Suchergebnisse

The scientific discipline of archeology has gone through various stages of its development and improvement of research methods. First, it was combined with ancient history and the history of art. In the mid-nineteenth century, the base of its chronology was on biblical events. Modernist archeology of the twentieth century focused on classifying monuments and reconstructing cultural processes. In the second half of the twentieth century, archeology inspired other disciplines of culture and science to "stratigraphically" look at their own history. In this way, the stratification of scientific thought (archeology of knowledge), the history of photography (archeology of photography), and the media (archeology of media) began to be analyzed. Archeology has become a cognitive metaphor in contemporary culture. Lack of knowledge of the theoretical and methodological achievements worked out by archaeologists may, after some time, lead to the trivialization and petrification of the archaeological metaphor, although today it still seems fresh and innovative for "archeology of media," "archeology of photography," or "archeology of modernism."

Archeologists create and interpret the past. Attempts to arrive at the "best explanation" of that past are misguided, ignoring the differing perspectives of those who are looking backward, as well as the imperfections in our cognitive abilities. The latter is the focus of this article: How do we best relate our models, as metaphors, to a presumed real past world? Archeological thought is argued to be embedded in traditional Western dichotomies by which we view the world in general. Different models are not necessarily in competition; rather, they provide different modes of understanding. Several models for the "origin" of agriculture are examined in this light and are then applied to the prehistory of the American Midwest.

The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them—as if it must be clinging even to their corpses—some authenticity.

Behavioral variation from year to year is archeologically invisible, yet it may have important effects on the archeological record. Moreover, much of current theory demands that we give attention to such variation. Rather than adopting normative reconstructions from ethnographies, archeologists must view the archeological record as a long‐term ethnography, confounded by such variations in behavior. Using an ecological perspective, patterns of behavioral variation can be linked to environmental characteristics, with implications for the archeological record of settlement and subsistence. The Paleolithic and Mesolithic of southwest Germany are used to illustrate this approach.

This essay was delivered as the Distinguished Lecture to the 86th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 21, 1987, at Chicago, Illinois.