Archaeology RQ Chapter 2

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Dec 6, 2023

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Archaeology Reading Questions Chapter 2 1) What are the four fields of anthropology? Briefly describe what each studies.  Biological anthropology – views humans as biological organisms; also known as physical anthropology  Cultural anthropology – emphasizes nonbiological aspects: the learned social, linguistic, technological and familial behaviors of humans  Linguistic anthropology – focuses on human language: it’s diversity in grammar, syntax and lexicon; its historical development and its relation to a culture’s perception of the world  Archaeology – the study of the past through the systematic recovery and analysis of material remains 2) What is the basic method of cultural anthropology? How come archaeology can’t do that? (May seem like a trick question, but it’s not. It’s literal.) Participant observation is the primary strategy of cultural anthropology. It involves data gathered by questioning and observing people while the observer lives in their society, which is impossible in archaeology because the society is no longer in existence. 3) Define culture. Culture is an integrated system of beliefs, traditions and customs that govern or influence a person’s behavior. Culture is learned, shared by members of a group and based on the ability to think in terms of symbols. 4) What are the features of culture (listed in your book)?  Learned – from parents, peers, teachers, leaders and others not inherited  Shared – members of a human group share some basic ideas about the world and their place in it  Symbolic – meanings condition what we do, which in turn affects the material traces of those behaviors 5) What are the two basic approaches to understanding culture your textbook lists (for anthropology in general)?  Ideational perspective – a research perspective that focuses on ideas, symbols and mental structures as driving forces in shaping human behavior  Adaptive perspective – a research perspective that emphasizes technology, ecology, demography and economics as the key factors defining human behavior

6) What is, or was, the potlatch? How might it appear in the archaeological record (as artifacts found later)? Potlatch means “to give.” Among the nineteenth century northwest coast Native Americans the potlatch was a ceremony involving the giving away or distribution of property in order to acquire prestige. A potlatch could appear in the archaeological record as artifacts found later in village sites in which villages allied with each other, ensuring assistance in lean times, forestalling the possibility of attacks from other villages and shifting populations to be more productive and successful. 7) What does your textbook say about science? Feel free to criticize some of the details. I will. The textbook says that science is the search for answers through a process that is objective, systematic, logical, predictive and public. It says that science is empirical or objective, concerned with the observable, measurable world, though I’m not entirely convinced all scientists are capable of being completely objective and without bias and I’m not entirely convinced that science is public and available for scrutiny, either. 8) Who were the Mound Builders? (5 W’s of journalism: who, what, when, where, why.) The Mound Builders were thought to be anyone, except the ancestors of Native Americans, who destroyed the people thought to be a superior race and the Mound Builders were hypothesized to be related to the nations of Mexico and Central America, though it was concluded by Cyrus Thomas objectively that there was no lost race of Mound Builders that were destroyed by Native Americans. The Mound Builders were said to be the people who constructed the mounds and earthworks found in North America, especially in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. 9) What’s all this business about low level theory, middle level theory and high level theory? Are we selling condos or what?  Low level theory – the observations and interpretations that emerge from hands-on archaeological field and lab work that begins with archaeological objects and generated relevant facts or data about those objects  Middle level theory links archaeological observations with the human behavior or natural processes that produced them and moved past the observable to the invisible, or relevant, human behaviors or natural processes of the past  High level theory seeks to answer large “why” questions and applies to inquiry about the human condition

10) How do you tell the difference between processual and post-processual archaeology? Processual explains social, economic, and cultural change as primarily the result of adaptation to material conditions and post-processual focuses on humanistic approaches and rejects scientific objectivity. Post-processual archaeology rejects the processual search for universal laws and emphasizes the role of the individual and it rejects the systemic view of culture and focuses on the ideational approach to culture. It argues that all archaeology is political and sees knowledge as “historically situated” and not as objective as processual archaeologists argue.

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Archaeology RQ Chapter 2

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