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Chapter 2
The Structure of Archaeological
Inquiry
Chapter Outline
 What’s an Anthropological Approach?
 What’s a Scientific Approach?
 The Structure of Archaeological Inquiry
 How Archaeological Inquiry Works
An Anthropological
Approach
 Anthropologists believe the best understanding of the
human condition arises from a global, comparative,
and holistic approach.
 What holds anthropology together is its insists that
every aspect of every human society, extant or extinct,
counts.
 Archaeologists are anthropologists who specialize in
ancient societies, drawing upon each of the subfields
of anthropology.
Kinds of Anthropologists
 Anthropology embraces four primary fields of study:
 Biological anthropology
 Cultural anthropology
 Linguistic anthropology
 Archaeology
Kinds of Anthropologists
The Culture Concept
 Brings together the subfields of anthropology.
 Archaeology is concerned with how cultures change
overtime.
 Integrated system of beliefs, traditions, and customs that
govern or influence a person’s behavior.
 Culture is:
 Learned
 Shared by members of a group
 Symbolic, based on the ability to think in terms of
symbols
How Anthropologists
Study Culture
Anthropologists study cultures in two basic ways:
 Ideational perspective
 Focus on ideas, symbols, and mental structures as
driving forces in shaping human behavior.
 Adaptive perspective
 Isolates technology, ecology, demography, and
economics as the key factors defining human
behavior.
Culture as Ideas
 This perspective emphasizes ideas, thoughts,
and shared knowledge and sees symbols and
their meanings as crucial to shaping human
behavior.
 According to the ideational view of culture,
one cannot comprehend human behavior
without understanding the symbolic code for
that behavior.
Culture as Adaptation
 An adaptive perspective privileges“culture as a
system.”
 Social and cultural differences are viewed as
responses to the material parameters of life (i.e.
food, shelter, and reproduction).
 We need both perspectives to understand human
diversity and history.
 Both fall within an overarching scientific approach.
A Scientific Approach
1. Science is empirical, or objective.
2. Science is systematic and explicit.
3. Science is logical.
4. Science is explanatory and consequently,
predictive.
5. Science is self-critical and based on testing.
6. Science is public.
How Science Explains Things: The
Moundbuilder Myth
 Colonial Americans justify the taking of Native American
lands in several ways, and one involved archaeology.
 Some mounds were constructed as early as 5,500 years ago, in
the Southern Mississippi Valley, by 3,000 years ago the
practice was widespread across the Eastern U.S.
 The moundbuilders might have been anyone, except the
ancestors of Native Americans.
 19th century scholars saw the Indians as late-arrivers
marauders, destroyers of a magnificent civilization.
 This view of history gave colonists the sense of innate
superiority and the rights to avenge the mound builders by
disposing Native Americans of their land.
Moundbuilders
The Scientific Method
1. Define a relevant problem.
2. Establish one or more hypotheses.
3. Determine the empirical implications of the
hypotheses.
4. Collect appropriate data.
5. Test the hypothesis by comparing these data with
the expected implications.
6. Reject, revise, and/or retest hypotheses as
necessary.
Scientific Methods
Components
 Hypothesis – a proposition proposed as an
explanation of some phenomenon.
 Inductive reasoning - working from specific
observations to more general hypotheses
 Deductive reasoning – reasoning from theory to
account for specific observations or experimental
results
 Testability – the degree to which one’s observations
and experiments can be reproduced
Science is Self-correcting
 Science insists that we ask: Do we really know what
we think we know?
 Deductive reasoning is required to uncover these
logical outcomes.
 The conclusions must be true, given that the premises
are true.
 Generally take the form of “if”… “then”
Science is Reiterative
 The scientific cycle does begin and end with facts.
http://mail.colonial.net/~hkaiter/scientific_method.html
Science is Not Infallible
 Science is subject to false starts, dead ends,
preconceived notions, and cultural biases.
http://scene.asu.edu/habitat/s_method.html
The Structure of Archaeology
Inquiry
 Theories answer the “why” questions
Low-Level Theory
 The observations and interpretations that emerge
from hands-on archaeological field and lab work.
 Begins with archaeological objects and generates
relevant facts or data about those objects.
 Data depends on theory much as theory depends
on data.
 Archaeologists don’t excavate data but objects,
data are observations made on these objects.
Middle-Level Theory
 Necessary to infer human behavior and natural processes
from archaeological data.
 Hypothesis that links archaeological observations with the
human behavior or natural processes that produced them.
 Moves past observable to invisible, or relevant, human
behaviors or natural processes of the past.
 Situations that require
 observations of ongoing human behavior or natural
processes, or
 evidence of the material results of that behavior or
those processes
High-Level Theory
 Theory that seeks to answer large “why” questions.
 Goes beyond the archaeology specifics to address the “big
questions” of concern to many social and historical
sciences.
 Paradigms – overarching framework for understanding
how the world works.
 A lot like culture; learned, shared and symbolic.
 Are not open to direct open empirical verification, they are
just useful or not.
Paradigms in Modern Archaeology
 Processual – explains social, economic, and cultural change as
primarily the result of adaptation to material conditions.

