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47
G
ustavo
G. P
olitis
Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
PYRENAE,
núm.
46
vol.
1
(2015)
ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
1967; Stanislawski, 1969), and archaeologists started not only to gather the ethnographic
information themselves, but also to reflect upon the methodology and the theory of this
practice (Ascher, 1968; Binford, 1968; Longacre and Ayres, 1968). It was in the 1970s,
however, when ethnoarchaeology achieved full status and developed its theoretical and
methodological basis. Contemporary ethnoarchaeology emerged as a direct result of the
development of actualistic studies and due to the optimism about the possibility of such
studies explaining the archaeological record everywhere. It was also an outcome of the
need to construct Middle Range Theory, in order to abridge the gap between the dynamics
of the living systems and the static nature of the archaeological record (Binford, 1981;
Schiffer, 1978). In that decade, Lewis Binford developed his ethnoarchaeological approach
in
Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology
(Binford, 1978), based on his research on the Nunamiut
people in Alaska. Also in those years, the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project (KEP) star-
ted under the direction of William Longacre (Longacre, 1974). After an exploratory first
trip in 1973, Longacre carried out a twelve-month field season in 1975 in order to record
the stylistic variability of Kalinga pottery and to record and understand the social context
of its production (Stark and Skibo, 2007). These contributions, together with Richard
Gould’s (1968, 1971, 1978)—who performed pioneering work in the Western Desert in
Australia—, John Yellen’s (1977)—among the Kalahari Kung—and the books edited by
Donnan and Clewlow (1974) and Kramer (1979, see also Kramer, 1982), established the
foundations of ethnoarchaeology within the processual paradigm and transformed the
subdiscipline into one of the prime producer of the models to interpret the archaeological
record of past societies.
The initial optimism about processual archaeology, in the belief that human behavior
was subject to some kind of laws, pervaded ethnoarchaeology and oriented its concep-
tual development in the 1970s and 1980s. During these early years, there was also an
underlying conviction in the possibility of generating universal laws that related human
behavior to material remains. In fact, Michael Schiffer assumed that, together with expe-
rimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology would be the main source for the production of
these laws. Consequently, great attention was given to identifying and describing in an
objective way the processes that contributed to the formation of archaeological deposits
(i.e., bone breaking and discard, use of domestic space, camp construction and abandon-
ment, etc.), as well as to the mechanisms and the physical procedures related to the pro-
duction of different kinds of artifacts, especially pottery and lithic tools (Lane, 2006). The
research carried out by Susan Kent (1984), in the USA, and by James O’Connell (1987),
in Australia, are good examples of the mainstream ethnoarchaeology in those times.
Since the late 1970s, and especially during the 1980s, specific studies of living tra-
ditional societies were carried by archaeologists in several parts of the world—such as
western Iran, Tanzania, the Kalahari desert, India, the Andes, etc. Among them, some
long-term, multi-stage enterprises, such as the Coxoh Ethnoarchaeological Project in the
Maya Highlands in Mexico conducted by Brian Hayden, the Mandara Project in Cameroon
and Nigeria headed by Nicholas David, and the research carried out by Valentine Roux