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Archaeology Is Anthropology Or It Is Nothing of Interest Outside of Area archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing of interest the prehistoric and ethnographic records. Archaeol- outside of area studies programs. ogy provided the primary documentation for the evo- lutionary sequence, and museum collections such as A SHORT HISTORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND that of the Danish National Museum were reorganized CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY to document the technological advances in Thomsen’s The relationship between cultural anthropology and famous three-age system: Stone, Bronze, and Iron. archaeology has changed dramatically over the years Ethnographically, societies were classified into stages (Trigger 1989). In Europe, archaeology’s beginning in of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The belief was the nineteenth century sought to determine the indi- that, by new means of food production, humans had viduality of each nation and its people. Departments liberated their societies from the constraints of nature, of prehistory typically have acquired strongly local moving from hunting-and-gathering savages to agri- hearts. In Britain they emphasize British prehistory. cultural barbarians to civilized people with complex In Denmark, Danish prehistory. In Spain, Spanish economies and societies. Histories of technological prehistory, and so on. Roots of these academic inter- developments would be described for flint knapping, ests can probably be traced to nationalist themes of food processors and containers, housing, weapons, nineteenth-century Europe when the academic de- and the arts. Attempts were made to see evolution in partments were institutionalized (Trigger 1984). The political and legal systems, religion, and kinship. In primary mission of archaeology in a country such England at the Great Exhibition of 1851, impressive as Denmark was to define that which was distinctly collections from the empire illustrated world cultures Danish, extending the nation’s history deep into the to the general public. The Pitt Rivers Museum, among past. I visualize the beautiful Danish landscape paint- others, presented a fabulous array of objects showing ings of its golden age that captured the country’s rural that human technologies from Europe’s past were still life, often showing a Neolithic dolmen or Bronze Age being used by “primitives.” The ethnographic work barrows on the skyline (Conisbee 1993:46). European was clearly comparative, placing cultures within an prehistoric studies are dominated by a commitment to evolutionary framework originally recognized in the such closely identified pasts, without a primary inter- archaeological collections. By and large, however, Eu- est in comparative analysis. ropean archaeology appears to have been kept separate In the United States, however, archaeology began from cultural anthropology. as part of anthropology seeking to describe societies Since at least Morgan (1877), American anthro- ignored by most scholars who were focused on the pology has had two goals similar to that of European rise of the West. As part of anthropology, the first anthropology: to document non-Western peoples and commitment was to comparison. Since the nineteenth to understand the human experience comparatively. century, the methods and theories of both archaeology When the discipline of anthropology crystallized in and cultural anthropology have been transformed as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pri- a result of continued debate and dialogue across the mary focus was to describe and understand North Atlantic. The relationships between archaeology and American Indian cultures. Somewhat later, but follow- cultural anthropology can be understood using a four- ing the same intellectual mission, work was extended part chronology (Barnard 2000; Gosden 1999; Harris to the indigenous peoples and peasants of Latin Amer- 1968; Trigger 1987; Willey and Sabloff 1974). With ica. Much of this work was considered to be salvage this chronology, I connect the histories of American ethnography, an attempt to document proud peoples and European archaeology as they relate to changes in and their cultures before they became extinct through cultural anthropological theory and method. death and acculturation. The assumption was that anthropology was documenting the end of their his- EVOLUTIONISM (PLAIN AND SIMPLE) tories. These were Eric Wolf’s (1982) “people without In the nineteenth century, the new awareness of the history” who lived outside of Europe’s written his- diverse range of human societies was understood tory. Beyond salvage ethnography, the primary tool for within an evolutionary framework pioneered by E. documenting the past of America’s indigenous people, B. Tylor (1871) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1877). As of course, has been archaeology. part of a broad fascination with evolution inspired es- In North America as in England, anthropology’s pecially by Darwin and Spencer, anthropologists used nineteenth-century foundation was firmly established a speculative history of technology to organize both in the great exhibitions and subsequent museums 188 timothy earle (Snead 1999). To present indigenous peoples to an traits then clustered somewhat haphazardly to form expanding urban society, large collections of dra- historically specific cultures. Deriving from dominant matic and beautiful material culture were made and Western societies, active forces of acculturation were displayed in the tall museum cases of the American rapidly swamping the distinctiveness of traditional Museum of Natural History in New York, the Field cultures. The first goal of ethnographers was thus Museum of Chicago, the Peabody Museum of Har- to describe the cultures and languages of threatened vard University, among others. For example, for the people in North America and around the world. From 1893 Columbian Exposition later transferred to the an analysis of similarities and differences in trait dis- Field Museum, Franz Boas collected material culture tributions, Boas and his adherents hoped to describe and arts of Indian groups along the northwest coast. the histories of world cultures and languages (see Jor- First with casual collections from farmers and then dan, chapter 26). from increasingly systematic excavations, museums Archaeology was central to the Boasian endeavor, began to fill with artifacts that documented Ameri- and some cultural anthropologists, including most can Indian culture histories. Destined for the muse- notably A. Kroeber and his student J. Steward, con- ums, the mining of artifacts supported an emerging ducted and encouraged major archaeological projects. professional archaeology. Collections were presented Archaeology had the potential to describe the origin according to the cultural traditions they represented and dispersal of all cultural traits that had material sig- and at least implicitly within the comparative, evo- natures, including technology, decorative styles, hous- lutionary framework established by Morgan. From ing, settlement forms, burial practices, and ceremonial the beginning, archaeology was central to American monuments. Archaeology’s job in the Americas was anthropology in its search to document the diversity thus dedicated to classification and time-space sys- of human history and cultures. tematics, for example, describing the distribution of specific traits, determining their earliest occurrences CULTURE HISTORY (TIME-SPACE SYSTEMATICS) and spread. Boas’s understanding of culture as inde- In the first half of the twentieth century, the rela- pendent of biology fit perfectly with generations of tionships between anthropology and archaeology di- American archaeologists who documented long-term verged. Both American and European anthropologists change in the archaeological record. This was culture embraced a scientific approach to human cultures and history for the modern ethnographic groups that the societies, rejecting earlier evolutionary approaches ethnographers studied. with implied racist undercurrents. Partly because of In Europe, the histories of archaeology and cultural their different relationships to archaeology, however, anthropology were quite different both from each cultural anthropology followed separate paths on the other and from American anthropology. European ar- two sides of the Atlantic. chaeology continued to be first and foremost about na- In North America, embracing a vision of anthro- tional histories, as each country’s archaeology sought pology as a historical science, Boas became the defin- to extend history before writing. Part of that interest ing figure of the modern discipline (Harris 1968). in history was a broader intellectual concern with the From 1896 until his death in 1941, he was patriarch of rise of Western culture from its origins in Mesopota- the Department of Anthropology at Columbia Uni- mia, Egypt, and the biblical past through the ancient versity where he trained a generation of anthropolo- civilizations of the Bronze Age, Classical Greece, and gists who went out to form prominent anthropology Rome. European archaeologists were early excavators departments across the country: Kroeber and Lowie in the Near East, Africa, and the Mediterranean. at University of California–Berkeley; Cole and Sapir The grand synthesizer of the time was V. Gor- at the University of Chicago, and Herskovits at North- don Childe of whom much has been written (Trigger western University. Strongly grounded in museum 1980). Childe’s many important books included The work, Boas had a historical understanding of cultures Dawn of European Civilization (1925),
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