Archaeology as the study of culture change?

Question

what are your opinions on Archaeology as the study of culture change.

Archaeologist need to understand how and why lifeways changed in the past. They have taken different approaches to study culture change. Do anyone know the different approaches archaeologist's have taken to study culture change?

Answer 1

Archaeologists are dependent on things like artifacts and the ruins of buildings to determine how groups of people live.  They can discover only some general patterns of cultural evolution for the most part.

Occasionally they can make some exciting discoveries.  They believe, for example, that the Mayan cities and the Mayan culture of that time disintegrated largely because of warfare as their population expanded  beyond the point where their water supplies could sustain the system of agriculture they needed to feed themselves.

They also discovered that a certain group of Indians in the United States had to abandon their homes when a group of invading tribes from Mexico invaded their settlements and ate them up.  They concluded this from the way their bones had been scraped as they were butchered, and they even discovered some petrified turds that one of these cannibals s.h.i.t out onto a campfire.

Not everyone in this settlement was eaten up.  But everyone who survived ran away from these invaders, and it is not known where they fled to or whether their culture survived.

Harleigh Kyson Jr.

Answer 2

If you are interested I could send you my essay I just wrote on the progression of cultural study in archaeology three weeks ago.

It is too long to post, so e-mail me at [e-mail]

Answer 3

There are many different approaches to archaeology, each of which allows archaeologists to engage different questions. The study of cultural change is a goal that most archaeologists can agree on since it is so obviously applicable to so many archaeological phenomena.  Your question is a little too general to answer precisely, but a couple of things come to mind immediately:

Three of the most productive approaches to cultural change that I have seen are (1) Social Evolution, (2) Cultural Ecology and (3) Civilizationist Approaches.  

1 - Social Evolutionism, at its best, applies the metapohor of biological evolution to the study of culture change. Some good examples of this can be found in the works of Dunnell, Rindos, and others.

2 - Cultural Ecology is an older, more established and more general approach to change pioneered by mid-20th century anthropologists such as Julian Steward. Cultural Ecology is a non-deterministic and holistic approach which has heavily influenced both processuialist and culture-historical approaches to archaeology.  Its applications in archaeology have wide and uniquely practical use - as it is the paradigmn which gave us predictive modeling for site location (perhaps the most important practical consideration in modern archaeology).  Most archaeologists focusing on cultural change fall within this paradigm even if they don't know it.  Some good authors - if you want to follow up -  Karl W. Butzer, Dena Dincauze, etc.

3 - I borrowed the term "civilizationist" from history because I think it summarizes the approach better than any term chose by anthropologists thus far. Civilizationism is a theory of social change which comes from political philosophy and anthropology. It is essentially the application of commonsense notions about social progress to cultural change - such that civilization (or, in other schemes, the nation-state, or communism) is regarded as the "highest", least primitive , social form and each culture is said to be advancing through various stages (i.e. "band, tribe, chiefdom, state") at various times. Some good examples from outside of archaeology - V. Gordon Childe, Karl Marx, etc.  From archaeology - virtually anything theoretical published between 1965 and 1985 will at least engage these ideas.  Although this school of thought has some merits and has resulted in some useful thoughts, it is fraught with serious problems, not the least of which are the highly problematic assumptions that social evolution equates to the highly ideological and very questionable notion of "progress", and that cultural change will necessarily be from 'simple to complex' as opposed to being responsive to selective pressures (whether internal or environmental).