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Archaeologists such as Matthew Johnson have argued that most, if not all, aspects of archaeology are informed by theoretical considerations. In his overview of archaeological theory, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson of the University of Southampton put forward four arguments for why theory was so important to the archaeological discipline, and ...
A multitude of different theoretical approaches have developed over the last 50 years and exist in parallel across the discipline. These range broadly from an empirical archaeology viewed as a science, to a relativistic post-modern concept of archaeology as an ideology that cannot verify its own concepts.
Until the mid-20th century and the introduction of technology, there was a general consensus that archaeology was closely related to both history and anthropology. Since then, elements of other disciplines such as physics , chemistry , biology , metallurgy , engineering , medicine , etc., have found an overlap, resulting in a need to revisit ...
Archaeology, he noted, "has learnt to speak with greater authority and accuracy about the ecology of past societies, their technology, their economic basis and their social organization. Now it is beginning to interest itself in the ideology of early communities: their religions, the way they expressed rank, status and group identity."
The post-processualists' approach to archaeology is diametrically opposed to that of the processualists. The processualists, as positivists, believed that the scientific method should and could apply to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective statements about past societies based upon the evidence.
Winckelmann was a founder of scientific archaeology by first applying empirical categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the classical (Greek and Roman) history of art and architecture. His original approach was based on detailed empirical examinations of artefacts from which reasoned conclusions could be drawn and theories developed ...
Culture-historical thought would be introduced to British archaeology by the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in the late 1920s. In the United Kingdom and United States, culture-history came to be supplanted as the dominant theoretical paradigm in archaeology during the 1960s, with the rise of processual archaeology.
The normative model of culture is the central model in culture history, a theoretical approach to cultures in archaeology, anthropology and history. In essence it defines culture as a set of shared ideas, or norms. [1]: 65 The normative model was the dominant model in archaeological theory up to the rise of processual archaeology.