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69
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 processes of ethnogenesis, and the steady advance of globalization are leading to the
demise of practices that help observers interpret the past. Also, as a result of the reduction
of indigenous societies, the subdiscipline reoriented its focus, and there are many projects
in the world that study peasants, rural and even suburban societies, or other fractions of
western societies as sources for analogy (i.e., Fewster, 2007; Alexianu, 2013; Vargas, 2010).
Final thoughts
As I see, ethnoarchaeology attempts to formulate models that permit the better under-
standing of the cultural patterns of human societies, both in the present and the past.
Essentially, ethnoarchaeology is a form of ethnography that takes into consideration
aspects and relationships that are not approached in detail by traditional ethnogra-
phies. In some way, it looks at contemporary societies with archaeological eyes and with
archaeological questions in mind, but it also takes into account the past from which
present societies are relatively close or distant. Therefore, temporality and materiality are
key elements in the epistemological foundation of ethnoarchaeology. This characteristic
is unique and no other discipline or subdiscipline has the same strategy or shares the
same methodology. This subdiscipline has proven that material culture is not a passive
consequence of culture itself, but an active agent in the construction of social dynamics.
In spite of some distrustful forecasts and against the argument of ethnoarchaeology
having little impact on “real archaeology”, I believe that the subdiscipline is influencing
archaeological reasoning increasingly, and that archaeologists are using the results of
ethnoarchaeological research to generate hypothesis and to test the validity of their
assumptions. Most of the time, it is not a direct use, a vis-à-vis comparison, but ethnoar-
chaeological data and results are embedded in most of the popular models and have a
prominent role in the archaeological interpretation and the validation of assumptions and
premises. The reduction of traditional societies and modes of life is compensated with the
redirection of the ethnoarchaeological study toward segments or fractions of contempo-
rary western societies. However, the methodological procedure to integrate this new set
of results into the interpretation of the archaeological record still needs to be properly
developed. There is a methodological gap in the analogical reasoning that needs to be
covered. It is clear that studies of contemporary material culture can tell us more about
our society, but it is unclear how it will contribute to understanding the distant past of
other people. However, for some new theoretical trends (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos,
2009; Harrison and Schofield, 2010; González-Ruibal, 2014), it should not be a goal, and
the study of the materiality of current societies is a goal in it itself, without any pretension
to be part any analogical reasoning.
As a corollary, it should be noted that one of the main contributions of ethnoarchaeo-
logy is the mitigation of the ethnocentrism that permeates the archaeological view of the