Goals of Archaeology

•Culture History

•Reconstructing Past Lifeways

•Studying Cultural Processes

•Understanding the Archaeological Record

Culture History

• Sites and their contexts in space and time

• Chronology• Description of artifacts-

architecture-associations• Sequences of changes

Reconstructing Past Lifeways

• Reconstruction of past adaptations to environments

• Subsistence practices• Characterize past environments• Descriptive-but links archaeological

material remains to: past food acquisition practices environmental influences on behavior

Studying Cultural Processes

• Seeks to explain why cultural changes occurred

• Global comparisons

• Explanatory approach-not just descriptive

• Introduced rigorous use of scientific methods

Understanding the Archaeological Record

• Formation of the archaeological record

• How to read the natural and cultural processes responsible for preservation and patterning in archaeological sites

• Middle Range Research to link modern, observable events with archaeological patterns

• Uniformitarian principals

Develop Archaeological Theory

• Culture History

• Reconstructing Past Lifeways

• Studying Cultural Processes

• Understanding the Archaeological Record

Clovis point

Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 history of Virginia examined antiquity of Native people

Charles Wilson Peale’s 1801 mastodon excavation, Orange CO., NY

William Henry Holmes

Ales Hrdlicka

Manis Site, WA, ~11,500 BP mammoth rib with embedded bone point

New world migration map based on modern language groups

Bering Strait during a glacial maximum The exposed continental shelf between Asia & North American is called Beringia.)

Bering Land

Bridge

Bison antiquus

Mammuthus primigenius

Price and Feinman p. 133

Pleistocene Extinctions

• 42% of all mollusks

• 41% small mammals

• 50% large mammals

Smilodon spp.

Minimal Biological

Data•DNA

•few skeletal remains

•teeth

Primary Reliance on Evidence of Stone Tools

Faunal Remains

Plant Remains• seeds

• pollen

• phytoliths

Data• geographic

distribution

• temporal patterns

• technological inferences

• food inferences

• climatic & environmental inferences

Modern Language

Groups

New world migration map based on modern language groups

Asian Dentitionshovel-shaped incisors

New World

Dentition

• shovel-shaped incisors

• cusp arrangement on molars

Meadowcroft Rockshelter, PA

• 14,250 BP

• lack of Pleistocene fauna or flora

• contamination with coal?

Pedro Furada, Brazil14,300-48,000 BP

• hearths-cultural or natural burns?

• “dates” from rock art

• “associated” with dated sediments?

• crude stone artifacts

Taima-Taima, Venezuela13,000 BP

Monte Verde, Chile13,000-33,000 BP

•bone

•wood

•plant fibers

•few stone tools

•few organic tools

•ambiguous association with oldest deposits

Old Crow, Alaska12,000-40,000 BP

Dyukati Cave, Siberia

• No clear technological similarity to New world Paleoindian tools

New Yorker

Kennewick Man • ~9000 BP• allegedly has

European features

Kennewick Man

• forensic reconstruction

• differs from modern population’s features in same area