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Anthropology

 

                  

2.1 Culture

2.1.1 Why study culture?

The study of culture has its roots in traveler’s accounts from the West as reports of different modes of existence of diverse human groups. The term “the noble savage” was coined from the ancient Roman’s account of what they termed the noble Bereans whom they considered simple and at one with nature. Culture is central to the study of anthropology. The entire subject, within its subfields is concerned with aspects of human existence. The study of the wide array of human cultures allow anthropology to generate a holistic and comparative outlook. Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing areas such as language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, and more. Culture is also defined as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned through socialization. Thus, it can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.  "Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language,marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million otherthings," Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London told Live Science.

The word "culture" derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin "colere," which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture. "It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth,"(What is Culture?, n.d.)

The study of cultures has received criticism as being a handmaiden to colonialism. Thesame effect occurs within the present era of globalization as described by (Denning, 2001)

       here:

“Globalization has quickly become a ubiquitous term; it names a process, an epoch, a discourse, a promise, a threat, a way of looking at ‘the world’. It also names a new kind of ‘inter-discipline’, anew protocol of writing and teaching in the humanities and social science. The article charts the emergence of globalization in cultural studies: first, by sketching the lineaments of globalization discourse as it appears in three major anthologies of cultural studies of globalization; second, by arguing that the freedom from history implied by the idea of globalization always depends on a variety of implicit narratives about the past; and third, by speculating on the ways one might constitute the culture of the era of globalization.”

          We study culture because of its inherent theme providing the tapestry of human existence and  lifestyles. Culture as a topic in research allows access to the entire human drama of action and reaction we are subjected to. The current perspective of cultural studies had their beginnings in the United Kingdom under the impetus of Bronislaw Malinowski, (Malinowski, 1966) with his field research in former Britishcolonies. He contributed to what is named salvage ethnography whose purpose was to leave a record of cultures in danger of disappearance.

 A different brand of cultural studies emerged in the United States under the early work of Frans Boaz (Boas, 1904) through his study with the Inuit. Boas’ work resulted in uniting the study ofculture with the three other dimensions of anthropology and thus establishing a unified school for the entire subject matter of anthropology.

 The studies of both Malinowski and Boas demonstrate why culture turned out to be a relevantscientific subject of inquiry. Both practitioners established principles and methods of studying unfamiliar cultures which find wider applications.We study culture because of our interest in gaining knowledge of others and ourselves. 

 As an example of multiculturalism, media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed. (Kellner, n.d.)

       

          2.1.2 Cultural variations

         Cultures vary over time and space. Past cultures have undergone change giving rise to the diversity of cultures that we observe today. Cultures also vary over the geographic landscape and there is evidence of borrowing between adjacent cultures which results in culture change and variations. Cultures are thus defined chronologically and spatially indicating the manner of their variation. A variant culture may be described in ethnographic, nationalistic or even racial terms. Although there are domains of culture that indicate cultural universals,  variations in cultures are notable.  

Culture is learned knowledge, used to interpret experience and to generate behavior. Proxemics or the violation of body distance is a learned attribute that varies across cultures. In Latin America, people who may be complete strangers may engage in very close contact. They often greet one another by kissing on the cheeks. North Americans, on the other hand, prefer to shake hands. While they have made some physical contact with the shaking of the hand, they still maintain a certain amount of physical space between the other person. (Proxemics - Proxemics and Culture, n.d.) Cultural characteristics of being learned, shared and symbolic contribute to the variations in cultures. Organizational culture is a choice example of shared culture. It shows why members of an organization often share similar beliefs. There are two mechanisms that lie at the origin of organizational shared culture. First, when performance depends on making correct decisions, people prefer to work with others who share their beliefs and assumptions, since such others 'will do the right thing'. Second, beliefs will converge over time through shared learning. While such homogeneity reduces agency problems, it does so at a cost. From an outsider's perspective, firms invest on average too much in homogeneity. (Steen, 2010)

Cultures also possess symbolic representations that uniquely characterize each group.

Cultural theory posits that social groups possess a cultural repertoire or “tool kit” that reflects beliefs, ritual practices, stories and symbols that provide meaning and impetus for resource mobilization. However, little research based on quantitative techniques has been forwarded relative to the relationship between longstanding Black Church cultural components ‐ specifically, scripture, songs, prayers and sermons ‐ and activism among Black churches. Using a large national sample of Black congregations across seven denominations, aspects of cultural theory have been tested findings support that consistent, direct relationship between prayer groups and gospel music and various forms of community action and less influence by spirituals and the general usage of sacred scripture. (Barnes, 2005)

 Cultural learning occurs inside circumscribed groups giving rise to attributes that are unique to each culture. Drawing on interviews in different contexts, it was found that conduct associated with the practice of ‘dating’ among New York respondents is more rationalized as indicated by a greater awareness of timing, a greater degree of intentionality and planning and a greater tendency to psychologize self and others. Berlin respondents report observations of themselves and others in less detail and tend to describe themselves as passive objects of the impersonal forces of love. Whereas conduct associated with dating is more reflexive in some ways, these forms of reflexive conduct are not themselves fully conscious or the object of reflection but have in turn become taken for granted and habitual. These findings challenge us to conceptualize habitus in a manner that does not reproduce the opposition between habit and reflexivity but allows us to use the concept as a tool to capture variations in how self-monitoring and habit are combined in modes of conduct. (Krause & Kowalski, 2013)

The variations among cultures can also be observed through the fact that culture is shared. Here (Alter & Kwan, 2009) is what is termed “Cultural Sharing in a Global Village: as exposure to foreign cultural environments.

          2.1.3 Ethnocentrism and Cultural relativism

Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own culture or way of life is normal and natural; and using one’s culture to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others.

There is also a belief that ethnocentrism may be unavoidable unless tendered with reflexivity which is a critical self-examination of the role anthropologists play and an awareness that one’s identity affects one’s fieldwork and analysis.

