Ethnoarcheology

"Selected proceedings of the “First International Conference on Ethnoastronomy: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions of the World”held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 5-9 September 1983."

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Rjabchikov, S.V., 2014. The Sea Route from the Marquesas to Mangareva and Then to Easter Island: New Data. Polynesia Newsletter, 3, pp. 2-14.

Keywords: Marquesas Islands, Marquesan, Mangareva, Mangarevan, Easter Island, Rapanui, Rapa Nui, Polynesia, PPN, petroglyphs, pictograms, rock art, rongorongo, script, writing


The original was first read by Sergei V. Rjabchikov as the paper “The Sea Route from the Marquesas to Mangareva and Then to Easter Island: New Data” on the scientific session of the Sergei Rjabchikov Foundation – Research Centre for Studies of Ancient Civilisations and Cultures, November 20, 2014, Krasnodar, Russia.

Masyarakat Baduy saat ini masih hidup sederhana di daerah Pegunungan Kendeng, Banten Selatan. Masyarakat Baduy juga pada umumnya masih terikat pada pikukuh (aturan adat). Pikukuh tersebut antara lain menyatakan lojor teu meunang dipotong, pondok teu meunang disambungan (panjang tidak boleh dipotong, pendek tidak boleh disambung). Implikasi dari pikukuh itu adalah masyarakat Baduy menerima apa adanya atau tidak mengubah ketentuan yang sudah ada dari karuhun (luluhur/nenek moyang), termasuk didalamnya adalah tidak menerima barang moderen atau buatan pabrik. Insan Baduy yang melanggar pikukuh akan memperoleh ganjaran adat dari puun (pimpinan adat tertinggi).
Hingga saat ini, pikukuh relatif bertahan pada masyarakat Baduy Dalam (tangtu), namun kecenderungan melonggar pada masyarakat Baduy Luar (panamping). Makalah ini akan mengkaji pergulatan bathin masyarakat Baduy antara menjaga kemurnian pikukuh dan mengikuti perkembangan zaman. Kajian tersebut akan didasari pada kearifan atau pengetahuan lokal Baduy dalam menghadapi perubahan sosial masyarakat pada era modernisasi dan globalisasi sekarang ini.

This monograph examines the way two sets of wide-spread European folktales became incorporated into the storytelling traditions of Europeans. The stories themselves are compared and treated as reservoirs of orally transmitted popular beliefs and traditions that are no longer readily accessible to a modern audience. It is shown that the tales themselves have acted as vehicles for transmitting an earlier animist worldview from one generation to the next, albeit with modifications. When viewed in the longue durée, certain repetitive elements found in the tales reveal their ethnographic value and allow us to reconstruct, always tentatively, the animist ontological framing that contributed to their creation. After carefully exploring the interpretive framework that characterized the tales in times past, a framework shared by storytellers and their audiences alike, what comes into focus is a worldview unfamiliar to most Europeans, but well known to Native Americans and Indigenous groups where bear ceremonialism has been or still is practiced and whose traditional narratives incorporate the belief that bears were ancestors and therefore kin.
The comparative analysis of the European tales serves as an introduction to a larger question, namely, whether traditions associated with the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela (the Way of St. James) have a pre-Christian origin and more specifically, whether the choice of this specific geographic location for the “discovery” of the remains of St. James was motivated by the geomorphological characteristics of the nearby mountain peak called Pico Sacro and the legends that had grown up around it. This approach includes the possibility that the mountain was already the focal point of a pre-Christian pilgrimage tradition. Using the results obtained from analyzing the recurring motifs found in the two sets of folktales, what is suggested is that the ecclesiastic authorities who came up the story about the miraculous discovery of the Saint’s remains eight hundred years after he was allegedly buried, may have been aware that people were already regularly visiting Pico Sacro and that this site was already the subject of veneration and enveloped in a form of sacrality. In this scenario, the founders of the alleged discovery of the relics of St. James may have realized that if they could come up with the right story, they could overlay it on an already existing pilgrimage tradition. In that way they would be able to co-opt the already existing practices and profit from them in a myriad of ways. The process of superimposing a Christian narrative on the pagan practices and beliefs would be facilitated by inventing a story, based on the discovery of the tomb of one of Christ’s own disciples.
In the folktales discussed here there is a motif that surfaces over and over, namely, a journey to a location referred to as Glass Mountain or Crystal Mountain. Furthermore, folkloric references to this steep mountain are widespread in Europe. It is directly linked the belief that upon death one’s soul must successfully scale the peak to be able to enter Paradise. And in some cases, it was customary for the dead to be buried along with the claws of a bear, in the belief that the bear claws would aid the soul to climb that steep mountain. That motif will be analyzed and shown to have a real-world counterpart.

