Kind Of Archaeology Research Articles

Is There Such a Thing as Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology?

This paper examines two related questions: firstly, whether there is a distinctive field of practice that might be called “hunter-gatherer archaeology” and which is different than other kinds of archaeology, and secondly, how such a claim might be justified. This question is considered through four prisms: (1) whether hunter-gatherers provide a unitary object of research; (2) whether hunter-gatherer archaeology is the same in different parts of the world; (3) whether hunter-gatherer archaeology is characterised by distinctive forms of archaeological record; and (4) whether there are distinctive themes within the field. None of these approaches provide a single unifying core, with any definition at best a constellation of “partially shared features” and with considerable difficulties surrounding the uncritical continued use of the concept of hunter-gatherers, which is linked to colonial ideologies and practices. Rather than provide a single unitary answer, it is proposed that the value and legitimacy of the concept of “hunter gatherer archaeology” requires consideration in the local contexts within which it might be used. In the European context within which I work, the broader social significance of the idea of the hunter-gatherer provides a significant opportunity for the development of a self-reflexive and publicly engaged hunter-gatherer archaeology committed to decoloniality. In this context, the potentials that the idea of a “hunter-gatherer archaeology” provides can, with caution, justify the continued use of the term. This answer will not characterise other locations, especially in colonised nations.

Henri-Jean Martin, historien de l’édition contemporaine

Dans cet article consacré à l’un des pères de la nouvelle histoire du livre, Henri-Jean Martin, Jean-Yves Mollier revient à la fois sur les origines de l’Histoire de l’édition française et sur l’ensemble de l’œuvre de celui qui en assura, avec Roger Chartier et Jean-Pierre Vivet, la direction. Un éclairage est apporté sur le troisième homme de cet attelage un peu insolite, l’éditeur et journaliste Jean-Pierre Vivet, le moins connu des trois maîtres d’œuvre d’une histoire de l’édition qui a fait souche. En mettant à jour une sorte d’archéologie de ce monument, l’article incite le lecteur à comprendre les mécanismes souvent cachés de ce que l’on peut désigner comme une « commande sociale ». La deuxième partie de cette étude est consacrée au reste de l’œuvre et de l’action d’un historien passionné par le monde du livre, de l’Antiquité à nos jours.

Quem faz Arqueologia abre uma janela

O pensamento arqueológico tem passado por efervescente criticismo nas últimas décadas em decorrência de ideias que contestam a hegemonia de categorias modernas. A dualidade humanista, a preponderância da discursividade, além da noção de tempo linear são alguns exemplos de categorias que estão em xeque desde o final do século passado. Esse cenário acabou propiciando uma aproximação mais pertinente entre a Arqueologia e outras áreas, como é o caso da Arte. Neste artigo, então, faço uma análise dessa interação, destacando algumas ressalvas que devemos tomar diante desse diálogo. Ainda, defendo que a Arqueologia deva, sim, utilizar-se da Arte, mas não como mera inspiração, tal qual uma nova espécie de Arqueologia promovedora de analogias, mas como um instrumental capaz de nos municiar de uma epistemologia mais combativa, mais condizente com as características próprias do fazer arqueológico. Por fim, trago aqui exemplos de três trabalhos desenvolvidos nos últimos anos e que julgo ilustrarem tal potencialidade.

What kind of archaeology do we want? Introduction

Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?

What Kind of Archaeology do We Need?

From the time of the constitution of archaeology as an academic discipline to the present, two radical changes have taken place of theoretical postulates, aims, methods, relationships with other disciplines. However, potentially far-reaching consequences of these fundamental changes have not had the same impact in all the academic communities. The critical assessment of the epistemological foundations of archaeology in Serbia indicates that our professional community has remained resistant to the large extent to the paradigm changes in the wider disciplinary surrounding, so the culture-historical approach still prevails, even though it was severely criticized as early as by the middle of the 20th century. Facing this significant delay raises many important questions, starting by the issue of selection among various, sometimes mutually conflicting theoretical approaches, being a part of archaeological research for several decades and implying certain consequences in terms of methodological aspects of the discipline. Partial, non-critical and insufficiently theoretically informed borrowing of individual elements of research may lead to equally bad results as the total rejection of influences from other archaeological environments. It is therefore necessary to bring into the discipline the comprehension of the social responsibility of archaeologists, the importance of the academic narratives we produce and the ways of their creation.

