heritage Article Use, Purpose, and Function—Letting the Artifacts Speak Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal 1,*,† and J. Scott Cardinal 2,3,† 1 Department of Chemistry, University at Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY 12222, USA 2 Cultural Resources Survey Program, New York State Museum, Albany, NY 12130, USA;
[email protected] 3 College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA * Correspondence:
[email protected] † These authors contributed equally to this work. Received: 1 June 2020; Accepted: 26 June 2020 ; Published: 30 June 2020 Abstract: Archaeologists have likely collected, as a conservative estimate, billions of artifacts over the course of the history of fieldwork. We have classified chronologies and typologies of these, based on various formal and physical characteristics or ethno-historically known analogues, to give structure to our interpretations of the people that used them. The simple truth, nonetheless, is that we do not actually know how they were used or their intended purpose. We only make inferences—i.e., educated guesses based on the available evidence as we understand it—regarding their functions in the past and the historical behaviors they reflect. Since those inferences are so fundamental to the interpretations of archaeological materials, and the archaeological project as a whole, the way we understand materiality can significantly bias the stories we construct of the past. Recent work demonstrated seemingly contradictory evidence between attributed purpose or function versus confirmed use, however, which suggested that a basic premise of those inferences did not empirically hold to be true. In each case, the apparent contradiction was resolved by reassessing what use, purpose, and function truly mean and whether certain long-established functional categories of artifacts were in fact classifying by function.