Página 70 - Pyrenae46-1

Gustavo G. Politis Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology
68 PYRENAE, núm. 46 vol. 1 (2015)ISSN: 0079-8215 EISSN: 2339-9171 (p. 41-83)
Ethnoarchaeology, in some way or another, fuels theory building in archaeology
and anthropology. It has been at the core of the theoretical discussion for the last forty
years, and the two more influential archaeologists in contemporary theory, Binford and
Hodder, certainly did ethnoarchaeology in the field, a practice that was a great source of
inspiration for them. Although ethnoarchaeology’s concrete data may not be used in full,
this subdiscipline is helping to change the way in which several current trends—such
as symmetrical archaeology, structuralist and post-structuralist archaeology, landscape
archaeology, etc.—are approaching their studies. There are more and more archaeologists
that accept that the protagonist of the past was people to whom we cannot project today’s
way of understanding the world. And, to a great extent, this is thanks to ethnoarchaeology.
Finally, ethnoarchaeology, as part of ethnography and archaeology, cannot detach
itself from its colonial legacy and still retains a colonial aftertaste. Therefore, it is not left
unaffected by the current debate in the discipline about the study of “otherness”. In the
current global scenario, it is becoming more and more difficult to separate “we” from
“they”. If “we” are the western-modern (postmodern)-urban-capitalists, “they” are the
others: a group that includes a huge variety of people called not only Indigenous, but
also “traditional”, and who are sometimes defined in opposition to “us”: “non-western”,
“non-industrial”, “pre-industrial”, “non-modern”, or even “pre-modern” people. None of
these labels give a full account of the “others”, who are turning into a sort of “distant us”.
Therefore, the limits between “they —the living society, our source for the analogical argu-
mentation—and “us”—the western researchers, the ethnoarchaeologists—are becoming
fuzzy, dynamic, and situational. This is quite clear in the various ethnoarcheological studies
among the rural people in Spain (Vázquez Varela, 2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b) or in the
traditional exploitation of salt in Romania (Alexianu and Weller, 2009; Alexianu, 2013).
When the field emerged, indigenous societies were the main target of ethnoarchaeology;
the more isolated and pristine they were, the better. The first systematic ethnoarchaeological
projects focused on communities that still behaved and did things in a “traditional way” (see
for example Longacre, 1974; Yellen, 1977; White and Modjesca, 1978; Lamming Emperaire
et al., 1978, etc.). In the late 1980s, however, some doubts were raised especially about the
existence of completely autonomous or isolated indigenous people; the concern was that
most of them were, in the past and today, increasingly more a part of macro-sociopolitical
systems, and, therefore, they should be studied within this global context. The so-called revi-
sionist debate illustrates the avenues of this discussion in relation to the Kung San (Wilmsen,
1989; Solway and Lee, 1990; Lee, 1992). With the globalization process taking place, with
the acknowledgement of the existence of regional political macro-systems, and with the
epistemological stability of analogical argumentation (which was not based on any degree
of “pristinity” of the source society), ethnoarchaeology rearranged its focus. Paradoxically, as
interest in ethnoarchaeological studies grows and as its contributions are valued as means of
archaeological inference, “traditional” societies dwindle—especially and dramatically hunter-
gatherer groups—, and the range of variation of contemporary sociopolitical referents is
consequently reduced. The continual disruption of traditional or non-industrial lifestyles,