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Archaeology vs. Pop Culture · Acedra
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Archaeology vs. Pop Culture
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0:00
Today we're going to delve into what is an extremely, extraordinarily fascinating field of archaeology. I guess I'm kind of being sarcastic. Archaeology has this weird vibe to it. It started out a long time ago, I think with the Indiana Jones movies—but you might not have seen those—and then you have the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series, and there's all sorts of pop culture representations of
0:35
archaeologists. I think that more than any other part of anthropology, there's a divide between how archaeology is represented on TV and in video games and what archaeologists actually have to do. I think it might be the biggest divide of any subpart of anthropology, in part because perhaps it is the most famous in popular culture. But it still is a pretty big divide. I have never quite comprehended this fascination with archaeology. I have some idea about why
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it is that people like it, and I think it has to do with being able to see it on TV and video games and have these go out and find some cool stuff and maybe have some romance—both in the sense of
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the romantic adventure and maybe even romance romance. That's kind of
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what gives it some of its fascination. But when you look at Lavenda and Schultz and start off on page 172, things get pretty boring pretty fast, I guess I would say.
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On page 172, Lavenda and Schultz start off with what they used to call the four phases of archaeology. Now they've come up with five phases of it, although I didn't really figure out where three and four—I think they got to number five, so I'll show you that. The first phase of archaeology, when we go back maybe a hundred years or so, is just simply trying to find out what's there—trying to get some of those material remains, some of those
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artifacts. This is probably when we think about the traditional archaeologists doing the traditional stuff and bringing out an artifact or some kind of relic. This is probably what they're talking about. But again, this is something that is kind of the oldest phase of archaeology. They then talk about a kind of second phase of archaeology, which was trying to use these artifacts in order to try and figure out what the people were doing.
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What were they doing with these artifacts? Because it wasn't simply to get stuff that was pretty to look at and extract it from its context—it was to use the context to figure out what people were doing, what their life was like, what their culture was like. That lasted up until about the 1960s in terms of how archaeology progressed—so about 60 years ago.
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During the 1960s there was another kind of phase of archaeology which is called now processual archaeology. What the processual archaeologists tried to do was to bring in much more science into the works. They would see archaeology as: you form a hypothesis and then you go and do whatever you need to do in the field in order to test that hypothesis. That was because they were looking at explaining different processes that happen in culture.
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Lavenda and Schultz here put a fourth part into this, which is the idea of cultural ecology—that from this time, even from the 1960s, archaeologists were very interested in these sort of long-term climate change events and how the climate and how the environment affected human cultures. There's a whole subfield of cultural ecology which is basically about the interaction between humans and their environment. What Lavenda and Schultz are saying here is that
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for these processual archaeologists, they were very interested in how the structure of society would basically shape people's actions. They weren't too concerned with individuals—they
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seemed to subsume the individual into the overall picture of what the society was like.
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After that, in I would say the last 20 years or so, there's a fifth phase or fifth objective they call it of archaeology, which is called either interpretive archaeology or post-processual archaeology—that is, after the processual field of archaeology.
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In some ways this takes us back a little bit, in that the post-processual or interpretive archaeologists began to think more about what the meaning of these things, these artifacts, were to the people who may have used them. They tried to interpret those things from a viewpoint which really emphasized people's individual power and the kind of conflicts and ways in which people had different interpretations within different societies.
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This in many ways echoed the concerns of anthropology in general, where we now see that culture is less of a kind of determining thing and there's always going to be conflict, there's always going to be different interpretations. The post-processual or interpretive archaeologists take that back into the past. That's very difficult work—it's very difficult to try and figure out what people might have been thinking about and the meaning of these artifacts as well.
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But it's led to some reinterpretations of the archaeological field which are quite important, and we'll be talking about those more for Tuesday's class. Now in some ways all of these objectives are still with us. Whenever we have an archaeological site, the reconstructing, trying to figure out what's there, finding some cool stuff, reconstructing the lifeways, trying to do some scientific hypothesis testing,
7:19
and some interpretation—this is all part of archaeology. In some ways you might say that these are different focal fields or focal areas that archaeologists tend to gravitate towards. There are people who really think of themselves as scientific archaeologists and have never really left the processual archaeology phase, while there are others who really are way into the interpretive archaeology when they're doing their archaeology.
