Página 62 - Pyrenae46-1

Gustavo G. Politis Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
60 PYRENAE, núm. 46 vol. 1 (2015)ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
better known source—living societies—in order to transfer this information to another,
less known, subject—extinct societies.
Since ethnoarchaeological research operates under the principles of analogical reaso-
ning, the two elements of analogy (the source and the subject) need not to be the same (in
the opposite case, analogical reasoning would not be necessary), but rather there should
be certain conditions of comparability between terms. Analogy’s strength does not lie in
the degree of similarity between source (in this case, present-day society) and subject (past
society, as perceived through the archaeological record), but rather in the logical structure
of the argument and the similarity between the terms of the relation. Obviously, the grea-
ter the similarity between source and subject, the greater the potential of the analogical
argument, but the degree of similarity alone is in no way a guarantee of the strength of
the argument or the veracity of the statements.
A different point that has also been discussed sometimes is the archaeological exca-
vations made by ethnoarchaeologists. Despite the relatively widespread belief that they
also excavate the places where the observations were made (i.e., the sites created during
their fieldwork or other sites in the region), this rarely happens today. Nevertheless, a few
decades ago, it occurred with certain frequency in several research projects, such as when
Lamming Emperaire dug a recently abandoned Hetá hut (Lamming Emperaire et al., 1978)
or when Jones (1993) collected what was left one month before in an Aché camp “with
the goal of determining how well observations made during site occupation hold through
time” (p. 109). Binford (1983: 176-84), during his fieldwork in Alaska, also recorded in
detail all the activities performed in a particular house in Tulugak, and, when it was aban-
doned, excavated it to see if he could correctly reconstruct the gender relationships of the
space he had observed using only the archaeological evidence (Fewster, 2013). In general
terms, ethnoarchaeologists generate models about human discard patterns or about the
material derivatives of human behavior, but they are not primarily interested in recovering
what is left after a place is abandoned. The generation of the “archaeological record” is
usually observed in “real time” during the fieldwork, and it is the interface between the
dynamic of the living culture and their material consequence what mostly interests the
ethnoarchaeologists (fig. 6). Thus, the excavation of a site where no observations of the
living culture have been made does not have much relevance for ethnoarchaeology, and
the study of differential preservation of the remains belongs to the field of taphonomy, as
well as the study of the natural processes of site formation.
What does attract ethnoarchaeologists is researching what Indigenous and non-wes-
tern people think about and how they conceptualize the archaeological remains found in
their territory, independently of whether they are assigned to their ancestors or not. This
has a great potential because it entails an emic interpretation of the archaeological record.
An interesting example is the study on the interpretation that the Asurini of Xingu made
of the archaeological remains found in the indigenous park Kuatinemu (Silva, 2002).
Another interesting case was recorded among the Nukak of the Colombian Amazon. In
my own fieldwork in a chontaduro (Bactris gasipaes palms) grove, I found pottery sherds