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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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Very timely for me. Was just re-reading “The Dawn of Everything” and had planned to go looking for some new source material. Thanks!
Hmm... Is there an underlying argument being made here that we should reject any narrative that predicates the current state of the world (e.g., widespread inequality) as an inevitable (or probable) outcome of historical processes? That would suggest that we’ve been overemphasizing causal vs stochastic elements in human cultures.
Are there any good studies looking at (say) the statistical persistence of cultural or institutional traits over time, in the absence of external factors? Or the general predictability (or lack thereof) of institutional changes over time?
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.13940
See point 3 for the first half of your question, from the same group. ;)
Thanks—that’s a great overview!
I guess what I’m hoping for are sources that make a clearer distinction between the case that the teleological grand-narrative view of history is a harmful product of our social and political biases, and the case that it’s objectively wrong.
I believe that both are true, but I want to keep the arguments separate in my head.