Anthro 2AC - Post Processual

High Level Theory

(Deetz and Structuralism) Organizes how an archaeologist thinks about the social world. Overall theories about everything.

Experimental Archaeology

Attempts to understand some cultural process through replicative experiments in the present.

Post-processual archaeology

Critique of big questions that processual archaeology failed to answer. More focus on the individual and lived experience and self-identity. Focused on outsiders and differences within a culture and understanding different perspectives. Also archaeologists must recognize excavation as a political act and be engaged in production of knowledge. Looked at microscalar to understand whole picture.

Hermenutic Reasoning

Dialogic thinking between parts and the whole (more inductive outside reasoning) a scholar would be fitting pieces into a whole while at the same time constructing the whole out of the pieces

Equifinality

Different forms of process leave the same archaeological trace. All reasonable conclusions are valid.

Ethnoarchaeology

Doing ethnographic research with the explicit goal of understanding the archaeological record. Time allocation to certain products or studying first hand how a product is made.

Processual Archaeology

Emphasis of trying to reconstruct all aspects of a system. Used different specialized archaeologists with a synthesizer of information. Can reconstruct conditions of site. Assumed all people rationally followed norms (bad).

Ian Hodder

Father of Post-Processualism. Believed 1) Human behavior is not always rational 2) People are active and self aware 3) Culture change must be interpreted within historical contexts

Structuralism

Idea that any culture has a set of mental templates that shape the way people in that society make and do things. (enduring practices of a society) - The grammar of a society

Bioarchaeology

Large scale studies of skeletons (think of Burial Grounds in New York and Indian burial mound museum) Important: To use bone, you need to date/analyze it (destroy it) - Processualitsts would remove hundreds of skeletons from burial mounds, destroy them and not discuss with indigenous people who built mounds.

Oral Tradition

Mythology, folk tales, jokes, songs, tall stories about how world came to be and group's history

Primary Deposition

Object found where it was originally left

Secondary Deposition

Object is left and then picked up and moved somewhere else by someone and then later found

Oral History

Personal narrative of an individual or family history - can be socially or racially biased.

Middle Range Theory

The collection of ways that archaeologists go from recognizing a pattern to understanding the behaviors the pattern represents. Most important 1) Ethnographic Analogy 2) Ethnoarchaeology 3) Experimental Archaeology

Taphonomic Processes

Things that have happened since object was deposited. (Decay and deposition of materials)

Ethnographic Analogy

Using ethnographic information to interpret archaeological patterns. Analogies between contemporary cultures and archaeological remains - direct historical approach. Looking at studies of modern/historical cultures.