What IS arch(a)eology?
(Note: we can’t even agree on how to SPELL it)
Indicate your agreement (or disagreement) with the following statements. Only the aggregated results will be distributed – so be as frank as you like!
A one (1) indicates strongly agree while a five (5) indicates strongly disagree. Please create an e-mail message to fred@cast.uark.edu that has your response followed by a blank and then the topic number (and text if you like). Do NOT put anything else in the message. This will allow me to quickly copy the results to a spreadsheet and tally them. The message would have a format like:
4 , 1. Archaeology is a social science
1 , 2. Archaeology is a humanistic discipline.
etc.
The e-mail should be set to me BEFORE 8 AM January 20.
1. Archaeology is a social science
2. Archaeology is a humanistic discipline.
3. An important goal of archeology is the reconstruction of economic, social and political organization and systems of beliefs and values.
4. Archaeology is the study of how human beings lived in the past.
5. An important goal of archeology is reconstruction of prehistory.
6. An important goal of archeology is investigation of the role of culture as an adaptive system through time.
7. Archaeology is primarily methodological.
8. Archaeology is primarily theoretical.
9. Archaeology is a equal mix of theory and method.
10. An important goal of archeology is delineation of kinship structures.
11. An important goal of archeology is definition of the economic basis of a society/culture.
12. An important goal of archeology is delineation of the geographic extend of a prehistoric cultural group.
13. An important goal of archeology is delineation of the geographic extent of modern ethnic communities.
14. Archaeology is the study of how human beings lived in the prehistoric past.
15. Archaeology is a science.
16. Archeology attempts to discover and explains patterns or regularities in the material evidences of past human activity.
17. Archeology is the study of material culture in all times and places.
18. Archaeology is the recovery, analysis and interpretation of the material remains of the human past
19. Archaeology is the study of material objects in ongoing cultural systems
20. Archeological studies can be conducted in a value-free setting.
21. Archaeology is anthropology.
22. Archaeology is not part of anthropology.
23. Archeology’s ultimate goal is nomothetic generalizations.
24. Archeology’s ultimate objective is aesthetic pleasure.
25. Archeological interpretations must be judged by their concordance with reality of the archeological record.
26. Archaeology is the analysis of past human behavior.
27. Archaeology is a technique for studying the past within a broader discipline of prehistory.
28. Archeology is a discipline with the theory, method and practice for the recovery of unobservable hominid behavior patterns from indirect traces in bad samples.
29. Archaeology is the study of the relationship between human behavior and material culture in all times and places.
30. Archaeology is the science of progress.
31. Archaeology is the science of garbage.
32. Archaeology is the general science of material culture.
33. Archaeology is the delineation and explanation of cross-cultural regularities over time.
34. Archeology is the study how environmental circumstances constrained and influenced past human culture.
35. Archaeology is the study of the functional elements and their interrelationships that created past human cultures.
36. Archaeological study involves the discovery of pattern from the analysis of material remains that are evidence of underlying economic interrelationships between past peoples and their environment.
38. Archaeology is an objective enterprise that has at least the potentials to define objective laws of human behavior in the past.
39. Archeological analysis is so embedded in value systems that there can be no objective perspective.
40. Archaeology is the study of formation processes of the archeological record and the reconstruction of the cultural past through behavioral inferences.
41. Archeological study is primarily focused on supporting the normative beliefs of western society.
42. Archeology’s ultimate goal is to extend the disciplines of anthropology and history into the ancient past, before the advent of writing.
43. Archeology is the study of the past for the purpose of serving modern social and political objectives.
44. Archaeology is what archeologist do.
45. Archeology is mainly a set of techniques that are applied within a method and theory framework supplied by related disciplines such as anthropology and ecology.