INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

can see what artifact manufacturing methods and raw materials were used, what people ate,
where they lived, and how old the sites are. We can do settlement pattern archaeology and see
how different kinds of sites, say, camps and villages, are arranged across the landscape, and
cultural ecology, relating the cultural behavior to the kinds of natural (and even social)
environments the sites are in. This is the major reason that most archaeologists, especially those
who do fieldwork often, are cultural materialists, interpreting everything in terms of
environments and technology. Because this is what we CAN do best; it is much more difficult to
see social behavior, and even more so to find ideological systems, what the people believed.
Even with techno-environmental issues, we could be very mistaken. We can reconstruct
prehistoric diet from the animal bones preserved at the site, but are remains of everything people
ate left in their garbage pile? What if some garbage is treated differently, perhaps disposed of
farther away because it smells? Does your trash can reflect everything you ate today? If you got
fast food on the way to class, we will never know that from your own kitchen garbage. There are
many sources of error even for the easier task of interpreting past technology and subsistence
(making a living, using environmental resources).
What ways are used to reconstruct past social systems? We have to look for material evidence of
social relationships, of political power and economic systems. Your book does a fine treatment
of using settlement patterns to reconstruct such issues (pp. 183-193). What would be obvious
material clues to social status? Wealth items or lack of them, differential treatment of burials,
different house sizes; we could list many. Processual or scientific archaeologists have been
looking for decades at the social dimensions of mortuary practices, the way the treatment of the
dead reflects not only the rank or status of the dead person but also the family and other kin ties
and relationships and statuses of the living (not to mention their religious or other belief
systems). Studies that can trace raw materials or finished artifacts back to their sources can
document economic patterns of how the items move around the map, showing various kinds of
interaction. When we get Florida conch shells in 1,700-year-old human burials in Ohio mounds,
we know somehow these rare items were of great importance to make it that far. But can we say
that people came from Ohio to Florida to collect them like tourists do today? Or could they move
north in what we call a down-the-line (domino effect) fashion? This is harder to reconstruct in
prehistory.
Can we ever reconstruct past belief systems and ritual? This is the hardest to do, especially in
prehistoric times, without any written record of what people were thinking and believing.
Postprocessual archaeologists really emphasize social and ideological issues too. The discussion
in your book of the famous Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük is an excellent introduction to
the exciting work going on there lately, which reinterprets older excavations in light of new
findings. Instead of seeing rooms with images of bulls and women as ceremonial shrines, the
reinterpretation is that regular dwelling places might be decorated with such images. Are they
deities or other important spiritual figures? How can we tell? In this classroom, how many
people are wearing or carrying an artifact with a bull image on it? Do those images reflect your
ideological system? Yes, because the USF team logo is Rocky the Bull, and you are presumably
rooting for sports teams and generally supporting the totem of your school. But does it mean you
worship bulls? If we had no written record to explain this, what would we say when we
excavated such items? “Must be ceremonial?”