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ABSTRACT
Contemporary ethnoarchaeology has come a long way from material correlates and ‘fleshing out the past’. This paper re-introduces ethnoarchaeology and opens a debate on its role in archaeology today. We summarize the role ethnoarchaeology has in developing, testing and building archaeological interpretation, and argue for its continuing importance in the wider discipline. This critical role further produces rich ethnographic and material information to think about human-material relationships not necessarily as analogies, but as empirical accounts of how culturally different people engage with the material in complex and variable ways. The study of human-material interaction in daily life and in long-term studies can both challenge and support dominant and emergent theoretical models.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Diane Lyons
Diane E. Lyons (PhD), Simon Fraser University, 1992, is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her research focus is the ethnoarchaeology of African rural farming communities and the material constitution of social identities in elite and non-elite vernacular architecture, community space, craft and cuisine. Her research includes studies in Cameroon, Sudan and Ethiopia. Currently, she is investigating marginalized craft production in northern Tigray, Ethiopia, in a context of rapid social, economic, political and ideological change.
Joanna Casey
Joanna Casey (PhD) University of Toronto, 1993, is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, USA. Her research is on the archaeology of early farming communities and the ethnoarchaeology of small-scale, rural trade in northern Ghana and Tigray, Ethiopia.