In this paper presented at the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington DC, November 2013, the author proposes answers to questions which have puzzled scholars since the 19th century concerning the enigmatic recumbent Mesoamerican figure known as the "chacmool", so named by French adventurer and photographer Augustus Le Plongeon.  While most scholars are convinced that chacmools were a genuine innovation for a specific type of sacrificial altar for the placement of an offering bowl, several key questions have remained: (1) What was the culture and place of origin of this remarkable sculptural innovation? (2) Who were these male figures?  (3) What is the origin and meaning of the challenging recumbent pose for these human figures with the unblinking, enigmatic gaze? (4) What were they, and what were they called, or described with a phrase, in any Mesoamerican language? Based on recent archaeological discoveries, the author presents a new interpretation of the "chacmool" as the elite "hip ulama" ball game ballplayer stylistically rendered in a serene and formalized ritual “por abajo” stance, well after the game is over, to play the final role as the recipient of the sacrifices. With this new interpretation the author hopes to open the door to finding the indigenous name or description of the "chacmool".

This study examines both edible plants and non-food uses of plants in a limited area to provide clues for archaeologists, to interpret their findings including the reconstruction of former diets.
The results are based on an ethnoarchaeological study conducted in 1994–1995 on the traditional
subsistence economy of a contemporary village, in close proximity to a pre-ceramic Neolithic site, Aşıklı, in the Aksaray province of Central Anatolia. As a part of this study, about 600 plant specimens were collected, of which over 300 were considered useful by the villagers.

The prehistoric archaeology of Mandla is of considerable significance to our understandings on the question of historical continuity of stone tool tradition/technology, in India. During the latter half of the last century, a series of ethno-archaeological investigations have well established the historical continuity of the archaic Stone Age technology among the contemporary tribes in Australia, Central America and in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. But, this is for the first time that we have found some evidence for a similar experience in this sub-continent. This article discusses the details of the field survey report, i.e. methods, sites, industry/tool assemblages etc., of the Mandla prehistoric sites for the first time. This will contextualize the issues emerging from the Mandla findings in more detail material context giving potentiality for further archaeological investigation.

This paper is an ethnographic description of indigenous pottery making in the Valley of Guatemala based on field work conducted between June and August, 1970. Pottery making in four Pokomam-speaking communities were studied extensively: Chinautla, Sacojito, and Durazno to the north of Guatemala City, and Mixco located to the west of Guatemala City. Potters were also visited in the Pokoman-speaking community of Sacoj, and one potter was visited in the Cakchiquel-speaking community of La Cienaga, near the town of San Raimundo. Mixco and La Cienaga made tortilla griddles and the remainder of the communities made a variety of vessels. For both summaries, and in-depth treatments of other aspects of this work, see the following on this site: Arnold, 1978, Arnold et al., 1991 elsewhere on this site; and my book "Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process" (Arnold 1985). Other of my sole- and co-authored  articles on this site use data from these communities in formulating tools for interpreting data from compositional analysis.

A significant number of symbolic compositions from Neolithic
Anatolia display a remarkably similar arrangement. Whether it is a female figure, an animal or a geometric sign (X, H), the central element is often depicted reaching out to two isomorphic symbols, respectively, with limbs, horns or lines/triangles. This general pattern, or part of it, appears to be much too common and deliberate to be random. Some thirty years ago, an original ‘archaeo-ethnological’ approach has allowed Jean-Daniel Forest to attempt a convincing decipherment of this type of depictions uncovered at the site of Çatalhöyük. To this author, the two side elements symbolize the subgroups of the community, or lineages, permanently exchanging sexual mates, while the central one stands for the capacity
of regeneration or for its result, the society. In other words, this represents the exogamic rule (‘marrying outside’), clearly identified by social anthropologists to be of utmost importance for all pre-state societies. Reflecting on the symbolism under an isomorphic form, like the twin pillars observed in various Neolithic sites, fertility would thus be conceptualized as a reciprocal marital exchange
scheme, no matter how many exogamic subgroups the actual society is divided into: exogamy is represented as two interacting subparts. The recent discovery of complete symbolic ‘archives’ pertaining to the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe has incited us to dig up Forest’s Çatalhöyük decipherment system and try it against this new array of pictorial representations. Despite inevitable uncertainties, it is striking how well it appears to make sense of most Göbekli Tepe depictions, indicating not only that his intuition must have been rather correct, but also that
it must have been widely shared during the Neolithic (and beyond).

