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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American anthropology | 6/15 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_anthropology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:59:05.969182+00:00 | kb-cron |
So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-supplemented subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized without a social structure which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive mating and is sufficiently egalitarian to sustain cooperation via shared or parallel reproductive interests. This problem can be solved symbolically. Symbols and symbolic thinking thus make possible a central feature of social relations in every human population: reciprocity. Evolutionary scientists have developed a model to explain reciprocal altruism among closely related individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible reciprocity between distantly related individuals.
== Archaeology ==
In the 19th century archaeology was often a supplement to history, and the goal of archaeologists was to identify artifacts according to their typology and stratigraphy, thus marking their location in time and space. Franz Boas established that archaeology be one of American anthropology's four fields, and debates among archaeologists have often paralleled debates among cultural anthropologists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian-British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe and American archaeologist W. C. McKern independently began moving from asking about the date of an artifact, to asking about the people who produced it – when archaeologists work alongside historians, historical materials generally help answer these questions, but when historical materials are unavailable, archaeologists had to develop new methods. Childe and McKern focused on analyzing the relationships among objects found together; their work established the foundation for a three-tiered model:
An individual artifact, which has surface, shape, and technological attributes (e.g. an arrowhead) A sub-assemblage, consisting of artifacts that are found, and were likely used, together (e.g. an arrowhead, bow and knife) An assemblage of sub-assemblages that together constitute the archaeological site (e.g. the arrowhead, bow and knife; a pot and the remains of a hearth; a shelter) Childe argued that a "constantly recurring assemblage of artifacts" is an "archaeological culture." Childe and others viewed "each archaeological culture ... the manifestation in material terms of a specific people." In 1948, Walter Taylor systematized the methods and concepts that archaeologists had developed and proposed a general model for the archaeological contribution to knowledge of cultures. He began with the mainstream understanding of culture as the product of human cognitive activity, and the Boasian emphasis on the subjective meanings of objects as dependent on their cultural context. He defined culture as "a mental phenomenon, consisting of the contents of minds, not of material objects or observable behavior." He then devised a three-tiered model linking cultural anthropology to archeology, which he called conjunctive archaeology:
Culture, which is unobservable (behavior) and nonmaterial Behaviors resulting from culture, which are observable and nonmaterial Objectifications, such as artifacts and architecture, which are the result of behavior and material That is, material artifacts were the material residue of culture, but not culture itself. Taylor's point was that the archaeological record could contribute to anthropological knowledge, but only if archaeologists reconceived their work not just as digging up artifacts and recording their location in time and space, but as inferring from material remains the behaviors through which they were produced and used, and inferring from these behaviors the mental activities of people. Although many archaeologists agreed that their research was integral to anthropology, Taylor's program was never fully implemented. One reason was that his three-tier model of inferences required too much fieldwork and laboratory analysis to be practical. Moreover, his view that material remains were not themselves cultural, and in fact twice-removed from culture, in fact left archaeology marginal to cultural anthropology. In 1962, Leslie White's former student Lewis Binford proposed a new model for anthropological archaeology, called "the New Archaeology" or "Processual Archaeology," based on White's definition of culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." This definition allowed Binford to establish archaeology as a crucial field for the pursuit of the methodology of Julian Steward's cultural ecology:
The comparative study of cultural systems with variable technologies in a similar environmental range or similar technologies in differing environments is a major methodology of what Steward (1955: 36–42) has called "cultural ecology," and certainly is a valuable means of increasing our understanding of cultural processes. Such a methodology is also useful in elucidating the structural relationships between major cultural sub-systems such as the social and ideological sub-systems. In other words, Binford proposed an archaeology that would be central to the dominant project of cultural anthropologists at the time (culture as non-genetic adaptations to the environment); the "new archaeology" was the cultural anthropology (in the form of cultural ecology or ecological anthropology) of the past. In the 1980s, there was a movement in the United Kingdom and Europe against the view of archeology as a field of anthropology, echoing Radcliffe-Brown's earlier rejection of cultural anthropology. During this same period, then-Cambridge archaeologist Ian Hodder developed "post-processual archaeology" as an alternative. Like Binford (and unlike Taylor) Hodder views artifacts not as objectifications of culture but as culture itself. Unlike Binford, however, Hodder does not view culture as an environmental adaptation. Instead, he "is committed to a fluid semiotic version of the traditional culture concept in which material items, artifacts, are full participants in the creation, deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic complexes." His 1982 book, Symbols in Action, evokes the symbolic anthropology of Geertz, Schneider, with their focus on the context dependent meanings of cultural things, as an alternative to White and Steward's materialist view of culture. In his 1991 textbook, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology Hodder argued that archaeology is more closely aligned to history than to anthropology.