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Conjunctive Archaeology
Conjunctive archaeology is a method of studying of the past developed by Walter Taylor in the 1940s that combined elements of both traditional archaeology and the allied field of anthropology. It is exemplified by Taylor's ''A Study of Archeology'' (1948). Taylor saw archaeology as an integrated discipline, combining the study of diet, settlement patterns, tools and other elements to provide a holistic view of the past. Elements of Taylor's approach are now a standard practice in the discipline, but Taylor's open and specific criticism of leading archaeologists of his day caused dismay amongst many archaeologists. Taylor was one of the first to criticize the descriptive, historical approaches to archaeology that dominated the discipline. According to Patty Jo Watson, Taylor's purpose "was not to generate ill will but rather to stimulate examination ... of aims, goals and purposes by American archaeologists". ''A Study of Archaeology'' Walter Taylor was the founder of conju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Taylor (archaeologist)
Walter Willard Taylor, Jr. (1913 – April 14, 1997) was an American anthropologist and archaeologist most famous for his work at Coahuila in Mexico and his " Conjunctive archaeology", a method of studying the past combining elements of both the traditional archaeology of the period and the allied field of anthropology. This was exemplified by his work ''A Study of Archeology''. Life Taylor was born in Chicago, but he grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended The Hotchkiss School l. Although studying geology, while at Yale University Taylor became interested in anthropology and archaeology. He graduated in 1935, and that summer began working for the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, where he was influenced by the holistic environmental philosophy of Lyndon Hargrave. After three years in the field, he enrolled for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard in 1938. When World War II broke out, Taylor enlisted in the U.S. Marines, serving in Europe and being parach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marxist Archaeology
Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information within the framework of Marxism. Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels described how archaeology could be understood in a Marxist conception of history, the archaeological theory was developed by Soviet archaeologists in the Soviet Union during the early twentieth century. Marxist archaeology quickly became the dominant archaeological theory within the Soviet Union, and subsequently spread and was adopted by archaeologists in other nations. In particular the United Kingdom, where the theory was propagated by influential archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. With the rise of post-processual archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s, forms of Marxist archaeology were once more popularised amongst the archaeological community. Marxist archaeology has been characterised as having "generally adopted a materialist base and a processual approach whilst emphasising the historical-developmental contex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historiographic
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, that of WWII, the British Empire, early Islam, and China—and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the development of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties—such as to their nation state—remains a debated question. In the ancient world, chronological annals were produced in civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, the discipline of historio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Post-processual Archaeology
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of "very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions". Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology. The post-processual movement originated in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered by archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley and Peter Ucko, who were influenced by French Marxist anthropology, postmodernism and similar trends in sociocultural anthropology. Parallel developments soon followed in the United States. Initially ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Material Culture
Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in. Some scholars also include other intangible phenomena that include sound, smell and events, while some even consider language and media as part of it. The term is most commonly used in archaeological and anthropological studies, to define material or artifacts as they are understood in relation to specific cultural and historic contexts, communities, and belief systems. Material culture can be described as any object that humans use to survive, define social relationships, represent facets of identity, or benefit peoples' state of mind, social, or economic standing. Material culture is contrasting to symbolic culture, which includes nonmaterial symbols, beliefs, and social constructs. The scholarly analysis of material ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Boas
Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism. Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography. He then participated in a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verifiability (science)
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic ( tautologies). Verificationism thus rejects statements related to metaphysics, as well as fields such as theology, ethics and aesthetics, as "cognitively meaningless". Such statements may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behaviour, but not in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Verificationism was a central thesis of logical positivism, a movement in analytic philosophy that emerged in the 1920s by philosophers who sought to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. Origins Although verificationist principles of a general sort—grounding scientific theory in some verifiable experience—are found retrospectively eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lewis Binford
Lewis Roberts Binford (November 21, 1931 – April 11, 2011) was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology (or the "New Archaeology") in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm. Recent appraisals have judged that his approach owed more to prior work in the 1940s and 50s than suggested by Binford's strong criticism of his predecessors. Early life and education Binford was born in Norfolk, Virginia on November 21, 1931. As a child he was interested in animals, and after finishing high school at Matthew Fontaine Maury High Sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Processual Archaeology
Processual archaeology (formerly, the New Archaeology) is a form of archaeological theory that had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, ''Method and Theory in American Archaeology,'' in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment: "My own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history, and being nothing." The idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human culture. That was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the cultural-history phase in which archaeologists thought that any information that artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life would be lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, and cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boasian Anthropology
Boasian anthropology was a school within American anthropology founded by Franz Boas in the late 19th century. Overview Boasian anthropology was based on the four-field model of anthropology uniting the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, and archeology under the umbrella of anthropology. It was based on an understanding of human cultures as malleable and perpetuated through social learning, and understood behavioral differences between peoples as largely separate from and unaffected by innate predispositions stemming from human biology—in this way it rejected the view that cultural differences were essentially biologically based. It also rejected ideas of cultural evolution which ranked societies and cultures according to their degree of "evolution", assuming a single evolutionary path along which cultures can be ranked hierarchically, rather Boas considered societies varying complexities to be the outcome of particular historical pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Archaeology
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes. Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. It is usually considered an independent academic discipline, but may also be classified as part of anthropology (in North America – the four-field approach), history or geography. Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology is distinct from palaeontology, which is the study of fossil remains. Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for which, by definition, there are no written records. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the adven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grahame Clark
Sir John Grahame Douglas Clark (28 July 1907 – 12 September 1995), who often published as J. G. D. Clark, was a British archaeologist who specialised in the study of Mesolithic Europe and palaeoeconomics. He spent most of his career working at the University of Cambridge, where he was appointed Disney Professor of Archaeology from 1952 to 1974 and Master of Peterhouse from 1973 to 1980. Born in Kent to an upper-middle-class family, Clark developed an early interest in archaeology through his collection of prehistoric flint tools. After an education at Marlborough College, he proceeded to Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, there attaining both his undergraduate and then doctoral degree. For the latter, he produced a thesis and published monograph focusing on Mesolithic Britain. In 1932 he co-founded the Fenland Research Committee, through which he excavated several prehistoric sites in the East Anglian Fens. He was also a senior member of the Prehistoric Society of E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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