Anthropologists seek to avoid ethnocentrism in favor of relativism and reflexivity. Relativism is the approach of choice versus ethnocentrism but poses its own problems when anthropologists are faced with human rights concerns. French anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the vexed question whether anthropology should be moral or not. Observing a general discomfort with the question of morality in the discipline of anthropology, Fassin argues that such a discomfort might actually serve a valuable heuristic function for the development of a moral anthropology in the near future. What Fassin means by moral anthropology is essentially a form of empirical inquiry that investigates how social agents articulate and negotiate moral claims in local contexts. (Caduff, 2011)

It is currently a common practice among anthropologists to take the side of disenfranchised groups they come across in their studies. Anthropologists who work with marginalized and disenfranchised communities frequently find themselves in the midst of shorthand long-term crises. Ongoing poverty and systemic discrimination, abrupt changes in entitlement programs and other policies, natural and human-made disasters, and profit-minded development initiatives can all threaten the lives and livelihoods of those we study. As practitioners of a methodology that emphasizes personal attachment, our first instinct is to leap headlong into crisis. In recent years, calls for engaged, public, and activist anthropology have ignited the discipline, making such interventions not only accepted but often expected (Checker, Davis, & Schuller, 2014)

          2.1.4 Race and Ethnicity

The concept of race is one of the most intellectually and emotionally charged subjects, not only in society but in science as well. NOVA Online asked two leading anthropologists, Dr. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan and Dr. George Gill of the University of Wyoming, fall on either side of the debate about whether race exists in biologic terms, to state their points of view. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, you will find their arguments well-reasoned and thought-provoking. (Does Race Exist?, n.d.) The concept of race has declined as worthy of use in delimiting human populations; the main reason being that originally conceived as a biological term human population, DNA evidence demonstrates that there is very little distinction among assumed human races. Ethnicity and race have been used interchangeably to describe human populations.

The terminology used to describe ethnic groups has changed markedly over time, and however defined or measured, tends to evolve in the context of social and political attitudes or developments. Ethnic group is also very diverse, encompassing common ancestry and elements of culture, identity, religion, language and physical appearance. (Ethnic group, n.d.)

 There has been little serious work to integrate the constructionist approach and the cognitive approach in the domain of race, although many researchers have paid lip service to this project. Little satisfactory account of human beings’ racialist cognition has to integrate both approaches. A step toward this integration has been suggested where an evolutionary theory that rests on a distinction between various kinds of groups is used. (kin-based groups, small-scale coalitions and ethnics). (Machery & Faucher, 2005)

Intersectionality is an analytic framework in anthropology for assessing how factors such as race, gender and, class intersect to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification. Kimberle Crenshaw who coined the term intersectionality writes:

“There is sometimes a failure to make analogies, she says. Feminists who have answers for the questions of class politics and how it plays out along gender lines sometimes exhibit an unwillingness to apply the same principles around feminism and race. “That ability to be intersectional - even though it’s not called that - isn’t replicated in [this] conversation, I think that the same kind of openness and fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we as feminists expect from men in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of color can rely upon with our white feminist allies.” (Adewunmi, n.d.)

In contradistinction to the treatment of race as a problem of epistemology—on how phenotype is represented in racial discourse— a materialist ontology of race is sought. The creative materiality of race is asserted following the ‘material turn’ in feminism, anthropology, complexity theory, and Deleuze. Race is shown to be an embodied and material event, a ‘machine assemblage’ with a different spatiality than the self/other scheme of Hegel. Taking issue with the calls for the transcendence of race amongst cultural studies scholars such as Paul Gilroy. It is suggested that the political battle against racial subordination includes a serious engagement with its biological dimensions. Race should not be eliminated, but its energies harnessed through a cosmopolitan ethics which is sensitive to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature.  (Saldanha, 2006)  

2.1.5 Kinship

Kinship describes relationship and residence rules for a circumscribed group of people. Forms of kinship range from that of nuclear families to extended families.  

Kinship is central to social organization in many societies; how people think about kinship should be relevant to social cognition generally. One window onto the mental representation of kinship is afforded by variation and universals in terms for kin. Kin terminologies are commonly organized around binary distinctive features, and terms for some types of kin are consistently linguistically marked. These observations can be formalized in the newly developed framework of linguistic Optimality Theory: permutations in the rank order of a small set of constraints generate basic types of kin terminology without over-generating rare or non-existent types. The result, I argue, is evidence for an innate faculty of social cognition (including several universal schemas of social relationships), apparently shaped by several kinds of genetic kin selection. (Jones, 2004)

 

All languages have expressions that can be glossed ‘father,’ ‘wife,’ ‘brother-in-law,’ etc., covering consanguineal, spousal, and affinal categories. However, from the beginning of serious cross-cultural study, it has been apparent that societies differ in the kinship categories used. To facilitate comparison, an ‘etic grid’ is necessary; namely, an open-ended universe of kin-types, such as ‘father’s sister,’ corresponding to the denotata of the infinitely expansible possessive construction seemingly found in all languages. The minimal nuclear components are parent (Pa), child (Ch), and spouse (Sp), a combinatory algorithm (PaPaSp ¼ parent’s parent’s spouse), and cross-cutting features, including sex of referent (Ch þ female ¼ daughter), sex of linking relative (male linking relative þ Ch þ female ¼ man’s daughter), and relative age within a generation (PaSb þ senior ¼ senior sibling). The initial linking relative (e.g., you in your father) is referred to as ‘ego’ or ‘propositus.’ In practice, most anthropologists and linguists operate with atomic categories based on a prototypical set of flesh-and-blood nuclear family members: Fa(ther), Mo(ther), Br(other), Si(ster), So(n), Da(ughter), Wi(fe), and Hu(sband). Combinations are then of the type FaMoBrWi (father’s mother’s brother’s wife). This grid permits analysis of the denotational scope of each kin term and, ultimately the entire system, by identifying the complete set of kin-types onto which the term maps. Some terms, such as English mother and brother, denote unique kin-types. Others, such as English uncle, correspond semantically to finite sets of kin-types. However, in languages with ‘classificatory’ kin-term systems, each such term maps onto an unbounded set of kin-types. With such languages, a common approach is to generate the more complex kin-types from simpler ones by expansion rules that link kin-types closer to propositus, with kin-types in the denoted set farther away; doing so entails converse reduction rules that go from complex to simple types. If in a system the term for MoBrDa expands to include MoMoBrDaDa, then conversely, MoMoBrDaDa reduces terminologically to MoBrDa; they are both denoted by the same term in such a system of terms. (Heath, 2006)

Marriage is the process through which non-kin become kin depending on exogamy. Kinship relationships are however formed outside biological ties. At the present time, although human population has reached over the 3 billion mark, many industrialized countries are experiencing an alarming fall in population growth. This is no doubt due to childless marriages by choice or one child marriages by edict.

