Página 48 - Pyrenae46-1

Gustavo G. Politis Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
46 PYRENAE, núm. 46 vol. 1 (2015)ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
in a different way, downplaying its distinction and definitively not centered in analogical
argumentation. The difference between these two approaches and ethnoarchaeology is
that the latter focuses on societies whose complexity level may be comparable to that of
past societies, while the former studies modernity. These new approaches propose the
study of the materiality of western industrial contemporary societies and would have their
main connections with the modern material culture studies.
A very very short historical background
In general terms, the development of ethnoarchaeology has followed the main archaeolo­
gical theoretical trends. As such, and simplifying something that is more complex,
ethnoarchaeology was embedded in the entangled succession of theoretical scenarios that
have characterized archaeology in the last fifty years, and went from processualism, to
post-processualism, to structuralism/post-structuralism (Criado Boado, 2014). Moreover,
the discipline has followed other theoretical drifts as well, such as behavioral ecology (Bird,
1996; Bird et al., 2009) and the “ontological turn” (González-Ruibal et al., 2011).
The attempt to use ethnographic information to interpret the archaeological record is
neither new nor the exclusive domain of ethnoarchaeology. In the past, this use was called
“ethnographic parallel”, and it involved using already existing ethnographic data, without
setting criteria and limitations, and projecting or imposing to a given archaeological case.
This kind of application of the ethnographic data was characteristic of the culture-history
approach. Although the term ethnoarchaeology was used for the first time in the 1900s
by Jesse Fewkes in connection with the use of the local knowledge of North American
Indians (David and Kramer, 2001: 6), it was in the sixties, upon the advent of processual
archaeology, that archaeologists became interested in ethnographic analogies in a system-
atic way, realizing, at the same time, that ethnographers were not giving proper attention
to the study of material culture. What was new in those times was that archaeologists
wanted to obtain ethnographic information by themselves with the fundamental objective
of aiding the comprehension of the archaeological record. Also new was the attention
given to technological processes and their by-products, and to discard patterns and garbage
management. At the same time, it was a great effort to make the observed variables and
the contexts of these observations explicit and measurable. These specifics would make
analogical reasoning more objective and controlled.
In the early years, archaeologists such as Maxine R. Kleindiest and Patty Jo Watson,
who were among the Pueblo Indians in the 1950s; Robert Asher, among the Seri Indian
of Mexico; and Peter White, in the Highlands of New Guinea, generated the first eth-
nographic set of data obtained with the specific purpose of aiding the interpretation of
the archaeological record (David and Kramer, 2001). During the 1960s—processualism’s
foundational decade—the term “ethnoarchaeology” was reborn (see, for example, White,