Anthropology 2229F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Nunamiut, Construction, Uniformitarianism

• School: Western University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: Anthropology 2229F/G
• Professor: Peter Timmins

Document Summary

We make inferences from artifacts and attribute meaning to them. Archaeologists must be students of human behaviour and the natural world. Involves making s correlation between the archaeological data and some aspect of human behaviour or some natural process that could have produced the observed remains. A reasoning process that links that static archaeological remains known behaviour or natural processes. Analogy: a process of reasoning between parallel cases, a process whereby two entities that share similarities are assumed to share others. Involved noting similarities between entities and inferring from that similarity that an additional attribute of one is also true of the other. Relational analogies: analogies justified on the basis of close cultural continuity between the archaeological and ethnographic cases or similarity in general cultural form. Subject: the archaeological data to be explained. Source: the explanatory data or relationship. Causality is crucial for assessing whether an analogy has relevance.