The role of the family is important in cultural studies because it is the institution where acculturation occurs.

In different parts of the industrialized West we are beginning to see families with same sex parents which has to be considered a progressive idea. The female - male, domestic - public dichotomy will be transformed by such an arrangement. A study examined whether there are differences between gay father families (n = 36) and heterosexual families (n = 36) on father-child relationship, fathers' experiences of parental stress and children's wellbeing. The gay fathers in the study all became parents while in same-sex relationships. They donated sperm to lesbian couples and then shared the child-rearing with them in kinship arrangements. It was also examined whether aspects that are related specifically to gay fathers (i.e., experiences of rejection, having to defend their family situation, with whom the children live, and conflicts with the children's mothers) are also related to the father-child relationship, parental stress and children's wellbeing. Data were collected by means of questionnaires filled in by the fathers. No significant differences between the family types were found on emotional involvement and parental concern in the father-child relationship, parental burden (as an aspect of parental stress) or the children's wellbeing. However, gay fathers felt less competent in their child-rearing role than heterosexual fathers. For gay fathers especially, experiences of rejection and the feeling that they have to defend their situation were significantly related to father-child relationship, parental stress and children's wellbeing. (Bos, 2010)

 

          2.1.6 Religion

The earliest assumed record of the religious is that of ceremonial burial by Neanderthals. The burials with evidence of pollen grains indicating that flowers must have accompanied the deceased and their bodies placed in secured position is interpreted to indicate an early form of ancestor worship.

It appears that the oldest known symbolic burials are those of early modern humans at Skhul and Qafzeh. This supports the view that, despite the associated Middle Palaeolithic technology, elements of modern human behaviour were represented at Skhul and Qafzeh prior to 100 ka. (Grün, et al., 2005)

Research about religious beliefs throughout the world has exposed a diversity of symbols, rituals, myths, institutions, religious experts, groups, deities, and supernatural forces.

Religion is the subject concerned with human ideas regarding the supernatural. Religious life extends from the polytheism to monotheism in parallel to economic life. In 1923 R. S. Rattray produced his classic work on Ashanti, in which he illustrated the worship of the Supreme Being, SNyame, with photographs of priests and temples, and texts of prayers in the Twi language and in translation. He also described some of the shrines and ceremonies of lesser gods (abosom), especially the river Tano, lake Bosomtwe, the river Bea and the sea, Opo. Ashanti religion appeared to be a mixture, in which an undoubted High God ruled concurrently with lesser divine and ancestral spirits, and the explanation of this diversity was said to be that men needed the favour of every kind of spiritual being and it would be a mistake to concentrate upon one and incur the anger of those who were neglected. (Parrinder, 1970)

 During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church. They persecuted scientists who formed theories the Church deemed heretical and forbade people from reading any books on those subjects by placing the books on the Index of Prohibited Books. A type of war between science and religion was in play but there would be more casualties on the side of science. (Leveillee, 2011) Early thinkers were of the opinion that the religious life will cease to have an importance once humans have conquered the frontiers of science. This opinion is not now supported by facts, religion continues to play an important role in human life.

Durkheim’s early theses on “The Elementary Forms of The Religious Life” testifies to the commonality of religion across cultures. Durkheim’s use of the term “elementary” derives from an outdated outlook that demonstrates evaluating phenomena among the “others” from the uplifted perch of one’s own. Cultural studies have since abandoned such a practice. A religion, by any other form is still a religion. The division between sacred and profane is a universal attribute. When Emile Durkheim wrote of the formes elementaires of religion, he was not writing about the origins of religion, as did so many of his contemporaries, from E. B. Tylor to James George Frazer. Rather, drawing on the work of some perhaps unlikely predecessors, chief among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Durkheim built a theory of religion that ought to have disallowed the question of origins altogether. For, if religion is a reflection and an integral part of society itself, how could we even imagine a human society existing before the emergence of religion? This article revisits Durkheim’s seminal work on Australian Aboriginal religion in light of this basic feature of his theory and questions whether Durkheim was able, ultimately, to avoid the thorny question of the origin of religion. (Trompf, 2011)

 

 

         2.1.7 Adaptive strategies and the political life

Adaptive strategies are the economic activities that describe a population. Yehudi Cohen (1983) (Cohen, 1983) has laid out term for stages in human for stages economic activities that range from hunter gathering, to horticulture, to pastoralism, to agriculture, and to industrialization. We currently have examples of the various modes of production in different parts of the world including historically known hunter gatherer groups.

Each strategy is characterized by its own typical socio-cultural structure. The different domains of culture including political life display undergo stages that can be identified with each stage in the economic life. The cultural domain of the political ranges from organization in bands to the formation of the state in parallel to the different stages of economic adaptations.

Hunter gatherers are tied to the natural and travel over a wide territory. Studies of modern hunter gatherers indicates they posess a developed knowledge of plants and the movement of animals. Hunter gatherer political life is dubbed acephalous because of the absence of an apparent leader.  Hunter gatherers are said to form an egalitarian band.

Horticulture is believed to be the next stage of economic adaptation that replaced hunting and gathering. This is not to indicate an evolutionary development since both hunting and gathering and horticulture are known in parallel. Horticulture is marked by the use of simple instruments to till soil plants and the building of shelters. We may say in holticulture we observe an economy where people build homes and tend a nearby garden. The political life of horticultural people is exemplified by the horticultural Enset cultivating people of Ethiopa, who display a generational political life structured around the chronological growth of the enset plants.

Pastoralists have an economy that depends on raising and tending animals. They may be nomadic or practice transhumance. Pastoralist among the Afar of Ethiopia are organized under  chiefly rule. Chiefdoms are the least describe type of organization, but the formal office of the chief is identified under their structure. The chiefly office is an office tied to descent.