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This gives us on one page a kind of brief overview of the steps and stages and objectives of archaeology, and it's quite different I think than
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our romantic notions of what archaeology would have been. Also on this page is an interesting statement by Lavenda and Schultz: we have these increasingly sophisticated methods, increasingly sophisticated technologies, increasingly sophisticated theories and ideas about study, and then they say well none of that stuff is going to matter if there is nothing left to study. In many ways, because of housing developments, because of climate change,
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because of the romance of TV shows, people are looting and destroying sites. We've reached what they call a kind of crisis point in archaeology. There are many archaeologists that now believe that one of their primary goals is not necessarily to be trying to explain and dig things up all the time, but to play a part in the stewardship of the remains of the human past—talking about ways in which we can preserve the archaeological record and really tell people of
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its importance and how we might learn from it and learn about ourselves because of it. This is an interesting overview statement about where we are in the time frame of archaeology.
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The other reason I think that there's a lot of fascination with archaeology and this subfield is simply that you get to dig some stuff up. A couple of you mentioned the excavation part, which is what we think about or associate with archaeology. It is very important, but I would here emphasize—and some of you were kind of surprised by this because you said well I thought archaeologists went out and just started digging stuff all over the place—one
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of the things that you want to do is to kind of get a survey of the landscape. Something just like walking through an area is extremely important to get an overview of where things might be.
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Surveying the land—also important to archaeologists, and increasingly important—is to talk to the people that live around and in the area and figure out what they are doing in their daily lives and what they might have done with an artifact that you find in that site. A lot of the fossil finds and a lot of the archaeological finds are done in collaboration with the people who already lived there and know where the main important sites might be.
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This is also called ethnoarchaeology, which is a way of trying to make an analogy between what people are doing in the present, in the ethnographic period, or what people get from cultural study, and to then make analogies back to the past. You always have to be very careful with making an analogy from what someone is doing in the present back into the past. As we saw with primatology, you don't want to just project whatever ideas you have and whatever you're doing
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and just project it back and assume that that was what was going on 10,000 or a million years ago. But it can sometimes offer clues to what we might expect people would do with certain artifacts and in certain areas.
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The other thing that has become extremely important in terms of both surveying and what we used to do—which is walk through, which is still important—but it's also important to do aerial imagery from airplanes, satellites, and remote sensing. Those things can give us a sense of stuff that is located under the ground without ever having to necessarily dig it up. You can get a sense of, for example, road networks and trade routes. These things can often be sensed
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from a distance in ways that they might actually be very difficult to get from simply excavating.
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Archaeologists increasingly use LiDAR, ground-penetrating radar, GIS systems. These are hugely important. Technology is extremely important in every aspect of doing archaeology these days. I would also add to this something that is not completely discussed in Lavenda and Schultz, but how important it is to do analysis in the lab these days. There are a lot of crossovers between archaeology and chemistry and trying to analyze samples and to carefully sift through those kinds
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of artifacts in order to find out what was really going on at the site. In the old days we simply got the biggest bones and the biggest artifacts, and we didn't really get a sense for what the little stuff that was going on that may have been more important for people's daily life. So the lab work is extremely important and increasingly important in archaeology. When we get to excavating things, when we actually get to that
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wonderful thing that we do like to do if we're interested in archaeology—the
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excavation part is when we want to, in the words of Renfrew and Bahn that Lavenda and Schultz use a lot in this chapter, learn a lot of stuff about a small area, about a little piece of the puzzle.
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One of the things we have to do whenever we make up our mind to excavate: we have to be very careful because excavation is also the destruction of a site. It will never be the same again. As Lavenda and Schultz mentioned, many archaeologists say that you should only excavate a little part of it because you think that in the coming years they will be able to find more sophisticated techniques and technologies in order to learn
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more. You don't want to destroy the whole site. When you excavate, you're destroying the site.
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Excavation is expensive. It involves a lot of time, a lot of money. You often have to get permits, so this can take years just to set up the team, to get the permits for them. There are also ethical issues involved that you always have to keep in mind when you're excavating, especially when you are traveling to another place, another country. What is going to happen to the artifacts? How will the people who live in the area be involved in the excavation? These are all
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complicated issues that archaeologists have to wrestle with when they're excavating.
