123 School Work

OUTLINE THE PRINCIPLE SOURCES OF CONFLICT BETWEEN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND COMMENT ON THE VALIDITY

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  The existence of archaeology in Europe as an individual academic discipline alongside anthropology offers credibility to those academics who advocate for the same individual recognition for archaeology in America, as opposed to acknowledgement as a subfield of anthropology. The need for individual recognition is deemed necessary because of the unique methods and techniques that have been developed over time. As technological advances encourage new methods of archaeological research, these are methods which differ from those used in the study of ethnology. It is the unique methods of research involved in archaeology that could distinguish it from other related disciplines individuality comes not from the actual data collected but the manner in which it was obtained. However, a source of conflict arises over the theoretical analysis of the data obtained. There have been calls for archaeology to not depend on theories assimilated from anthropology and instead develop their own theoretical interpretation. In the post-modern world, archaeological data may be better served by new individualistic theories of analysis that interpret the diversity of the human evolution in the scientific manner of archaeology, as opposed to the social interpretation of anthropology. European archaeology is based on the prehistory of nationalist identities, whereas American archaeology developed in relation to Boasian anthropology, the study of Native American populations that were seen as disappearing. The difference lays in the timescales involved. American anthropology has much closer ties with the ethnographic present, so the scope of the human experience that the archaeologist investigates may be constrained by anthropological interpretation...