The development of agriculture with the domestication of plant and animal species has led to a marked turning point in history. Agricultural adaptation involves the use of animals with the invention of the plow. Production became large scale and individuals developed an interest in carving off individual land.

The production of food and large-scale storage is commonly thought of as a trigger for population growth with some unfortunate repercussions, most especially down the road.

Cities and civilizations emerged due to state formation.

The industrial age which began with the invention of metallurgy and the wheel led to an unprecedent growth in human population.

The political features of the state arose out of the need to regulate aspects of such a growing population.

 

         2.1.8 Globalization

This is the increased intensification of interactions of increased movement of money, people, goods, and ideas within and across natural borders.

The global media scope is a global cultural flow of media and visual images that enable linkages and communication across boundaries in ways unimaginable a century ago. (IMF, 1 2002)

The end of the world as we know it. Once upon a time, not very long ago, economic globalization - the free worldwide flow of capital, goods, and labor - looked both inevitable and inexorable. Most governments seemed to embrace the very real benefits being offered by rapid technological change and international markets and sought to liberalize their economies in order to maximize these gains. Policymakers worked to prepare their societies for a world of ever-increasing interconnectedness and relentless competition, and the debate - at least within the United States - started to revolve around how to cope with the effects of this new "flat" earth. (Abdelal & Segal, 2008)

 The earth is not flat, as claimed in a recent bestseller in the context of globalization (Friedman). It is not even necessarily round. It is uneven—there are highs and lows, valleys, craters, rocks and cliffs. It is not an even playing field for the six billion‐odd human beings who inhabit this planet. Some of us occupy the high ground by virtue of belonging to dominant religions, races, castes, languages and gender. Others less fortunate must contend with the essentialisms and hegemonies created by such dominant groups. Such essentialisms are also called fundamentalisms—orders that privilege the in‐group beliefs and selves and marginalize the other. A fundamentalist social orientation jeopardizes not just the quality of life and liberty enjoyed by those who do not fall into the dominant pattern, but sometimes their very existence itself. (Bharucha, 2007)

The debate continues to rage over whether or not global expansion of corporations and the opening of economic markets in developing countries is good for the poorest of the world's nations. Do the poor really benefit from investments made by large corporations in their country, or do the rich only get richer? If there is benefit, is it simply in job creation or are there other factors that influence a developing nation's overall wellbeing? Although many factions weigh in on the subject, several basic ideas should be considered. (Natter 2019)

 

 

         2.1.9 Ethnography and Ethnology

An ethnography is a complete account of a distinct cultural group or phenomenon. Practitioners in the study of culture are known as ethnographers hence the studies they produce is known as such. Ethnographies are original pieces of research where the researcher participates in field work and participant observation.

Bronislaw Malinowski (Young M. W., 2015) is often considered one of anthropology's most skilled ethnographers, especially because of the highly methodical and well theorized approach to the study of social systems. He is often referred to as the first researcher to bring anthropology that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasized the importance of detailed participant - observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they are to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that are so important to understanding a different culture.

Ethnographic writing includes ‘zeros’ that are elements of a story that are omitted   and ‘mutual transformations’ where both the subject and the anthropologist are affected by the field experience.

Ethnographic writing is polyvocal, shifts in tone and style and assumes authority. There is also a current tendency of ethnographic writings to adopt an experimental approach.

Moral and ethical guidelines also guide the ethnographer. (Li, 2008)

Ethnology draws on the analysis of set of ethnographies by submitting local data to cross – cultural comparison. The emic (local centered) perspective forms an understanding of culture on its own terms. In order to adhere to the anthropological commitment to cultural diversity, ethnological analysis also undertakes the etic (scientist centered) approach.

2.2 Language

        2.2.1 The origin of language

Language is a structured system of communication used by humans. It consists of sounds in spoken languages or written elements in written languages. Additionally, a language may consist of other symbolic elements like hand gestures in sign languages to convey information.

Humans are not the only animals that use forms of communication although human language involves sounds and gestures along with myriad symbols that have deep historical and cultural meaning. It is remarkably flexible and creative, rapidly adapting to changes in human life and environment. The human capacity for acquiring speech and language must derive, at least in part, from the genome. In 2001, a study described the first case of a gene, FOXP2. This gene could, without being specific to the brain or to our own species, still provide an invaluable entry-point into understanding the genetic cascades and neural pathways that contribute to our capacity for speech and language. (Marcus & Fisher, 2003)

In captivity, apes can acquire humanlike gestures even for use in language or language-like codes (such as ASL, the American Sign Language of the deaf), although acquisition by apes of vocal signs not already part of their species-specific vocal call system is extraordinarily difficult and very limited. (Hewes, 1981)

Jakobson's model of the functions of language distinguishes six elements, or factors of communication, that are necessary for communication to occur: (1) context, (2) addresser (sender), (3) addressee (receiver), (4) contact, (5) common code and (6) message. Each factor is the focal point of a relation, or function, that operates between the message and the factor. The functions are the following, in order: (1) referential ("The Earth is round"), (2) emotive ("Yuck!"), (3) conative ("Come here"), (4) phatic ("Hello?"), (5) metalingual ("What do you mean by 'krill'?"), and (6) poetic ("Smurf"). When we analyze the functions of language for a given unit (such as a word, a text or an image), we specify to which class or type it belongs (e.g., a textual or pictorial genre), which functions are present/absent, and the characteristics of these functions, including the hierarchical relations and any other relations that may operate between them. (Hébert, 2011)

The origin of language and its evolutionary emergence in the human species have been subjects of speculation for several centuries. The topic is difficult to study because of the lack of direct evidence. Consequently, scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from other kinds of evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition and comparisons between human language and systems of communication existing among animals (particularly other primates). Many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the implications and directionality of this connection.

          2.2.2 Descriptive and historical linguistics

The study of language is structured under a rubric that is built of the primary element of the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning (a phoneme) continuing to the area of the study of the sounds that exist and are important in particular languages(phonology) A morpheme is the smallest unit that carries meaning and the combinations of these are studied under morphology. Descriptive linguistic studies also include rules of syntax and grammar in the construction of phrases and sentences and language use. In the study of languages semiotics is described as a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.

