archaeology are unique:
A concern with ecology and adaptation: Whereas most peoples written about in the historic period were agriculturalists, people of the prehistoric period were mostly foragers (formerly known as hunters and gatherers) who moved across landscapes to hunt and gather their food; figuring out what they ate and how they got their hands on it (that is, adapted to their selective environments) is a central focus of prehistory.
A focus on stone, bone, and antler artifacts: Before the historic farming societies, artifacts made from these materials were the most likely to have survived decay over the millennia. Wood was also important, but it decays quickly and not much survives beyond a few thousand years.
A concern with egalitarian social organization: Unlike the farming societies, which ranked members according to how much they did or didn’t have, prehistoric societies were essentially socially equal. A significant question is how ancient cultures maintained this egalitarian mode of social organization.
Keep in mind that just because some societies took up writing around 6,000 years ago, not all did; many remained foragers living outside the boundaries of growing civilizations, like that of the Aztecs or the Maya. These people included the Native Americans, people who lived in the Americas for well over 10,000 years before the arrival of European explorers. Those explorers wrote down what they observed of the Native Americans, so documents do exist that describe people on the margins of history. But of course the Native Americans had their own histories, told as oral traditions, so they weren’t people without history. Today, a lot of their past is told through archaeology.
Historic archaeology
Historic archaeology takes advantage of the fact that about 6,000 years ago, some human groups invented language and began to write down things that can tell about the past. In a way, because I’m primarily a prehistoric archaeologist (normally working on cultures that did not have writing systems), I envy historic archaeologists; they have a lot more information to go on when they start their research. On the other hand, when I start looking into the billions of pages of historic records about the ancient world, I realize that the historic record presents as many problems as it does solutions!
Historic archaeology proceeds with many of the same concerns and methods as prehistoric archaeology, but it often addresses two issues of particular importance.
History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, which is another way of saying that each story has (at least) two sides. The use of propaganda, the convenient omission of inconvenient facts from state records, and the wholesale creation of “facts” by those who control the written records, are nothing new; these occurred in every ancient civilization, from Sumer to the Incan empire. Unless you’re happy to simply believe what ancient governmental records tell you about their illustrious (and they’re always illustrious) leaders, historic archaeology is a good way to test that written record against artifacts in the ground. Words describe policy; artifacts show what was really built, or not.
Similarly, written records of the ancient world often dealt with the royalty and their activities, military conquests, or religious ceremonies and ideas, but they rarely discussed the common people — the peasants — who formed the bulk of the population of every ancient civilization. And unless you’re directly descended from royalty — and I mean without a drop of commoner’s blood in your veins, which is pretty unlikely — the history of the common person is partly your history. Historical archaeology sometimes focuses on these forgotten ancestors, fleshing out the history books with a fuller picture of the ancient world.
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology studies human language, the animal kingdom’s most uniquely powerful — and at the same time subtle — system of communication between individuals.
Language is basically a system of information transmission and reception; humans communicate these messages by sound (speech), by gesture (body language), and in other visual ways such as writing. Because language is one of humanity’s most distinctive characteristics, I devote all of Chapter 13 to a detailed examination of what language is and what we know about how it evolved.
Linguistic anthropology traditionally focuses on several key issues, each resulting from a new research paradigm developed over the last 60 or so years. Interestingly, these interests haven’t steamrolled the previous ones but rather incorporated and complemented earlier types of investigations. The following list details some of those key issues:
Classification of languages, to identify which languages evolved when and where
Understanding of language structure, units, and grammar
Identification of the ways language constructs and reflects identity, ideology, and narratives
Another topic of considerable interest has been when, where, and among what species language first appeared, and how it subsequently evolved. This is one of the great questions of anthropology, but it’s such a massively complex topic that all you really need to know at this level is that, at present, no single model or theory has convinced all anthropologists just how language first evolved. People have presented some compelling theories, but anthropologists are still evaluating them. You can read more about these theories in Chapters 7 and 13.
Nonhuman animal communication
Nonhuman animals also communicate; this reminds humanity that we’re not as different from other animals as people often like to think.
Nonhuman animal communication is different from human communication and language, though, in certain ways:
Nonhuman language is symbolically simple. A monkey’s screech for “hawk” (an aerial predator) is surely distinct from a squawk for “python” (a ground predator), but “hawk” or “python” are ALL these sounds can mean. On the other hand, humans can use language to say “That guy is a real snake,” attributing snake-like qualities to a person.
Nonhuman words are phonemically simple. That is, although human words can be constructed from many sounds (like the word constitutional) nonhuman “words” are usually formed of two or fewer sounds (each distinct sound of a language is called a phoneme).
Nonhuman language is grammatically simple. Although human sentences can be constructed from many words (like “I broke the glass, that was sitting on the edge of the table, before I slipped on a banana peel!”), nonhuman “sentences” are very rare and short (normally no more than two sounds made one after another), and grammatical rules for their assembly are simple.
Spoken language
Human