Editorial Reflections: Teaching Science with Ethnoarchaeology and Experimental Archaeology

Abstract

While archaeology as a discipline is scientific in nature, its subject matter and academic home in the social sciences often attract students who are less drawn to the so-called natural and hard sciences. As such, archaeology provides an ideal opportunity to teach scientific principles to students, even those who flee from physics or chemistry. Within archaeology the sub-areas of ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology especially allow students the opportunity to engage in hands-on activities and to do independent research even when archaeological collections are lacking. Teaching science involves imbuing students with a good sense of both content and process. While the archaeological practitioner may be most interested in the ways that the content of ethnoarchaeolgy and experimental archaeology can inform the interpretation of archaeological remains, the teacher should find the process entailed in ethnoarchaeological and experimental archaeological research equally or even more compelling, because relatively simple experiments and observations can be used to teach the way science works. Ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology developed because making archaeological interpretation more scientific required consistent and wellsubstantiated methods for extrapolating behaviors and cultural understandings from material objects and their distributions. Understanding the relationship between the interpretation of the material record and the principles used in its analysis is the core of archaeological, as opposed to cultural or anthropological, theory. The process of ethnoarchaeological and experimental inquiry and the challenges inherent in both types of studies go to the heart of scientific reasoning. To learn about these requires the basics of experimental design. Often, very simple experiments teach hypothesis testing and sampling issues. Because the cultural and physical milieus are both very complex, students doing more sophisticated projects need to grapple with multi-variate research designs, think about the potential effects of variation on their results, and cope with the frustrating, but real, problem of equifinality. Ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology tend to provide a nice methodological contrast because ethnoarchaeological studies are usually observational in contrast to the controlled process of the experiment. Both ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 6 No. 2, October, 2014, 79–80