A kind of archeology: collecting American folk art, 1876-1976

A kind of archeology: collecting American folk art, 1876-1976

What Can Archaeology Do for Justice, Peace, Community, and the Earth?

The purpose of this forum is to contribute to the ongoing conversation about archaeology as it might be of service beyond its traditional roles. The observation that archaeology plays a role in society beyond its contribution to knowledge is not new; there are increasing numbers of archaeologists determined to use their expertise to make the world a better place. What I hope in this forum is that I and my colleagues make a fruitful contribution to the ongoing dialogue about potential and actual benefits of archaeology related to doing justice, making peace, building community, and restoring ecological balance. In a recent issue of The SAA Archaeological Record, ethnobotanist and archaeologist Paul Minnis initiated a dialogue about "The Skep tic's Question" because he is concerned that archaeologists don't know how to make the case for what we do (Minnis et al. 2006). The skeptic, in this case, is the person who asks, essentially, why spend public money?that is, tax dollars?on archaeology instead of spending the money for more obviously important things such as schools, medical research, or reduc ing poverty. In addition to Minnis, six other archaeologists?five prehistorians and one his torical archaeologist (me)?offered short versions of our answers to why archaeology is relevant today. Our responses ranged from ecological conservation and the diversification of crops, to the encouragement of long-term perspectives on public decision making, to tourism, to promoting heritage and identity, to battling racism. Our responses to the "skeptic's question" assume that the archaeology that will be useful will be competent, scholarly archaeology. The need to ask the question and to "make the case" relates to increasing anxiety about public relevance throughout the sciences and humanities. Generations of archaeologists have felt strongly the need for their work to be useful, not only to justify continued funding, but also to act as responsible scholars. Archaeologists have disagreed, however, about what counts as usefulness, often ridiculing work that falls outside of one's own "camp." Archaeologists too often fight about a basic division presumed to split the discipline. One kind of archaeology is a science, which provides credible and hopefully useful knowledge. One kind of archaeology is a humanity, which provides meaning and perspective on life within the human condition over time and across space. Sometimes we integrate those two identities well, and sometimes we do not. The kinds of benefits we hope to provide depend on how we see the purpose and strengths of our field. It may be that one of the most beneficial things we could do?for ourselves, for the social sciences, for intellectual life, for policy makers, for a broad range of interested publics ?is to do a better job of integrating the values of the humanities and the sciences and making the case, by example, of how to do that. As archaeologists, we know that there are many scholars who could use archaeology to do a better job in their own research and that there are many people who could use archaeology to make their lives richer. One example contribut ing to research impacts outside of archeology is useful data for ecologists and environmental researchers who need a longer-term view than is often available on the ecological effects of industry and globalization. And, for enriching lives, for example, we want teachers and students to learn archaeology, not only so that they'll support it, and not only so that they see the world is diverse in peoples and cultures, but also to learn about how one might make sense of a process deeply imbued with ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty and to gain the insight that those characteristics apply to life in general no less than to the messy business of archaeology. In addition, we want communities and archaeologists to engage with each other and to use the process and results of

Marxism, the United States, and the Twentieth-Century

The previous century now seems to be drawing away from us at an increasing speed, especially in the global society's existing superabundance of communications. Readers of Monthly Review know that the basics have remained the same in the all too physical world of capitalism and neocolonialism, as much as they might have changed in terms of resistance and apparent alternatives. Still, as the graying of the 1960s generation continues, and the New Deal era draws ever further into a kind of archeology, a summing up of some points is useful and may even be fun.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Eavesdropping on a Global Conversation

How do we negotiate our own positions as locally situated archaeologists in relation to a global discipline? On the one hand, we belong to a worldwide community of scholars, practitioners and activists whose conversations and debates crisscross national boundaries, continents, hemispheres and social classes. On the other hand, we are positioned in specific, local contexts through out national and institutional affiliations, which themselves are variously situated in relation to the fault-lines and cleavages that divide out world: North and South, West and non-West, developed and under-developed economies, and members of dominant and subaltern national groupings. These different forms of insertion often play a key determining role when it comes to the kind of archaeology that we practice, and our access to resources and networks. One of the strengths of WAC as an organization is that it pays close attention to the different ways in which we are situated as archaeologists, and thinks creatively around how to address this. One demonstration of this in practice is the WAC list-serve, where as a subscriber one eavesdrops on a global conversation, around a fascinating range of issues.

