INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

much about material culture, which is what you are digging. The records might describe
pyramids or clothing or houses, but not what the garbage looks like or where it is deposited.
What classic example of ethnographic analogy is described in your book (p. 170-71)? Lewis
Binford, a major archaeological theorist, encountered at midwestern late prehistoric sites many
pit features filled with charred wood and corncobs that he reasoned would have produced a lot of
smoke. To figure out what they were for, he read through the literature about Native Americans
in this region and found that they processed deer hides by drying and smoking them over small
smoldering fire pits during historic times; he reasoned that this activity could be traced back in
time to the sites dating A.D. 1000 that he was excavating (Binford 1967).
Does this mean that all such pits found in the eastern U.S. were for hide smoking? At the San
Luis mission site in Tallahassee, archaeologists excavated the large Apalachee Indian council
house that we know from historic documents was the political center of the native town, not far
from the Spanish church and other colonial buildings. The council house is now reconstructed
and wonderful to visit because you can see the huge circular building with the very tall thatched
roof in downtown Tallahassee. Large postmolds in a big circle delimited the building in the
ground, and around the inside there were small postmolds indicating what the historic documents
say were sitting and sleeping platforms. Under these were pits full of charred corncobs that
would have made lots of smoke. Were they processing hides? The Spanish documents say they
were making smoke to keep out mosquitoes, and it makes more sense, given the public function
of the building and the abundance of bugs in Florida! When we find corncob-filled pits at
prehistoric sites in the northwest Florida area we can suggest they were similarly for bug control.
This kind of specific analogy can work very well, in these two cases, because there is clear
cultural continuity from the prehistoric archaeological record forward into historic times.
What if there is no continuous or appropriate cultural record into historic time? We can use more
general analogies, such as with cultures in similar environmental settings and sociopolitical
organizations. Sometimes this is better than historic cultures in the same area for interpreting
remains of foraging peoples in the more distant past. So, for example, during the Archaic, some
5,000-8,000 years ago in Florida, we know people were hunting and gathering modern species.
To understand their remains we might not want to use historic documents describing complex
chiefly sedentary societies supported by maize agriculture that were first encountered by the
Spanish; these evolved thousands of years later than the Archaic and were very differently
organized. Examining the ethnographic records of hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world in
similar forested warm temperate environments might give us better clues to the prehistoric
adaptation. General analogy of this type is common in archaeological interpretation, but is more
risky.
Uncritical use of the ethnographic record is a common abuse. There are so few hunter-gatherers
left that those who are well-studied are subjected to this kind of analogy all the time. The !Kung
foragers (San or Ju/hoansi) of South Africa, made famous in The Hunters, the classic 1957
anthropology movie that many of you have seen, are often used in analogies to explain Archaic
sites in the eastern U.S. (mainly because archaeologists now in practice saw that movie during
their training!). This is usually inappropriate, since the southern African Kalahari desert is
enormously different in environment and cultural adaptation from the wet, forested climate we