What good is archaeology?

Abstract

The CRC project is entitled "Culture-Environment Interaction and Human Mobility in the Late Quaternary." It uses ethnographic and ethnological data, as well as agent-based modeling, to devise a model, a First African Frontier model, that accounts for how modern humans migrated out of Africa into Europe and, in fact, to the rest of the world. I take a slightly different approach to the conference's issue of scale, asking what the scale of archaeological data is, how it differs from that of ethnography, and, given the difference, what archaeology can contribute. In sum, archaeological data are aggregated data, especially for the time period in question where assemblages result from possibly thousands of years, and thousands of human actions. I argue that at this scale the "strong signal" is primarily telling us about human response to ecological and demographic conditions, and that human behavioral ecology provides a useful learning strategy to know when these material factors are not relevant. I then use terminal Pleistocene New World colonization as an example of a colonization process, including evidence for the scale of social relations at this time.