Limits to a public archaeology? Two new books about Çatalhöyük

On 18 May 2001 Science magazine ran an article by Robert Koenig titled 'Creationism takes root where Europe, Asia meet'. It documented the increasing success of an anti-evolutionist lobby in securing changes to the Turkish national curriculum and marginalizing scholars who adhere to a secular, Darwinian view of biological change. Many scientists in Turkey, wrote Koenig, 'fear they are losing ground to Turkish creationists in the wider court of public opinion especially in provinces where Islamic fundamentalism is strongest'. One such region is Konya in central Turkey, home to the prehistoric site of <:;atalhoyiik, a key resource for understanding the development of early farming communities and the westward spread of Neolithic economies and lifestyles from their locus of origin in the Middle East. Since 1993 <:;atalhoyiik has been the site of a widely publicized archaeological proj ect, led by Ian Hodder of Stanford University, which has attracted an international team of experts and technical resources that far exceed those available to most prehistoric excavations. The site and Hodder's activities have also attracted the interest of another Science correspondent, Michael Balter, who first covered <:;atalhoyiik in 1998 with,an article titled 'Digging into the life of the mind'. This was followed by a succession of short pieces in the same magazine (a vaila ble at http://www.michaelbalter.com/ articles. php) that raised the profile of the <:;atalhoyiik Research Project, as well as bringing current archaeological debates over the origins of farming and the spread of Indo-European languages to a wider readership. Balter further brought to public attention the sea-change in archaeological interpretation initiated by Hodder under the banner of 'post-processualism', and the importance of <:;atalhoyiik as a pilot project for a new kind of archaeology. While embracing the latest scientific techniques, this new kind of archaeology was to be less confined than its 'processualist' predecessors by the stringencies of evolutionary theory, more open to the symbolic worlds of prehistoric societies and better attuned to the biases and uncertainties of modern interpretations. Perhaps most ambitiously, it was seeking to break down the barriers that traditionally separate fieldwork from interpretation, by housing a large team of specialists on-site and engaging them directly in the decision-making processes of daily excavation an exciting methodological departure, but also a potential source of tension between professional excavators and full-time academics, who are often drawn to fieldwork for quite different reasons. Balter, sensing the makings of a larger story, became a regular fixture at <:;atalhoyiik over a period of six years, during which he conducted extensive interviews with staff members. Some divulged to him highly personal information about themselves, their families, their early careers and professional motivations, which Balter clearly felt would lend necessary human interest to an otherwise dull story of ... well ... 'the dawn of civilization'.

Orphan Heritage: Issues in Managing the Heritage of the Great War in Northern France and Belgium

This paper summarises recent developments in the field of Great War archaeology and examines solutions to the issues raised. The Great War is recent enough to be modern, but far enough back to be beyond living memory. As such, its material remains have become the province of archaeology, which raises two issues. Firstly, that the heritage is "owned" by people distant from the territories that contain the material, an issue exacerbated by modernity and derivation through conflict of the material. Secondly, the issue of what kind of archaeology is suitable for dealing with this material, and which archaeologists should do it.

What is community archaeology?

Community archaeology, understood as a distinctive set of practices within the wider discipline, is a relatively new development. Its most important distinguishing characteristic is the relinquishing of at least partial control of a project to the local community. This introduction takes a preliminary look at where this kind of archaeology is being carried out around the world and outlines what marks it out as different from other kinds of archaeology. In conclusion, it is suggested that community archaeology has a unique, if not critical, contribution to make to the future development of archaeology as a genuinely worldwide discipline.

Baxter Street then.