External conditions (i.e. environment) are assumed to take causal
priority over ideational factors in explaining change.


Culture viewed as a system – general systems theory
Postprocessual – focuses on humanistic approaches and rejects
scientific objectivity

Concerned with interpreting the past, more than with testing
hypotheses

Change arises largely from interactions between individuals
operating within a symbolic and/or competitive system.

Processual-Plus – middle road. All archaeologists view history
as the combined result of the actions of individuals.
How Archaeological Inquiry
Works
Processual paradigm:
Paradigms provide specific guidelines for high-level
theory.
Paradigms generate more specific claims about a
region’s prehistory.
Postprocessual paradigm:
May look at other social and economic factors for
changes within a past society.
Contrast between Processual and Postprocessual
Archaeology
Processual Archaeology
Postprocessual Archaeology
Emphasizes evolutionary
generalizations and regularities not
historical specifics; downplays the
importance of the individual
Rejects the search for universal laws
and regularities
Views culture from a systemic
perspective and defines culture as
adaptation
Rejects the systemic view of culture
and focuses on an ideational
perspective
Explanation is explicitly scientific and
objective
Less enthusiastic about scientific
methods and denies possibility of
objectivity
Attempts to remain ethically neutral:
claims ot be explicitly nonpolitical
Argues that all archaeology is
unavoidably political
Testing Ideas
 Hypotheses must be constructed to test the competing
propositions, processual or postprocessual.
 Adequate middle-level theory can define what
constitutes relevant archaeological data.
 Archaeologists must design fieldwork to generate
adequate data.
Reconstructing the Past
 Hypothesis testing requires reconstructing the past.
 A complete picture of the past will always elude us.
 To reconstruct the past, some issues are important and
others can be downplayed.
 Modern archaeologists know that results need to be
conveyed to a broader public.
 This professional and public feedback might require a
revisit and even a revision of the research propositions.
Videos
 The Scientific Method Explained
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA3yhdNXiFM&fe
ature=fvwrel
 Questions of Doom: Processual vs. Post-Processual: The
Great Schism?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjnR4uGVglU
Quick Quiz
1. Which of the following would an anthropologist
study?
A.
Biology
B.
Languages
C.
Linguistics
D.
Humans living in the past
E.
All of the above
Answer: E
Archaeology, Biological anthropology, Cultural
anthropology, and Linguistic anthropology are
subfields of anthropology.
2. The ideational perspective of anthropology:
A. Focuses on ideas, symbols, and mental
structures as forces in human behavior.
B. Considers the ideas of technology, ecology,
demography, and economics as factors that
define behavior.
C. Is primarily concerned with “culture as a
system.”
D. All of the above.
Answer: A
The ideational perspective of anthropology focuses on
ideas, symbols, and mental structures as
forces in human behavior.
3. Which of the following are characteristics of science?
A. Objective, logical, and explanatory
B. Objective, subjective, and processural
C. Based on an untested idea
D. Objective, logical, explanatory, and unproven
E. All of the above
Answer: A
Science is objective, logical, and explanatory.
4. Processual archaeology rejects the search
for universal laws and regularities.
A. True
B. False
Answer: B
Postprocessual archaeology reject the search for
universal laws and regularities