INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

meaningful to the prehistoric people from what they left behind, for example, but it is very hard
to discern what the meaning was. However, it works better with historic archaeology because we
may have texts to indicate what past people considered significant. One segment of
postprocessual archaeology includes several varieties of Marxist viewpoints, most of which
envision the past as the common people’s struggle for empowerment and resistance against
domination by elites. Possibly the most useful aspect of postprocessual archaeology is critical
theory, which points out all the many biases inherent in archaeological interpretation and in the
profession itself. The numbers of Native American or African-American archaeologists in the
U.S. still are ridiculously small, for example, and interpretations of ancient peoples are still
dominated by pictures of men doing everything. A major emphasis lately in postprocessual
archaeology has been in gender studies and feminist archaeology, though these can of course be
done in a processual context as well.
Most archaeology done today is predominantly processual, with spatial and temporal aspects
established by culture history and the awareness of bias brought in by postprocessual thinkers.
We need to use all approaches as well as possible and be aware of the shortcomings of each. We
also need awareness of how archaeology is done in the intellectual atmosphere and politics of the
times. Today’s “science wars” have been triggered by a kind of postmodern impatience with the
biased investigator, even though every investigator is biased! We will examine bias in the latest
archaeological discoveries to come out in the news while we are in this class. Controversies
surrounding the discoveries are always juicy to discuss, and arguments from many sides can be
found in weekly scholarly publications such as Science, Science News, the Chronicle of Higher
Education, and many others, nearly all of which are easily available online as well as in the
library.
For example, in 2002, a discovery making the daily news was the engraved ocher fragments
from Blombos Cave in South Africa dated to 77,000 years ago, suggesting modern-looking
human symbolic behavior. The science aspects can be explored in discussing the limits of
radiocarbon dating to go far enough back in time, in questioning of the method of
thermoluminescence dating, and in the debates on the timing for emergence of biologically
modern humans. Humanities aspects of the story might be whether the cross-hatched lines are art
or if there symbolic meaning of some other kind. There are also the political and professional
issues: the great expense for the research in a poor country, the primacy of European-based
explanations, and the world political situation applied to South Africa and its indigenous peoples
today (see, for example, Rossouw 2002).
Types of Archaeological Data
Lesson Objectives: Understand sites, artifacts, sampling, and other basic concepts.