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51
G
ustavo
G. P
olitis
Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
PYRENAE,
núm.
46
vol.
1
(2015)
ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
analysis of the Mursi’s lithic industry, an agro-pastoralist group that has recently occupied
the Mago Valley (Ethiopia), thus starting a sedentarization process (Salazar
et al
., 2012).
This study presents a typology of the different stone tools used by the group; it identifies
the tools’ functions, and sets criteria for the correct identification of their function through
the study of the medium’s morphology (Salazar
et al
., 2012: 394). The work, in addition
to covering these morphological and functional aspects, analyzes the social dimensions of
the use of stone tools.
The ethnoarchaeological project carried out by Almudena Hernando (1997, 2002)
among the Q’eqchí in Guatemala represents another theoretical line following an origi-
nal post-structuralist approach. Hernando suggests an ethnoarchaeology that attempts
to understand the “world types” in which past societies could have lived, by analyzing
structural features instead of the particulars of current non-modern societies (Hernando,
2006: 29). She used her ethnoarchaeological case study to approach complex cultural
issues such as the construction of identity, the perception of the space, or gender issues
(Hernando, 2002). In the last decade, together with Hernando, Gonzalez-Ruibal, Brazilian
anthropologist Elizabeth Beserra Coelho and myself carried out an ethnoarchaeologi-
cal project among the Awá, a Tupi-Guarani hunter-gatherer group from the northeast
of Brazil (fig. 2). The goal was to study, with an ethnoarchaeological methodology, some of
Fig. 2.
Spanish ethnoarchaeologists Almudena Hernando
and Alfredo González-Ruibal recording arrows among the
Awá-Guajá in the Jurití village (Maranhao State, Brazil).
The photo was taken by a young Awá-Guajá in 2008. Photo
courtesy of Alfredo González-Ruibal.