ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Abstract

Archaeology, as a discipline rooted in 16th century antiquarianism, periodically faces academic identity crises, which manifest in the urge for conceptual changes and upgrading with new perspectives. Such trends gave birth to processual, post-processual, and evolutionary archaeology, ethnoarchaeology etc. Restricting archaeology to the endless preliminary reports accompanied with accumulating volumes of typologies of various artifacts (mostly pottery), archaeologists have lost the idea that archaeology is ’the means’, not ’the end’ in itself. This problem is especially evident in countries ’traditionally’ far from the world’s main archaeological theory currents. By studying the artifact, we tend to forgot its maker – the man. The world of the past is oversimplified ad absurdum, and deprived of its crucial aspects, which in turn reduces our capability to define properly the chain of events and the related social causality. As a discipline of the wider social sciences, archaeology is obliged to explain the total range of characteristics of past cultures, their respective variables and changes. That goal seems to be far above the recovered static material remains alone – if they have survived or are discovered at all. Along with the archeological dialogues with natural sciences – such as for instance those related to various physicochemical and biological analyses, eco-facts and paleoclimatology – what turns out to be crucial for the discipline is a reformulated interaction with anthropology, as the broader humanistic framework. An important and rather new field is paleopolitics, that offers a closer understanding of the world of the past as the immediate predecessor to our own world of the present.