| Abstract: |
Introduction: When a person does what he or she considers ethnoarchaeological research there is no particular worry about a definition of ethnoarchaeology. When I write to friends in various countries in Asia asking them about what is going on in ethnoarchaeological research in their countries, I don't define the term. In the few replies I have received, no one has asked me to define the term or has seemed to have misunderstood my request for information. But now that I am writing about "ethnoarchaeology," I have been forced to ask myself, "What is ethnoarchaeology?" I find I am not very sure of an answer. Is it ethnoarchaeology when an archaeologist does ethnography? I suppose that is usually the case. Are archaeologists the only ones who can do ethnoarchaeology? I would think not and would hope not. Can ethnoarchaeology be a library study? While I suspect this is not the purpose we have in mind, I don't see why it can't be. If we agree that ethnoarchaeology can be done in a library, then it could also be done in archives
either way we are overlapping ethnohistory, with no harm done. What is the purpose of ethnoarchaeology? To provide models? To tell us how specific artifacts were made and/or used? To provide data on the functions of material culture, both direct function and social function? I am sure there are many, and multiple, purposes. I suppose ethnoarchaeology became a recognizable, named subdiscipline of archaeology simply because most nonarchaeological anthropologists have stopped doing ethnography in the United States while archaeologists' need for ethnography continues and, in fact, is growing. Certainly many archaeologists were consciously or subconsciously doing a bit of ethnoarchaeology while other anthropologists were still doing ethnography. For my purposes here, I make no attempt to define ethnoarchaeology and only hope that what I include here as ethnoarchaeology will not irritate more than a small minority of my audience.
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