Zooarchaeology

3 units

Archaeologists use ancient objects or material culture to study all of the human past, in its length and diversity. To do this, we have to reconstruct human actions from the things people made and used and the impacts that they had on the environment. Since the 1960's archaeologists have turned in an increasingly systematic way to aspects of the way people relate to material culture in the present, as sources for analogies for interpreting aspects of the past. Ethnographic field studies designed with archaeological problems in mind have become more common, and have contributed substantially to archaeological interpretation. Questions such as how archaeological sites form, and interpretation of changing human diets, human adaptations to challenging environments, how people domesticated plants and animals, the nature of human foodways, gender roles, the spread of food production or ritual and burial practices have all been informed by ethnoarchaeological studies We will look at ethnoarcheological approaches to the interpretation of many different categories of archeological data including: lithics, ceramics, house structures, and rock art and discuss a wide variety of archaeological topics to which ethnoarchaeological approaches have been applied. The areas that we focus on will depend on the topics in which the class is most interested.