INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

consideration landowners, descendants, and people with political, legal, and other interests in the
archaeological record, as well as professional archaeologists.
Now we see that all archaeology is public archaeology. We need to account for how we use
public funds to investigate the past; we need to define whose past we are investigating, and why
it is important to save it when there are other more pressing world problems. All archaeology
can/should be applied anthropology: for example, forensic archaeology, excavation of murder
and genocide victims (e.g., Lloyd 2002) in Latin America, the Balkans, and elsewhere after
ethnic conflict; excavation of World Trade Center victims and finding their artifact possessions.
There can be practical, useful information derived from all archaeological work. Rathje’s (2002)
garbology studies are the most clearly practical in their applications of knowledge about what we
throw away (up to 15 percent usable food in Americans’ garbage), what ends up in landfills, and
what does not degrade as expected (paper being the greatest component of landfills). Many
archaeological studies of human effects upon natural environments, and vice versa, are useful
today to see the consequences of various natural and cultural disasters, environmental depletion,
and overuse/extinction of biotic and other natural resources.
Is modern anthropological anthropology without bias? A last caution, about archaeology or any
other research: all science or other scholarly endeavor is a product of its time, with the political
and other biases that might be expected. In this class we will try to do scientific archaeology, but
also to have some of what has been called the postprocessual or postmodern viewpoint and look
at the biases that might be present based on who is doing the research. What do you suppose
might be some modern biases in archaeology? It is still dominated by elites, white upper- or
middle-class males in a Western capitalist system. Does this matter? Will our interpretation of
the past be different if African-American women are doing it? A prehistoric stone tool is a stone
tool to whoever excavates it, but can you determine the sex, gender, age, other social information
about who made it? Not so far! This does not stop us from doing it. Think of reconstructions
such as are common in many museums where male figures hold the large stone tools and women
and children are in the background. Diane Gifford-Gonzales’s article entitled The Real
Flintstones? (1985) [show cartoon from this article] warns us not to impose our modern views or
someone’s modern view upon reconstructions of the past. She notes how most museum exhibits
portray prehistoric men doing useful, interesting things and standing up straight, while their
women are in the role of “drudge on the hide,” always bending over domestic tasks such as hidescraping
or cooking.
Kinds of Archaeology
Lesson Objectives: Compare different types of
archaeology.