ANT-2221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Ethnoarchaeology
Document Summary
To accurately interpret the archaeological record and reconstruct and explain past human lives, adaptations, and cultural diversity, we must, through experimentation and observations of contemporary processes, make comparisons between the present and past. Analogy a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be like another thing in a certain respect on the basis of the known similarity in other respects. Thus, in archaeology: we infer the meaning of something in the archaeological record based on its similarity to a known {human behavior observed in the present} thing that is similar in other respects. Analogy and the scientific method: hypotheses and negation: *marks were made with a reed , river cane, hollow bird bone, hollow frog bone, scaphopoda shell, feather quill. Three methods of developing modern analogs: ethnoarchaeology/ethnographic analogy, experimental archaeology, observations of natural processes. Desert people film in library watch it. Ethnoarchaeology: the study of the formation of the archaeological record of contemporary humans.