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When you do an excavation, you always have to document it as much as possible by
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roping it off and trying to figure out exactly where the artifacts—you want to document exactly as you are excavating them where each artifact is, so that you can reconstruct the site as well. This is something that has become increasingly important: doing this digitally. Photography, trying to figure out using the internet and other methods to preserve and to analyze the site is crucial to archaeology.
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So the first part of the chapter is about the general overview of archaeology and archaeological methods. I thought it would be a good time to go back to something we skipped over during our evolutionary talk, which seemed to correspond more to what was going on here in the archaeological methods. We went back and looked at Module 2, which is dating methods in paleoanthropology and archaeology. This is super exciting stuff.
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There's a couple of things that I'd like you to think about here. Most of this is from the first page of the module. Lavenda and Schultz talk about the law of superposition,
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which is a very sophisticated way of saying—what is the law of superposition?
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Sounds very law-like. It's a big word, superposition, and it's a law, so you have to know it, you have to follow it all the time. The law of superposition.
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Fancy way of saying: older stuff is at the bottom, newer stuff is at the top. Not sure it's a law, it's just the way the world works. Your deposits go down as you get older, you're going to be going down. There's another law they talk about here, another big law: the law of cross-cutting relationships, which means that if the old rocks are cross-cut by a different geological feature, then you can get
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the law of superposition messed up a little bit because you have this cross-cutting relationship coming in. So big law there—two laws that you always have to know when you're doing your dating.
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This page always cracked me up, I always thought that was funny.
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A couple things in here about dating methods. One of them is relative dating.
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Not a good idea. But relative dating is when you date objects that are relative to other objects or geological features in the environment. Relative dating methods are still super important.
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That's why you need the law of superposition and the law of cross-cutting relationships. A lot of people got very excited by what was once called absolute dating, or being able to take an artifact and get a carbon-14 measurement. This is now called numerical dating—we don't call it absolute dating, or sometimes we do. We used to get these measures that seemed extremely accurate. It was this amazing thing where you could just
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pop the artifact in and do an isotope analysis and you'd get a year, and it would give you a number, and people thought everything was great because we had numerical dating, we had absolute dating. We've come to find out that those numbers are themselves subject to interpretations. They give you a range, they give you a range of possible dates. There's a lot of things that we used to think were 30,000 years old that turned out to be more like 36,000 years old.
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You have to be careful with this. You basically have to look at the numerical dating and anything that you can get from that, but you also have to verify or cross-verify that with anything you're able to get from relative dating, because a lot of these things are actually more difficult to estimate than one would think just based on all the techniques we have. You may remember from the last unit when we were talking about Homo naledi, the very recent find,
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which had a lot of different fossils recovered. They've actually still to this day kind of struggling to figure out how to get some concrete dates for that find.
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The main message that I guess I would ask you to take from this module is that you want to use as many methods as you can in order to establish these dates. We should not fall prey to the idea that simply because we have radiocarbon dating that gives us a magic number, that number is always correct. You always have to cross-verify it with
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different ways and different ways of dating the artifacts.
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So today has been a kind of briefer primer on some of the basics of archaeology—what archaeology is, the main areas of it, and some of the very exciting methods of archaeology.
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For the next part, we're going to read basically—I'm going to send you an article. We'll finish the chapter, and we'll also go back and read—there was a box
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that is back on page 135 which we also skipped over, and we'll put all these three readings together. The box is called "Women's Art in the Upper Paleolithic," so it's on your syllabus. I'll send you exactly what we need to read. There are three different short readings here.
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The main unifier of this—and some of you just blazed through the whole chapter so you're ahead of the curve on this—you get to the end of the chapter, they're talking about the contribution of feminist archaeology and more recently gender archaeology into reinterpreting some of these past assumptions and artifacts that we found. We cannot overemphasize the contribution of feminist archaeology and presently gender archaeology in helping us to rethink some of
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those things that we used to simply assume about the artifacts that we were digging up.
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For Tuesday we'll read three different pieces that are all kind of interconnected on this theme of how we should interpret the past and how we should think about some of the artifacts that we have. We're going to be concentrating on figurines specifically from the Ice Age, and we'll be using it to talk about hunting and gathering as well as how these artifacts should be interpreted based on our modern understandings. So we'll try that for Tuesday.
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