This paper reports some refinements in the Threshold Model for Ceramic Resources based on distances to ceramic resources from ethnographic pottery making communities (Arnold 1985). The refinements make the thresholds more objective than they were in the previous model and enable it more precise application for identifying local vs. non-local ceramic production in the past.

How do the social and spatial organization of units of pottery production units change over time? As a follow-up to "Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution" (Colorado, 2008), this book uses a unique approach to ceramic ethnoarchaeology that traces the history of potters in Ticul, Yucatán and their production space over a period of more than four decades. Illustrated with more than 100 images of production units, it uses narrative to trace the changes in production personnel and their spatial organization through evolution production organization in Ticul including traditional househose and the development of new types of production organization. Although several different kinds of these units developed, only households have roots that extend deep into the 19th century, and these units are both the oldest and the most persistent units of production in spite of massive social change and the re-orientation of pottery production to the tourist market. On the contrary, recently developed entrepreneurial, attached, and government-sponsored workshops were more short-lived and did not persist. Changing production organization in Ticul also reveals that intermittent crafting, multi-crafting, and risk management also play and important role revealing the complexity of the craft production in the present as well as in antiquity.

This paper examines pottery production in three sub-dialect regions of the Central Pokomam (or Pokom) language in central Guatemala. One dialect area (Palin) has excellent agricultural land and makes no pottery. Another (Chinautla, Sacojito and Durazno region) has very poor agricultural land unsuited to anything except slash and burn agriculture and makes a variety of pottery. A third area (Mixco) has better agricultural land than Chinautla, but worse than Palin. Potters there made tortilla griddles. The comparison reveals that groups having the same culture history as revealed by language have different amount and intensities of pottery production depending of the quality of the agricultural land used for subsistence. (This research was seminal in the development of my thinking in the writing Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process (Cambridge UP, 1985), and is summarized there.)

During the last third of the twentieth century, traditional ceramic production in Ticul Yucatan, Mexico, changed greatly from pottery made exclusively for Maya household consumers to that made largely for tourists, and tourist hotels in Mérida and Cancun. This paper explores the factors behind the changes in ceramic production from a traditional craft making pottery for Maya households to a craft devoted to making pottery for commercial production and sale.

The paper criticises on the basis of ethno-archaeological data from Evenki hunter-gatherers in Siberia the settlement concept as it is used in hunter-gatherer archaeology. It pleas for the development of a more realistic and operational approach to the phenomenon. It is suggested that settlements should not be seen as small confined areas in the landscape but as a series of differently sized zones related to human habitation. Such a settlement concept would suit better an interdisciplinary approach than the traditional one. The archaeological problems related to re-use of locations for habitation - especially in forested environments with large amounts of firewood available - are
discussed in relation to organisational aspects of Mesolithic settlements.

In the literature dealing with the development of ceramic specialization, paste uniformity has been suggested as a surrogate index of product standardization and the result of a more intensive level of specialization. More recently, the amount of paste variability has been seen as an indicator of different types of production organization. Ethnoarchaeological data from Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala suggest that a variety of environmental, technological, and social factors influence paste variability. These factors are important in all production contexts and complicate inferences drawn about production organization in antiquity. As a consequence, social and economic inferences derived from ancient ceramic pastes need to be understood in relation to numerous other factors such as natural variability of the ceramic raw materials, their procurement, and their use in paste preparation. Furthermore, changes in resource use and paste preparation over time can obscure intracommunity and other fine-scale patterns. As a consequence, it is argued that little, if anything, can be learned about the organization of production below the level of the local production community. Rather, the primary usefulness of paste compositional analyses lies in the identification, in geographic and geological spaces (“community signature units”), of source communities that exploit raw materials within a limited range of probably no more than 3 to 4 km. Paste analyses thus provide important information about the organization of ceramic distribution, revealing the emergence and demise of source communities and the movement of their ceramic products.

