Archeological Research Paper

Selena Parker

ANT-107

Archeological Theories and Methods Paper

4/15/18

The archeological theory that I chose to research and write about was Culture- historical archeology. Culture-historical archeology is an archeological theory that emphasizes on defining past societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture. Culture Historian was in the 19th-20th centuries. The culture-historical theory was a way of conducting anthropological and archaeological study that was common among western scholars between about 1910 and 1960. The primary principle of the culture-historical approach was that the core motivation to do archaeology or anthropology at all was to construct timelines of key occurrences

and cultural changes in the ancient times for groups that did not have in print report. The culture-historical theory was developed out of the theories of historians and anthropologists, to some extent to assist archaeologists categorize and understand the huge quantity of archaeological information that had been and was still being collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries by antiquarians. As an absent, that hasn't changed, in fact, with the availability of power computing and scientific advances such as archaeo-chemistry (Plant residues, DNA, stable isotopes) the quantity of archaeological data has bloomed. Its enormity and convolution today still drives the progress of archaeological theory to struggle with it. Amongst their writings redefining archaeology in the 1950s, American archaeologists Phillip Phillips and Gordon R. Willey (1953) provided a good figure of speech for us to comprehend the defective frame of mind of archaeology in the first half of the 20th century. They said that the culture-historical archaeologists were of the belief that the ancient times were slightly like a giant mystery, that there was a pre-existing but useless of creation which could be discerned if you collected adequate pieces and fitted them together. The culture-historical approach is based on the movement of Kulterkreise, an idea developed in Germany and Austria in the late 1800s. Kulturkreis is every so often spelled Kulturkreise and translated as "culture circle", but in English means something next to the position of "cultural complex". That school of thought was generated primarily by German historians and ethnographers Bernhard Ankermann and Fritz Graebner. Particularly, Graebner had been a medieval historian as a student, and as an ethnographer, he thought it should be possible to build historical sequences like those on hand for medievalists for regions that did not have in print sources. For one to be able to build regions of cultural histories for people with no written records, scholars grew into the notion of social evolution based in part on the ideas of American anthropologists Edward Tyler and Lewis Henry Morgan, and German social philosopher Karl Max. The idea was that cultures grew along a sequence of more or less set steps: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. If you studied a exacting region properly, the theory went, you could track how the people of that region had developed (or not) through those three stages, and then catalog ancient and modern societies by where they were in the route of becoming civilized. Three primary processes were seen as the drivers of social evolution invention, transforming a new idea into innovations; diffusion, the process of transmitting those inventions from culture to culture; and migration, the actual movement of people from one region to another. At the end of the 19th century, there was a natural affirmation of what is now considered "hyper-diffusion", that all of the innovative ideas of antiquity (farming, metallurgy, building monumental architecture) arose in Egypt and spread outward, a theory thoroughly debunked by the early 1900s. Kulturkreis never argued that all things came from Egypt, but the researchers did believe there were a limited number of centers responsible for the origin of ideas which herd the social evolutionary growth. That too has been proven artificial. The culture-historical approach did produce a framework, a starting point on which future generations of archaeologists could build and in many cases, deconstruct and rebuild. But, the culture-historical approach has many limitations. We now know that evolution of any kind is never linear, but rather unkempt, with many different steps forward and backward, failures and successes that are part and parcel of all human society. And frankly, the stature of "civilization" identified by researchers in the late 19th century is by today's standards shockingly moronic: civilization was that which is experienced by white, European, wealthy, educated males. But more painfully than that, the culture-historical approach feeds directly into nationalism and racism. By developing linear regional histories, tying them to modern ethnic groups, and classifying the groups on the basis of how far along the linear social evolutionary scale they had reached, archaeological research fed the beast of Hitler's Master Race and justified the imperialism and aggressive colonization by Europe of the rest of the world (Hirst 2017 pg 1).
The method I chose to research and discuss is shovel testing.

The first step used in excavation is surveying the remote area; it is the controlled exploration of what is to be found underneath the ground. Excavation is usually uses techniques such as making grids of the trenches and shovel testing. Shovel testing it is a standardized test that archeologists use to test their research in a real world setting. Shovel test pits or STPs are small holes dug on a grid that allow archeologists to pick up artifact samples and stratigraph data across large areas of land. Stratigraphy is results based on what geologists and archeologists get using a process where layers of soil and debris are laid down on top of one another over time. An STP survey is a great method for understanding and recognizing important shifts in the patterns of human activity. STP was used in instructive ways enslaved people were working and living throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shovel test pits are a method used by archeologists that can cover an area quickly and are less invasive (shovel test pit methods pg.1). Culture-historical archeology will be a step used in analyzing artifacts and materials found in excavation and from doing shovel testing. Archaeological excavation aims to identify any evidence of past human activity that may be buried below ground at any given site. This evidence usually consists of features, such as buried soil layers, rubbish pits, ditches, graves or parts of former buildings such as postholes, wall foundations and floor surfaces and the finds material that has ended up within the features. Although some finds will have been deliberately buried, such as grave goods or treasure hoards, most of the finds material found by archaeologists is the discarded rubbish from the activities of everyday life and work in a settlement. Due to the small size of a Test Pit you might need a bit of luck to find a proper archaeological feature such as a pit or building

but you’ll almost certainly find the bits and pieces that people have thrown away or lost over the years, mixed in both the topsoil or within buried older soil layers. Finds will consist of man-made items such as sherds of pottery, metalwork, glass and building material, as well as organic or environmental material such as pieces of animal bone or shell (Suffolk council 2013 pg. 7).One way this method could improve is to be a bigger pit, test pits are usually 1m by 1m so if they were bigger I think one could find more to analyze. I personally think excavation and shovel pit testing is very interesting and a very engaging way of finding artifacts and materials that are underground and digging them up and finding them and preserving them. In Excavation matrix is the physical material in which archeological objects can be found. The physical material is usually dirt where the objects are found. Provenance is the history of ownership of an object, a list of who has own the archeological object or origin of the object. Preservation is the protection of archeological sites and artifacts and taking actions that prevent damage or deterioration or loss of the context or content. There is an act called the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 that has become a U.S. Law that establishes the National Register of Historic places and the trust for historic preservation. These steps help archeologists to be able to find keep and study archeological objects to better understand cultural evolution. These Acts have helped protect artifacts and many archeological sites.

References:
Hirst, K. K. (2017, March 08). What is the Culture-Historical Approach and Why Was it a Bad Idea? Retrieved April 15, 2018, from https://www.thoughtco.com/cultural-historical-method-170544
“Shovel-Test-Pit Methods.” National Museums Liverpool,
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/archaeology/excavate/methods/excavate21.aspx. Council, S. C. (2013, June). How to Excavate an Archeological Test Pit. Retrieved from
http://www.hoxnehistory.org.uk/Hoxne Test Pit Guidebook.pdf

https://archaeologywordsmith.com/lookup.php?terms=preservation
https://www.archaeological.org/search/node/what is