Human language consists of non-verbal elements such as kinesics or body language and paralanguage which are sets of noises and tones of voice that carry information.

The particular manner of speech of an individual is termed an idiolect. Although a dialect is considered a non-standard variation of a language, variations in languages that gradually appear over long distances so that groups of people who live near one another speak in a way that is mutually intelligible contributes to the language continuum addressed by historical linguistics.

From the sociolinguistic point of view, Black English is increasingly recognized as a systemic, 'rule-governed', form of language (lect), like any other, at least among scholars. There is less adequate understanding of the meaning of Black English to those who use it. Such understanding requires ethnographic study of the place of Black English in the verbal repertoire of the community in which it is used. There has been some work in this area, but much of it has focused on aspects of Black English of interest for linguistic theory, e.g. the possibility of creole origins as a constraint on variability. Such studies have tended not to recognize the full scope and complexity of Black English. (Hoover, 1978)

          2.2.3 Language and thought

Noam Chomsky is famous for his theory on transformational-generative grammar, also known as universal-grammar theory. He believed that language is innate, meaning that humans are born with a capacity for language. He based his theory on the fact that it is unclear as to how humans acquired the ability to speak a language. The absence of environmental influences still allows the human brain to have a pre-determined set of rules for how language works when one is born.

Critics of the Universal- grammar hypothesis elaborate mostly fall under the following four areas:

1. Chomsky differentiates between competence and performance. Performance is what people say, which is often ungrammatical, whereas competence is what they instinctively know about the syntax of their language - and this is more or less equated with the Universal Grammar. Chomsky concentrates upon this aspect of language - he thus ignores the things that people say. The problem here is that he relies upon people's intuitions as to what is right or wrong - but it is not at all clear that people will all make the same judgements, or that their judgements actually reflect the way people really do use the language.
2. Chomsky distinguishes between the 'core' or central grammar of a language, which is essentially founded on the UG, and peripheral grammar. Thus, in English, the fact that 'We were' is considered correct, and 'We was ' incorrect is a historical accident, rather than an integral part of the core grammar - as late as the 18th Century, recognised writers, such as Dean Swift, could write 'We was ...' without feeling that they had committed a terrible error. Similarly, the outlawing of the double negation in English is peripheral, due to social and historical circumstances rather than anything specific to the language itself. To Chomsky, the real object of linguistic science is the core grammar. But how do we determine what belongs to the core, and what belongs to the periphery? To some observers, all grammar is conventional, and there is no reason to make the Chomskian distinction.
3. Chomsky also appears to reduce language to its grammar. He seems to regard meaning as secondary - a sentence such as 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' may be considered as part of the English language, for it is grammatically correct, and therefore worthy of study by Transformational Grammarians. A sentence such as 'My mother, he no like bananas', on the other hand, is of no interest to the Chomskian linguist. Nor would he be particularly interested in most of the utterances heard during a normal lecture.
4. Because he disregards meaning, and the social situation in which language is normally produced, he disregards the situation in which the child learns his first language.

In distinction, The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis known as linguistic determinism, states that our language determines how we think and perceive the world. There are different levels of linguistic determinism, some that are “stronger” than others. “Weaker” forms of this idea suggest that language simply influences the way we think. To people who only speak one language, the concept of linguistic determinism might be hard to grasp.

Language, culture, and mind are closely related, each of these extracts reflects one another. The relationship between language, culture and mind of speakers is a basic idea of Sapir and Whorf's theories and hypotheses. Language politeness that is rooted in the splash of the cultural values of the speaking community, including can be seen from the packaging of the information structure as outlined in the sentence of a language. The construction of different clauses grammatically packs different information structures and politeness values. The way of thinking between cultures as outlined in a writing will be different in the way it is delivered. The purpose of this study is to describe culture in expressive writing, is seen from the hypothesis of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. (Syahrin, 2018)

          2.2.4 Language loss

Well before the present era of globalization, but even more aggravated at present diminishing language diversity is observed. Half of the 7,000 languages in the world today could be lost by the end of the 21^st century. On average one language is lost every ten days (Harrison 2007).

As "globalization" increases, so does the loss of human languages. People find it easier to conduct business and communicate with those outside their own culture if they speak more widely used languages like Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish or Russian. Children are not being educated in languages spoken by a limited number of people. As fewer people use local languages, they gradually die out.

There is a current move for language revitalization and preservation, since the major obstacle causing language loss is the fact most of the languages under threat have not been written down. Documentation is the key to preserving endangered languages. Linguists are trying to document as many as they can by describing grammars and structural features, by recording spoken language and by using computers to store this information for study by scholars. Many endangered languages are only spoken; no written texts exist. So, it is important to act quickly in order to capture them before they go extinct.

On the positive side, one language can enrich another—for example, by providing words and concepts not available in the other language. Most languages (including English) have borrowed words of all kinds. Learning another language often brings an appreciation of other cultures and people. The study of endangered languages also has implications for cognitive science because languages help illuminate how the brain functions and how we learn. “We want to know what the diversity of languages tells us about the ways the brain stores and communicates experience,” says Peg Barratt, NSF division director for behavioral and cognitive sciences. “Our focus is not just on recording examples of languages that are soon to disappear, but on understanding the grammars, vocabularies and structures of these languages.” (Fuller & Malone, 2008)

At least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages (about 50 percent) are about to be lost. Why should we care? Here are several reasons.

The enormous variety of these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities— and limits—of the human mind. Each endangered language embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems in the region in which it is spoken. These languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history.

          2.2.5 Language in the digital age

In the article Born Digital Palfrey and Gasser (2011) illustrate the group in the world population that they have termed ‘digital natives’ - a generation of people born after 1980 who have been raised in the digital age and have spent their entire lives thinking digitally. The earlier group are termed ‘digital immigrants’ and suggestions for communications between the two groups is reviewed here. (Autry & Berge, 2011)

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute. What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N- [for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. (Prensky, n.d.)

