An archaeological research center is located on the site.
The goal is to gain new knowledge about people in the past, their living conditions, technology, methods of cultivation, and the like through practical experiments.
Engaging the public fascination occurs as well.
Lejre is a large-scale example of experimental archaeology, one of the ways that archaeologists try to answer questions about the past.
Archaeological questions are the key to gaining knowledge about the past.
It is essential to define the questions to be answered before beginning any research.
The package of questions, intended methods, research area, and planned analysis is called the research design.
Much of what archaeologists do is intended to answer these questions relating to who, what, when, where, and why.
In addition to such fundamental issues, there are larger questions about origins.
What do Archaeologists Want to Know?
The basic concept that archaeologists are interested in is culture.
Culture is a complement to our biology.
Culture is a non-biological means of human adaptation based on intelligence, experience, learning, and the use of tools.
Culture enables us to modify and enhance our behavior without a corresponding change in our genetic makeup.
This is the focus of archaeology is the search for evidence of our cultural development through time.
There are many ways to look at past cultures.
One schematic view sees cultures composed of components that are closely related and interact.
The questions that archaeologists ask about past societies focus on several aspects.
These components of human society are also closely interrelated in prehistoric materials.
Environment
Human groups cannot be understood outside the natural and social environment in which they operate.
The environment in which human society operates includes natural resources in the form of water, plants, animals, and minerals, as well as climate, catastrophe, and other human societies.
Environment operates for human benefit and detriment.
Climate is major factor in human life.
Demography
Prehistoric demography (or paleodemography) is the study of human populations in the past.
Demography includes the number of individuals, sex and age distribution, birth and death rates, migration, and geographic extent.
An archaeological population generally refers to the people related through membership in the same group.
Another aspect of demography is population density, the number of people per square kilometer (Table 4.1).
The population density of human populations increased over time and is sometimes argued to be one of the major forces of social change.
Archaeologists attempt to estimate past human population sizes.
Archaeologists make estimates based upon many factors.
There are many problems with estimating population sizes.
Bioarchaeologists use biological information from graves and cemeteries to describe the major characteristics of a population.
The human skeleton provides important information on the sex and age of death.
Estimates of population size are difficult using burial evidence.
Bruce Trigger developed a formula to predict living population from the size of the cemetery and the number of modern inhabitants.
Birth and death rates (fertility and mortality) in a population are determined from the numbers of individuals in different age classes in burial populations.
Example: The Black Earth Site
Black Earth is an important early site in southern Illinois dating from 4500 to 3000 B.C.
The site is more than a city block in size.
The primary food resources included turtles and fish, deer, turkey, and nuts, especially from the hickory tree.
There was a substantial cemetery at the Black Earth site.
The contents of the graves provided important evidence of tools, as well as ornamental and ceremonial items.
Males were generally buried with equipment to obtain food or other resources, while females were buried with tools to process or prepare these raw materials.
Demographic information was obtained from the burial population.
Technology
Technology is an interface between human society and the environment.
Technology includes the tools, facilities, and knowledge used to obtain or create resources for human existence.
It is one of the most readily observed aspects of archaeological data.
Changes in technology over time provide clear indicators of the development of material cultural as well as diagnostic information about the age of various materials.
New materials and technologies can appear in a region through invention, diffusion, or migration.
Invention is the creation or development of new ideas or techniques for solving problems.
Diffusion involves borrowing from other areas.
Migration is a specific kind of diffusion that involves foreign people bringing new ideas and/or materials to an area. One of the challenges of archaeology is to determine which of these factors was responsible for the appearance of new things.
Economy
Economy concerns how people obtain foods, material, and goods to sustain their lives.
One major aspect of prehistoric economy is subsistence.
One form of subsistence is hunting and gathering.
Agriculture is another major form of subsistence pattern that involves the herding of domesticated animals and/or the cultivation of domesticated plants.
The initial domestication of plants and animals took place in several different areas of the world between 10,000 and 4000 years ago.
Exchange is another important aspect of economy.
Three kinds of exchange can be distinguished: reciprocity, redistribution, and trade.
Reciprocity involves the exchange of items of roughly equal value and can include gift giving.
Redistribution involves the movement of goods to a central place from where they are rationed or portioned out to select members of society.
Trade involves bartering, buying, or selling goods and usually takes place in some sort of market economy.
Archaeologists frequently examine exchange and trade through the study of "exotic materials."
Objects and materials that are not available or locally produced in an area provide immediate evidence of connections and interaction.
Of great use in such investigations are artifacts or materials that come from a known location.
A fundamental mechanism for the efficient organization of tasks is a division of labor.
Separate groups or segments of society perform different activities as part of an efficient organization of the economic process.
Hunter-gatherers provide a good example, where the division of labor is often by sex.
Economies become more specialized through time with larger groups or entire communities involved in the production of specific items.
Example: Jomon Japan
The Jomon period in Japan dates from 10,000 to 300 b.c.
Almost 50,000 sites have been discovered.
Technology was elaborate and well developed.
Pottery is frequently found at Jomon sites.
Jomon villages varied greatly in size and often were occupied for a long time.
The inland settlements generally contained 4–8 pithouses.
Pithouses were substantial, circular or rectangular structures built of large support posts, containing elaborate, stone-lined hearths.
Communal structures for various purposes were built around the periphery of the village.
Burials occurred individually near houses or in the communal structures.
Subsistence was based primarily on wild resources, although some cultivated plants may have been included in the diet.
More than 180 species of plant foods have been identified from Jomon settlements.
In the later Jomon, root and cereal crops may have been under cultivation.
