ANTH 360 Lecture Notes - Pleistocene, Silt, Social Anthropology
Document Summary
Archaeology borrows approach and theories from many related disciplines: Considered a cluster of methods, rather than a single method. A method: an approach to understanding information about the past, a method to recover information about past. Biological/physical anthropology: study of human biological or physical characteristics and how they evolved. Analyzes past human culture and societies through material remains (material culture) *how to interpret something without any informants? (ethnoarchaeology: analyzes how past societies used material culture by studying how present cultures use similar objects) Linguistics: study of languages, their acquisition, structure and meaning. 99% of human existence happened before historical documentation. Protohistory: line between having some written records or visual information; civilization with a language, but cannot read it; history recorded through other civilization"s language or by other civilizations. History: events are already known, and asks more specific questions about the events. Unlike texts, archaeological data must be interpreted. Make hypothesis: a testable proposition to account for the data.