Digital activism has taken root due to the availability of social media that has the ability to organize masses of people under any imaginable platform.  Digital activists tend to be the young making use of technology mediated tools for social interaction, crowd engagement and participation, through a networked and apparently leaderless social and political activism. By analyzing the interaction between the existing tools and the generational characteristics of the social actors in particular situations the role that digital systems and new social media play in certain situations is made clear. (Mora, 2014)

Unfortunately, there is a digital divide in access and connectivity issues in non-industrialized and less urbanized regions.

2.3 Archaeology

 2.3.1 Ancient civilizations

Archaeology is the study of material culture. The classification of hand tools by Thomsen using three categories of materials—stone, bronze, and iron—to represent what he felt had been the ordered succession of technological development. The idea has since been formalized in the designation of a Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

In successive years, the Assyrian and Sumerian civilizations were unearthed followed by Troy and Mycenae.

The Early Iron Age inscriptions and reliefs carved on the cave walls of the Dibni Su sources at the site of Birkleyn in Eastern Turkey, known as the ‘Source of the Tigris’ monuments, present a compelling paradigm for such spatial practices. Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) carved ‘images of kingship’ and accompanying royal inscriptions at this impressive site in a remote but politically contested region. This important commemorative event was represented in detail on Shalmaneser III's bronze repoussé bands from Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat) as well as in his annalistic texts, rearticulating the performance of the place on public monuments in Assyrian urban contexts. (Harmanşah, 2007)

The evidence presented by Dalley, an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages, emerged from deciphering Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform scripts and reinterpreting later Greek and Roman texts. They included a 7th-century BC Assyrian inscription that, she discovered, had been mistranslated in the 1920s, reducing passages to "absolute nonsense".

She was astonished to find Sennacherib's own description of an "unrivalled palace" and a "wonder for all peoples". He describes the marvel of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze – and predating the invention of Archimedes' screw by some four centuries. (Alberge)

Archaeologists digging in southern Iraq have uncovered the remains of a large harbor built more than 4,000 years ago by the Sumerians. The discovery confirms that Sumerians, best known for creating one of the world's earliest civilizations based on farming, had advanced seafaring skills too and were trading with distant lands, including the Indian subcontinent. (David, n.d.)

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was a product of the nineteenth century who remains unforgotten today as the excavator of Troy and Mycenae, he became the founder of a new scholarly discipline, modern archaeology, that is field archaeology. Along with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717- 1768), the founder of archaeology as art history. (Schindler, 1992)

The ancient Greeks and Romans considered Ancient Egypt as the fountain of wisdom of knowledge. But it is only during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte that an archaeological study that revealed the treasures of ancient Egypt was uncovered. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798.  He is reputed to have had a keen interest keen on the excavation of Egyptian archaeology. The scientists that accompanied him explored, collected, and recorded antiquities. In 1822 Jean Francois Champollion deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

2.3.2 American archaeology

American archaeology properly begins with an interest in the ‘Moundbuilders’. Thomas Jefferson excavated such a burial on his Virginia estate in the 1780s and uncovered several layers of skeletons.

In the 1890s Cyrus Thomas proved beyond doubt that the mounds were of Native American manufacture.

Rising above the northern Michigan landscape, prehistoric burial mounds and impressive circular earthen enclosures bear witness to the deep history of the region’s ancient indigenous peoples. These mounds and earthworks have long been treated as isolated finds and have never been connected to the social dynamics of the time in which they were constructed, a period called Late Prehistory.
In Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200–1600, Meghan C. L. Howey uses archaeology to make this connection. She shows how indigenous communities of the northern Great Lakes used earthen structures as gathering places for ritual and social interaction, which maintained connected egalitarian societies in the process.
Examining “every available ceramic sherd from every northern earthwork,” Howey combines regional archaeological investigations with ethnohistory, analysis of spatial relationships, and collaboration with tribal communities to explore changes in the area’s social setting from 1200 to 1600. During this time, cultural shifts, such as the adoption of maize horticulture, led to the creation of the earthen constructions. Burial mounds were erected, marking claims to resources and defining areas for local ritual gatherings, while massive circular enclosures were constructed as inter societal ceremonial centers. Together, Howey shows, these structures made up part of an interconnected, purposefully designed cultural landscape. When societies incorporated the earthworks into their egalitarian social and ritual behaviors, the structures became something more: ceremonial monuments.

The first systematic examination of earthen constructions in what is today Michigan, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200–1600 reveals complicated indigenous histories that played out in the area before European contact. Howey’s richly illustrated investigation increases our understanding of the diverse cultures and dynamic histories of the pre-Columbian ancestors of today’s Great Lake tribes (Howey, 2012)

 The ancient mounds and earthworks of imagined "lost civilizations" that dotted the landscape west of the Allegheny Mountains were contrasted with the "savagery" of the contemporary native inhabitants of the region and became key tropes in a colonialist discourse that sought to justify and legitimate the westward expansion of agrarian capitalism. One result of this discourse was the production of historical narratives that have collectively come to be known as the "myth of the moundbuilders” (Mann R. , 2005).

The spread of plaza-pyramid complexes across southern Mesoamerica during the early Middle Pre-classic period (1000 to 700 BCE) provides critical information regarding the origins of lowland Maya civilization and the role of the Gulf Coast Olmec. Recent excavations at the Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, documented the growth of a formal ceremonial space into a plaza-pyramid complex that predated comparable buildings at other lowland Maya sites and major occupations at the Olmec center of La Venta. The development of lowland Maya civilization did not result from one-directional influence from La Venta, but from interregional interactions, involving groups in the southwestern Maya lowlands, Chiapas, the Pacific Coast, and the southern Gulf Coast. (Inomata, Triadan, Aoyama, Castillo, & Yonenobu, 2013)

By the year 500, Mayan cities had been in existence for more than three hundred years and the Maya had reached a high in economic prosperity. It is estimated that two hundred years later the Mayan population peaked. Then, between the years 750 and 900, one Mayan city after another was abandoned and much of the Mayan population disappeared. The last of the hieroglyphic writing erected in the city of Copan (Copán) was dated as the year 800. The last hieroglyphic writing in the city of Piedra Negras is dated 810. The last writing on a stele in Tikal is dated as 869. Abandoned cities, where Maya had thought their gods dwelled, became overgrown with jungle and filled with the chatter of monkeys and birds.