The importance of hunting is indicated by the abundance of arrowheads at many Jomon sites.
Fishing was important at sites on the rivers, estuaries, and the ocean.
Organization
Organization refers to the roles and relationships in society.
Organization structures many aspects of society including social interaction, marriage, economic activity, and political relationships.
Kinship defines the relationship between individual members in society based on family ties.
Marriage systems tie unrelated individuals together through sanctified kinship.
Families and households are the fundamental units of human society.
Lineages are genealogies, lines of descent that extend relationships and determine membership in a group.
Societies vary with respect to their level of stratification.
Many societies of hunter-gatherers are described as egalitarian, with more or less equal relations between the members of the group.
Agricultural societies are usually larger and often distinguish separate groups within society defined by inherited status differences based on rank or class.
One of the most significant changes in human organization was the shift from egalitarian to hierarchical structures that was witnessed following the origins of agriculture.
Higher status is often reflected archaeologically in more elaborate and valued material possessions.
Political organization is a reflection of the increasing complexity that is witnessed in human society through time.
One of the more common trends in the organization of past societies is an increase in complexity over time.
Complexity refers to more units in society and more integration between those units.
One of the most common ways to describe hierarchies in human society uses the terms bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states to distinguish four different levels of political organization in human society.
Ideology
Ideology is the way that a people view and understand their world.
Ideology encompasses the norms, values, and beliefs held by a society.
Ideology is usually embodied in specialists who maintain ritual knowledge and direct the ceremonies and activities that keep such ideology active and pertinent.
Ideology includes aspects of cosmology, iconography, ritual and religion.
Iconography concerns the pictorial representations of beliefs, ideas, and concepts.
Belief systems have powerful symbols to reiterate their meaning; ritual sanctifies and validates that message.
Iconography involves symbols, depictions, and designs, which are expressions of ideology.
Ritual is a ubiquitous practice in human society and a manifestation of ideology.
Ritual usually involves symbolic, prescribed, and structured behaviors that are often repetitive in nature.
Aspects of ritual behavior include animism, dance, divination, magic, music, mythology, rites of passage, sorcery and witchcraft, shamans and priests, taboos and totems.
As used in archaeology, the term ritual encompasses various aspects of past behavior including religion, ceremony, and belief.
Religion is formalized framework of belief and behavior that helps humans cope with the unknown.
Roy Rappaport described religion as having three components: sacred propositions, ritual, and religious experience.
Religion is an organized belief system that promotes cosmology, morals, and values in human society.
Religion takes many forms.
Religion is manifested in ritual and ceremony, and observed archaeologically in religious artifacts and architecture.
Archaeological Thinking: Ritual in Ancient Oaxaca
Ideology can be difficult to grasp in archaeology since it is hard to determine whether certain places or artifacts were important for practical or ideological reasons.
An intriguing study comes from ancient Mesoamerica.
Sedentary village life began around 1800 B.C. in Mesoamerica.
Society changed very rapidly from that point as long distance exchange, status differentiation, and monumental construction began to appear in the Olmec Culture on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
By 1300 B.C. there were at least a dozen small villages of 8-10 nuclear families living in small, thatched-roof houses in the valley.
The largest of these was José Mogote with 20-30 households and the only one with a distinctive public building, located in the center of the village.
Several interesting features characterize the findings at San José Mogote.
Many artifacts were imported from as far as 200 kilometers away.
Ethnography and Archaeology
Ethnography is the study of living human cultures.
In North America, the connections between the living and the past were obvious and a cozy relationship existed between these two academic fields.
Archaeologists were able to use the observations of ethnographers to help interpret the prehistoric remains that they found.
Archaeologists often look for comparisons between ethnographies and archaeology to explain things.
There is a debate in archaeology about how to use analogy and whether it is appropriate for understanding past human cultures.
Example: Floor Area and Settlement Population
Archaeologists are interested in determining how many people lived at a site.
Determining the number of inhabitants at a site is not easy.
Many assumptions have to be made in estimating site population.
Archaeologists sometimes turn to ethnographic data to learn more about the relationship between material culture and human behavior.
Raoul Naroll investigated this relationship to learn more about settlement population.
He collected cross-cultural information from descriptions of ethnographically reported societies.
He was able to find data on both population and site size.
Naroll found a relationship between population and floor area.
Ethnoarchaeology
Ethnoarchaeology is the study of living peoples by archaeologists.
Ethnographic information has certain limitations.
The goal is to gain useful information for learning about the past.
Example: Harappan Beads
The Bronze Age Harappan civilization flourished between 2800 and 1900 B.C.
This is one of the world's early state-level societies and is located in western Pakistan.
The culture encompassed more than 1500 cities, towns, and villages.
Major hallmarks of the Harappan state included a written script, systems of weights and measures, planned cities with elite and common living areas, and distinctive symbols and motifs.
A considerable degree of occupational specialization also characterized Indus society.
One of the major centers of this society was at the site of Harappa itself, a large walled city of more than 375 acres.
The population is estimated to have been between 40,000 and 80,000 people.
Excavations at Harappa revealed tens of thousands of beads, drills, and pieces of bead-making debris.
Ethnoarchaeological studies of bead makers in Pakistan today were conducted to learn more about the past.
Research questions concerned the technique and control of production as a means of understanding political organization at Harappa.
A great deal was learned from the ethnoarchaeological study.
The study lead to new strategies for excavation at the site of Harappa to insure that relevant information on bead making was found.
Experimental Archaeology
Experimental archaeology is the 'hands-on' investigation of past human activity and behavior.
Experimental archaeology is done in many ways and at many different scales.
