INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

ooks and drawings of monuments; and surveyors Squier and Davis in the eastern U.S. doing the
same for mounds and earthworks.
Among the many others, Thomsen and Worsaae stand out in nineteenth-century Denmark
because they established the three-age system. What is it based on? Technology is its foundation,
demonstrating our Western ethnocentric bias, which we must keep in mind throughout the class.
Likewise, the early anthropological models of cultural evolution in stages assume a unilineal
pattern or even multilinear, normative development throughout the globe. But this is not
necessarily the case. However one defines bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, a particular culture does
not necessarily go through such stages or end up at some predetermined point. Cultural
evolution, like biological, is not teleological; that is, it does not have a direction or an end point
in mind; it is simply change.
What about diversity among archaeologists? Were all early archaeologists rich white colonial or
other capitalist guys? Not necessarily. There are many others whose stories are only now being
discovered or emphasized. I recently finished work on a book about women who did archaeology
in the southeastern U.S. beginning early in the twentieth century (Grit-Tempered, White et al.
1999), and there are now many many works on women’s contributions (e.g., Parezo 1993). It
was a black cowboy who discovered the Folsom site, where archaeologists realized that people
and extinct Ice-Age animals coexisted in the U.S. (Preston 1997, Meltzer et al. 2002:7).
The politics of archaeology can be rough on its practitioners. In Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia),
an archaeologist was fired less than a half-century ago for suggesting that Great Zimbabwe and
other ruins were the work of indigenous Shona people and not white traders (e.g., Kuklick 1991,
Ndoro 1997). There are many such examples of who is left out of the archaeological record and
out of the ranks of archaeologists.
How does past looting differ from that of today? Though in the past mostly the wealthy colonial
administrators claimed ancient items for themselves or their governments, now everyone wants
to collect. You can buy artifacts looted from sites around the world on the Internet. There are
many blue-collar, working class as well as middle-class looters who do not care about preserving
the past, though ethical collectors are willing to utilize archaeological methods and collaborate
with professionals. In most countries outside the U.S., any archaeological remains become the
property of the state once they are discovered. This is only the case in the U.S. if they are found
on public lands. Archaeological materials on private lands can usually be collected or destroyed
with no penalty unless they are involved in projects using public money or projects large enough
to have regional impacts or otherwise governed by local preservation ordinances.
Archaeologists consider it unethical and unprofessional to buy and sell artifacts, much as
physicians would not buy and sell livers or kidneys. But what is subsistence looting? In poorer
regions where finding an ancient pot or statue would mean immediate government control, the
peasant farmer who unearths such an artifact might instead quickly sell it to a dealer to bring
money so an impoverished family will to be able to eat. What is the anthropological view of such
a practice? The situation has no easy answer. It is very much the same as with international drug
traffic. It starts at the local level with very small compensation and usually subsistence farmers,