Maya Blue is an unusual blue pigment consisting of a clay-organic complex of indigo and the unusual clay mineral palygorskite (also called attapulgite). Used on pottery, sculpture, and murals from the Preclassic to Late Colonial periods largely in Mesoamerica, blue was the color of sacrifice and ritual. Did the palygorskite used to make Maya Blue come from a restricted source in Yucatán like Shepard, Arnold, Arnold and Bohor believed, or from widespread sources like Littmann argued? This report presents the results of a pilot study comparing INAA and LA-ICP-MS analysis of 33 palygorskite samples collected from different parts of the Maya area. These data reveal that it is possible to discriminate mineral source locations, and that it should be possible to determine whether the palygorskite used to make Maya Blue came from widespread sources or was traded widely from one or a few sources. Consideration of contextual information such as agency, landscape and language suggest that the ...

Ethnoarchaeology as a sub-discipline of
archaeology primarily entails the survey and research
of various aspects of contemporary societies, in order
to enable archaeologists to understand the dynamic
processes that have created in the past the phenomena
we now recognize as archaeological material, i.e.
archaeological record. Ethnoarchaeological studies in
Serbia have been ill-fated, since almost all the roads
leading towards this approach have been jammed by
various conceptions of the idea of continuity. In Serbian
archaeology, continuity has been understood as the
continuation of direct Aegean and Greek influences,
as a metaphysical continuity of spirit, inexplicable
“ideal typical” continuity, national continuity, or as a
transmission of cultural traditions. Common to all these
paradigms is the understanding of continuity as a given,
and contemporaneous ethnographic material has been
used solely as an illustration of the long life of certain
cultural shapes. The true value of ethnoarchaeology as
a way of overcoming the statics of the archaeological
record and gaining insight into the dynamics of the past
has never been realized.

Written more than 40 years ago, this paper lays out some cautions for those archaeologists who analyze ceramic pastes. The cautions come from  ethnoarcheological data from my work in Peru, Guatemala, and Yucatan, Mexico. These points have been picked up and used by others, especially Rice in Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Paste analysis has moved beyond these points, but they still provide some cautions for those who analyze ceramic pastes.

Whereas production organization and its changes affect ceramics and ceramic technology, the techniques of production may also have an effect on craft organization. This paper argues that the adoption of the fabrication technique of vertical-half molding has important implications for the organization of ceramic production, the identification of that organization in antiquity and the study of its evolution. Ethnoarchaeological research in Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico suggests that potters do not use a molding technology because it is more efficient than other technologies, nor just because it produces a more uniform product. Rather, potters use molds for a variety of reasons. Molds are employed to create new and innovative vessels and are used to produce vessels that cannot be fabricated with any other technique. Molding also requires less skill than traditional techniques; virtually anyone can use molds to make pottery with little practice. Vertical-half molding, however, is paste, shape and size dependent, and is only utilized to fabricate small vessels. These advantages and disadvantages have significant implications for the organization of the potter's craft. Mold-made production requires more space than traditional techniques for fabrication and drying. Changing demand for vessels requires an increased number of molds, more space for the storage of molds, and more space for the production and storage of mold-made vessels. Potters using a molding technology can respond quickly to increased demand for ceramic objects by increasing the number of unskilled individuals making pots. Finally, a molding technology can easily be perpetuated and controlled by individuals unskilled in ceramic production. These factors suggest that a vertical-half molding technology has a selective advantage for "attached" specialization where the control and perpetuation of production resides outside of the potters' households.

This article summarizes the changes in pottery production and design that occurred in Ticul, Yucatan between 1965 and 1984. These changes consist of change to a ball-bearing turntable, an enhancement of the traditional turntable that turns on a nail, and changes in vessel shapes that occurred over time. The population of potters, however, has changed little. This description introduces the changes over a 20 year period that continued to change over a 32 year period that are described in Social Change and The Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community (above in books). The latter work expands and details the changes provided in this article and includes raw material acquisition, paste composition, patterns of demand and distribution, forming, vessel shapes, decoration  and firing.

