ANT 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Paleoanthropology
13 Sep 2017
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Document Summary
Gold: very stable, lasts a very long period of time. Excavation is destruction, what is destroyed is context. Anthropology: the study of people, from origins to present. Materials: pottery, metal, wood, bone, gourd, stone, cloth, etc. As a discipline: grew out of 18th and 19th century european interest in human diversity. Multi-disciplinary field: humans are social and biological creatures. Humans: unconscious desire to validate our theory, difficulty in avoiding culture bound hypothesis. Anthropologists immerse themselves to avoid this until patterns are clear. Ethnohistory: using historical documents to derive data and theories about previous societies. Ground mummies were once believed to have medicinal purposes. Physical: focusses on biological organisms, human growth, genetics, paleoanthropology. Social-cultural: focusses on humans as culture producing creatures.