THIS IMAGE OF BAXTER Street, New York City, NY, was published in A Handbook of the People's Health (1913), one of several textbooks written by Walter Moore Coleman.1 Like other textbooks in the series, it was intended to present modern problems in an engaging way to audiences of adolescents. The upbeat text emphasizes how much things have changed for the better and how modern, professionally led public health reform initiatives will lead to a better and healthier life for all. This particular photograph was meant to capture the horrors of 19th-century housing before tenement house reform. Successive waves of immigrants had made Baxter Street their home. Early in the century, German bakers and grocers opened corner stores here, Jews from Bavaria and Bohemia operated used clothing stalls, and the Irish dealt in iron, brass, and copper.2 As the immigrants continued to come, landlords converted the wood frame houses originally built for single artisan families (in the foreground of the photograph) into rabbit-warren boarding houses jammed with renters. When these increasingly dilapidated houses could hold no more, the landlords built huge tenements (in the background of the photograph) where they could pack in hundreds of poorly paid laborers and artisans. In general, the higher the density of rental housing, the poorer the health conditions, and the greater the mortality rates of the populations inside. This photograph captures a kind of archaeology of urban housing horrors that Coleman would have us believe were being successfully abolished by Progressive-era reform.3 Later 20th-century developments would prove that the problems of urban housing were easier to identify than to solve.

Status, Wealth and the Chronological Ordering of Cemeteries

The study of grave goods plays a central role in two very different kinds of archaeology. As groups of artefacts that were deposited together, grave finds occupy a key position in chronological studies. At the same time, it is commonly supposed that the selection of artefacts for deposition with the dead may be some reflection of the social position that they had enjoyed in life; the contents of different graves may be studied for evidence of wealth and status. Although chronological studies have the longer history, these two types of analysis ought to be most informative where social variation can be traced over a lengthy sequence. As we shall see, this raises special problems.

Discourse and Disoccultation: An Interview with Timothy Reiss

DISCOURSE AND DISOCCULTATION: AN INTERVIEW WITH TIMOTHY THOMAS F. REISS BERTONNEAU I The Discourse of Modernism' by Timothy Reiss is a groundbreak- ing theoretical essay. Careless consideration wants to make of Reiss an epigone of Michel Foucault. Reiss' book is a kind of archeology, concerned, as its author puts it, with a central canon composed of science fictions and Utopias from the critical historical moment of the European Renaissance and Neoclassicism. ^ Yet the disguises a superficial resemblance to the Foucaldian archival work plex relationship between Reiss more com- and his inspiration. The Discourse of Modernism, while occupying a position in the so-called post-structuralist movement more or less dominated by Foucault, does not so new context as much continue the Foucaldian analysis in a complement the work characteristic of, say, Les Mots et les choses. Foucault concentrates on the particular episteme, and any given Foucaldian episteme will be peculiar in respect of its iso- lation from and non-communicability with its ante- and post- cedents. An auditor of Hans Robert Jauss' UCLA seminars (1985) quotes him as saying that Foucault's episteme seems to drop out of the sky. Apocryphal or not the remark contains some truth. Foucault has brilliantly documented the determinative force of the episteme;

Historic site archaeology in relation to other archaeology

This is in some sense a progress report on Historic Site Archaeology as a discipline, and in some sense an attempt to establish the place of Historical Archaeology or Historic Site Archaeology in relation to other kinds of ar chaeology. It is also concerned with the prob lem which confronts many professional and academic people who become involved in the practical application of their field. In this case, the question would be: "What is real archaeology?" A common concept of Historical Site Ar chaeology is that it is a purely "practical" ap plication, of methods better used elsewhere, to answer immediate, often political, questions. This is partly because there are certain sub jects which are more commonly studied by this technique than others. The other subjects have a large amount of information available through documents or other sources, or are so common and everyday that one does not think of "studying" them. For this reason, archaeology seems restricted to being a method of studying those places and people who are so remote from us in time that this is the only way by which they can be studied. Some people would say that there was a contradiction in the very term "Historic Site Archaeology". It is normal to think of archae ology as being concerned with "Prehistory". The boundary line of what is historic may change, depending on when written records become available for an area. Thus, "History" begins thousands of years ago in the eastern Mediterranean, but less than two centuries ago for much of North America. Most people think of the era after historical records have started in North America as being the proper subject of study for historians, and the period before that as being prehistoric and the study of ar chaeologists.