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65
G
ustavo
G. P
olitis
Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
PYRENAE,
núm.
46
vol.
1
(2015)
ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
The product of ethnoarchaeology enters into the interpretation cycle in basically three
ways. One is more direct: specific models or correlates that are generated based on the
observation of a given living society are applied to interpret the material record of some
extinct society or to illuminate some dimensions of its cultural pattern, on the bases that
both societies share some elements which make logical the analogical argumentation. The
research by López Mazz (2010), Stahl and Zeilder (1990) or my own study about children
ethnoarchaeology and the application to the Pampas archaeological record (Politis, 1998)
are good examples of this. This application is quite common, but I agree that it is not very
frequent. I suspect that the criticism has been made keeping this kind of appliance in mind
and is probably not focused in hunter-gatherers ethnoarchaeology.
The second way is more complex, but still quite recognizable. Ethnoarchaeological
observations of a given society, along with other similar observations of the same kind,
are compound with historical, anthropological and archaeological information in order to
generate models that can be useful for archaeological interpretation. It is not that activity
A correlates with derivates B and C; it is that the record of activity A and derivates, along
with all other sources of information and inspiration, permits the generation of models
that would help to understand and explain some dimensions of past societies. The over-
quoted hunter-gatherer models produced by Binford (1978, 1979) are good examples.
It is difficult to find a Latin American archaeologist devoted to hunter-gatherer studies
who has not applied on one occasion (and, surely, on more than one) some of the cate-
gories proposed by Binford: curated/expedient, (fig. 9) foragers/collectors, residential and
logistical mobility, etc. Binford’s last book (2001) was decidedly a great effort to generate
complex models by the equally complex integration of ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological,
and environmental data to predict hunter-gatherers’ behavior.
Another example of this trend, which obviously has a much lower impact, is my own
work on food taboos among the Nukak, hunter-gatherers from the Colombian Amazon
(Politis and Saunders, 2002; Politis, 2007). This research has been applied to interpret some
“anomalies” in the archaeological record of the extinct societies of the Beagle Channel
in southern Argentina (Fiore and Zangrando, 2006). In this case study, the authors inte-
grate archaeological and ethnographic records representative of the sixteenth to the early
twentieth centuries and analyzed them with the goal of discussing the existence of a
food avoidance of certain potentially high-yield species such as the Patagonian blennies
(
Eleginops maclovinus
), possibly as a result of ceremonial activities. The zooarchaeological
analyses of the case were structured based on optimality principles, which establish that
the intensity of exploitation of different food resources varies in relation to ecological
conditions (Fiore and Zangrando, 2006). However, they discussed the model proposed
by Politis and Saunders (2002) in relation to food taboos among contemporary hunter-
gatherers, and how they can be explored in the archaeological record in order to look for
another, non-ecological factor which would be affecting human dietary practices and thus
the formation of the zooarchaeological assemblages. Throughout a thoughtful discussion,
in which they combine different sources of information and theoretical perspectives, the