The few Maya who remained were on the periphery of what had been Mayan civilization. Exactly why Mayan civilization disappeared is not known. One cause dismissed by scholars is that of invasion by outsiders. Another possible cause is a decline in food production. On the skeletal remains of Maya who lived during the period of decline, archaeologists have found signs of inadequate nutrition. These remains were shorter in stature, the bones thinner, with dental enamel problems (another sign of insufficient nutrition) and more signs of disease. Maya agriculture had been slash and burn. It required land be left fallow for five to fifteen years after only two to five years of cultivation. Agriculture had spread with the growing population, and, with agricultural fields replacing natural forest, rains may have caused much soil erosion. Also, the Maya may have had trouble with their water supply: in much of Maya country, water ponds had been used as a source of drinking water; ponds were a source of food such as frogs; and indications have been found that these ponds became silted.

A diminishing food supply would have created social upheaval and perhaps war. Warfare had been a preoccupation of Mayan lords. But with war, victors would have remained in possession of lands. Instead, the Maya had completely abandoned their lands. Wars may have helped bring down Maya civilization, along with an increase in mosquitoes and disease, but the complete abandonment of land suggests that the heart of the problem was the unavailability of food.

By the year 1000 the Toltecs had wandered from the Tula- Teotihuacán area into what had been Maya country, to Chichén Itzá, where they built their own monuments, including a great pyramid, and a ball court. From Chichen Itza the Toltecs acquired control over the northern half of what had been Mayan lands. And for about a century the Toltecs of Chichen Itza maintained contact with the Toltecs of Tula.

Tula had grown into the largest city on the continent, with a population of about 50,000. People there had agriculture, but they were still in the Stone Age – their tools and weapons still made of wood and stone. They had copper, but it was cold pounded and used for jewelry. They wore cotton fabrics, and they wore feathers as ornaments. Cocoa was a popular drink, and cocoa was used by the wealthy to buy slaves.

Tula imported goods from afar, more than had Teotihuacán, but apparently, according to archaeologists, Tula had no empire as had Teotihuacán. Then in the 1100s drought came. Around the year 1150, Tula was abandoned and destroyed. And, beginning around the year 1200, another people, the Aztecs, began drifting into the area.  

Yupanqui began rebuilding Cuzco, and around 1463, while remaining in power, he turned leadership of his army over to his son, Tópac. Between 1463 and 1471, the son, Tópac, extended the Inca Empire northward, and he began a policy of scattering uncooperative peoples and began filling the vacated areas with docile people already under Inca rule In Cuzco, Yupanqui oversaw the building of stone structures, walls and walkways. Nearby rivers were channeled. Grounds were leveled for agriculture, and agricultural terraces were built on hillsides Yupanqui began rebuilding Cuzco, and around 1463, while remaining in power, he turned leadership of his army over to his son, Tópac. In Cuzco, Yupanqui oversaw the building of stone structures, walls and walkways. Nearby rivers were channeled. Grounds were leveled for agriculture, and agricultural terraces were built on hillsides.

The Aztecs came to an area that today is Mexico City. It was high in elevation, surrounded by mountains, with a lake and swampland – an area that was to become known as the Valley of Mexico. The last branch of Aztecs to arrive there was the Mexica, who arrived around the year 1250.

The Aztecs were an impoverished, uprooted people who had been living by hunting and gathering. They were without writing, with an oral history. According to their legend they were from somewhere in the north called Aztlan and had been led to the Valley of Mexico by a magician-priest.

In the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs found all land adequate for farming occupied, and they settled onto an infertile hilly region named for grasshoppers – today the glorious Chapultapec region of Mexico City. Their neighbors despised them for what they saw as their barbaric ways and drove them from Chapultapec to an area where they were forced to live off snakes and lizards. Then they were driven away again, to a swampy region within the valley. The Mexica had become divided by class. A few of them were nobles, the same logic of power and wealth that had appeared elsewhere in the world. The nobles controlled much land and the labor of commoners and slaves. (Several kinds of money were in use. Cacao beans were used as money for small purchases, and standardized lengths of cotton cloth called quachtli were also used as money.) There was ranking within the nobility, but, regardless of rank, the nobles were unified in defense of their status against threats from commoners. Nobles married those from other noble families. They used marriage to link themselves into a kinship network and reinforced the network by exchanging luxury goods. Sacrifices were public spectacles that took place at the top of a pyramid in a town plaza. The person to be sacrificed was taken up steps to an apex of a temple. Priests assisted in the sacrifice, performed by a special priest with an official flint knife. The victim's heart was torn from his or her body. Then the victim was sent rolling down the temple steps. At the bottom of the steps the victim's head was separated from his body and mounted on a skull rack next to the temple. The blood of the victim was soaked up with bark and the bark put on a fire, the smoke believed to carry the blood to the gods.

In the early 1400s an empire was in the making in the highlands of what is now Peru. From the town of Cuzco the Inca had been raiding and plundering their ethnically different neighbors. In 1438 a federation of tribes called the Chanca attacked the Inca. The Inca drove the Chanca back out of Cuzco. Then – not unlike the Egyptians after they drove out the Hyksos – the Inca launched an expansion of their own. The Inca king, Yupanqui (Yupánqui), acquired the name The Destroyer. He conquered, and he strengthened his army by taking into its ranks conquered men to be officered only by the Inca.  (Religion and Conflict: before Columbus, n.d.)    

 

         2.3.3 Modern scientific archaeology

The technological sophistication of archaeology stems from:

1. The invention of modern excavation techniques,
2. The use of the multidisciplinary approach,
3. The increased impact of science on archaeology, and
4. The refinement of archaeological theory since the 1960s.