This research paper deals with the rock art traditions and tribal arts of the little known
Lanjia Saora forest tribe of southern Orissa (eastern India). The tribal art of the Saora
has striking similarities with the Central Indian prehistoric rock art in terms of their style,
themes, colour, techniques, ritual and ceremonial character in addition to overall nature
of the painting. An attempt is made for a comprehensive study of the primeval tribal art
in order to understand the Central Indian rock art traditions. Systematic comparison is
attempted with some selected rock art motifs of Central India, with particular reference to the Bhimbetka group of rock art. In the preliminary study, different evolutionary phases
of the tribal art are observed. This valuable tradition is vanishing rapidly with the impact
of modernisation. Suggestions are also made to safeguard and document this priceless
heritage for further study.

This paper compares fabrication times for three pottery forming techniques in Ticul, Yucatán, and discusses the factors that affect the choice of one technique over another. Because fabrication techniques are part of the adaptation of a community of potters for making vessels within the limits of local raw materials, efficiency of time is only one factor affecting technique preference. Nevertheless, the potter's wheel is faster than a vertical-half molding technique and faster than using modified coiling on a traditional turntable (the kabal). The wheel, however, was never adopted in Ticul because of its cost and the incompatibility of the motor habit patterns that the wheel required with those used with traditional forming technique of modified (slab) coiling on the turntable.

Indigenous theories of historical knowledge and time may capture the interest of Western scholars, but when they do, it is a radical departure from the dominant discourse in Western archaeology, resulting in their denial as viable, and then being shuffled off-stage once again. Serious historical engagement with other ontologies is viewed as insidious rather than informative empirical evidence, even seen as threatening conventional historical methods and  protocols. Rather than listening to and learning from the ontologies of history-making peoples, this view argues that non-Western ontologies omit what we in the West comprehend as chains of causality, thus their consideration and use in our archaeologies defeats the principles of linear, progressive time in archaeology. Such denial of other ontologies introduces confusion and cast doubts on attempts to learn from other time-space realities. I argue here that when alternative local ontologies arise amid our archaeological practice, we are compelled as part of our responsibility as historians to account for how they structure physical phenomena that relate directly to space-time issues.

Although not described in the language of technical choice, this chapter describes the technical choices in design behavior of four utilitarian vessels shapes (N = 172) made by potters in Quinua, Peru during a six-month period in 1967. Designs are described in terms of the field of design and design zones, and the kinds of designs that occur in each zones. Designs are then analyzed using patterns of symmetry and plotted by shape and design zone. The patterns that emerge from the analysis reveal that some designs and symmetry type are restricted to certain shapes, and others are restricted to certain zones on  shapes. Designs and symmetry types that occur in the zones that always occur in a layout type of a particular shape have less variability than designs and symmetry types that do not always occur in zones that are not always present on that type. Finally, the layout, zones, and designs for each shape are organized into hierarchical decision trees that collectively model the decisions that the potters in the community make when they decorate these vessels.

These data reveal that the community patterns of design (or designs in what would now  be called a ‘community of practice’) are multi-dimensional and consist of similar surface preparation, slip and paint colors on each vessel shape. Second, they consist of high frequency methods of subdividing the design space on each vessel shape. Third, each type of design space contains certain design zones. Fourth, certain designs are associated with particular zones on each shape. Fifth, the community uses a high frequency of certain types of motif and band. Finally, most variability occurs with community-defined decorative space but outside of the high frequency patterns of design.

These conclusions suggest that when pottery design is used to reconstruct ancient patterns of social interaction, it must be done within the domain of particular vessel shapes, layout types, and design zones. Whereas these patterns may reflect patterns of kin groups, and geopolitical subgroups in Quinua, they definitely reflect overall design correlates of the interacting community of potters (or community of practice). Using the same method described here may enable archaeologists to identify interacting groups of potters (or ‘communities of practice’ in modern parlance) in antiquity.

Some of these data have been related to social and political structure in Quinua (Arnold 1983), and many of these data have been described and reprinted in Ecology and Ceramic Production an Andean Community (Arnold 1993).

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The destruction of cultural heritage during armed conflict has been a constant concern of the international community's interest in subsidiary respect for human rights in these tragic episodes. There is a ius in bello specially directed to minimize this type of damage, but, to be effective must be accompanied by an awareness of governments and armies of the value of cultural heritage as an instrument of social post-war recovery. A difficult task when it comes to the contestants, but more feasible when expeditionary forces are aimed at those scenarios involved in international organizations mandated with missions related to the processes of peacekeeping. This paper summarizes the current situation in this area, especially after what happened in Iraq in 2003, and proposes the incorporation of Spain to the group of countries aware of the value added by the introduction of this type of action in military missions abroad.