There are four philosophical traditions in contemporary archaeology: critical theory, hermeneutics, historicist, and scientific. Each of these traditions ‘explains’ the archaeological record in distinct manners. Critical theory and hermeneutics constitute the cornerstone of post- processual archaeologies. These frameworks avoid explanation as it is understood in the traditional sense of the term and instead focus on criticizing contemporary practice and creating rich narratives of the past. The historicist tradition derives from the classic space–time systematics of an earlier era but has developed into an empirically-rich method for explaining past cultural sequences. This tradition seeks to identify cultural affiliation and dates of archaeological materials. Scientific or processual archaeology is a comparative social and behavioral science that seeks to derive broad principles of human behavior from the archaeological record. (Stanish, 2008)

Taphonomy is a term that was originally coined by Russian paleontologist Ivan Efremov to describe the ‘‘transformations from the biosphere to the lithosphere’’ in explaining the formation of fossils, today has much broader meaning. The term has been widely adopted in archaeology and forensic science and is concerned with the decomposition of the body and associated death scene materials. As such, the disciplines of archaeological taphonomy/diagenesis and forensic taphonomy cover the location of buried or disturbed human remains and time since death/burial estimation and explain the survival/differential decomposition of physical remains and macromolecules such as proteins, lipids, and DNA. Death may be defined under two categories: somatic and cellular death. In somatic death, while the person has lost sentient personality, reflex nervous activity often persists. In cellular death, the cells of the body no longer function, cease to exhibit metabolic activity, and cannot function by means of aerobic respiration. Understanding the distinction between somatic and cellular death is important when considering physiological changes that occur immediately after death, (Janaway, Percival, Percival, & Wilson, 2009)

Different aspects of grave mounds can be combined in a multidisciplinary study combining cultural, visual and biodiversity aspects and values, which are traditionally approached from different academic disciplines. (Tveit, 2005)

         2.3.4 Culture and Context

Archaeology as a professional endeavor deals with artifacts that are part of the data from which human cultural systems may be retrieved. One approach to viewing cultures is focusing on the manner that cultures change is unavoidable.

Modern proponents of the idea that human culture evolves through broad Darwinian processes, involving variation and selective retention, of course recognize that the idea is not a new one. There is no doubt, however, that in recent years the idea has become particularly fashionable among scholars. Many advocates of the position use the term "Universal Darwinism", generally believed to have been coined by Richard Dawkins. An alternate term is David Hull’s “General Selection process” that takes dynamic biological mechanisms in culture change into consideration. (Nelson, 2004)

Archaeology attempts to construct culture history, reconstruct ancient lifeways, explain social and cultural change, and preserves the archaeological record.

The context associated with an artifact tells the story of a long forgotten human behavior. The association of archaeological finds within context is therefore critical

Context is a term that has come into more and more frequent use in the last thirty or forty years in a number of disciplines—among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology. A trawl through the on-line catalogue of the Cambridge University Library in 1999 produced references to 1,453 books published since 1978 with the word context in the title (and 377 more with contexts in the plural). There have been good reasons for this development. The attempt to place ideas, utterances, texts, and other artifacts “in context” has led to many insights. All the same there is a price to be paid, the neglect of other approaches and also the inflation or dilution of the central concept, which is sometimes used—ironically enough, out of context—as an intellectual slogan or shibboleth. To analyze both the present situation and past ones, it is surely necessary. (Burke, 2002)

         2.3.5 Excavation

Types of archaeological excavations vary with the nature and requirement of the site in question. Stratified sampling of selected units (test pits) is the basis of further excavation which are commonly vertical. Horizontal excavation is the method of choice where artifacts are scattered. Earth moving machinery, picks, and shovels are used to ensure the economy of time and control damage. Once an artifact layer is reached more meticulous care is involved. The earth surrounding finds is passed through fine screens. Excavation is in part a recording process, and accuracy is essential.

Video recording is increasingly becoming a favorable medium in archaeological research, particularly as an unconventional documentation tool that captures the elusive processes of ongoing interpretation in an audiovisual format. Personal Architectonics Through INteraction with Artefacts (PATINA) project, is a project focused on the design of technologies for supporting research. Archaeological fieldwork is one of the research environments being studied by the project, current research practices in the wild and to examine the influence of new technologies on those practices brings together well-established and advanced observation techniques used in social sciences and computing fields such as human–computer interaction with archaeological research and presents the deployment of an off-the-shelf wearable camcorder as a recording interface in archaeological fieldwork. User evaluation methodology and the results, while addressing long-standing and timely theoretical discussions on the role of video recording in archaeological research are observed to be effective. (Chrysanthi, Berggren, Davies, Earl, & Knibbe, 2016)

As with radiocarbon dating also the subject of archaeological prospecting now has a reasonably long and full development. Even so it is probable that there remain those both on the archae­ological and on the scientific side who are not completely clear as to what has and can be done. Further use and development of the methods have been implemented. While there exist a whole range of possible techniques for archaeological field surveys those of geophysical prospecting enter most closely within the general topic of excavation. In all cases the basic aim of any survey will be that of discovering information on buried archaeological sites either before or instead of excavation. The value of such information in part depends on the fact that normally the archaeological deposits will not be disturbed while almost always the surveying can be carried out relatively rapidly; at least compared to the time required for excavation. (Linington, 1970)

         2.3.6 Classification and Taxonomy

Typology is a system of classification based on the construction of types. It enables archaeologists to construct arbitrary units through which artifacts may be compared.

Archaeologists increasingly have become aware of the effects of bias and have made strides to identify and correct for error introduced in such areas as sampling and recovery techniques. Much less attention has been paid to the significance of bias introduced during artifact analysis. The potential for analyst-induced error is discussed in terms of: (1) the explicitness of class definitions, (2) differences in perception among analysts, and (3) changes in a single analyst's perception over time. (Beck & Jones, 1989)

Numerical taxonomy, represented in the archaeological literature most commonly by cluster analysis on raw data, is found to be inappropriate for those goals by some. In contrast, the technique of r-mode factor analysis fits very well with the nature of archaeological data and the general aims of archaeological classification. The results of three experiments illustrate the drastically different interpretations that can be engendered by the two procedures from the same data. (Christenson & Read, 1977)

A fundamental element of Upper Paleolithic archaeological practice is cultural taxonomy—the definition and description of taxonomic units that group assemblages according to their material culture and geographic and chronological distributions. The derived taxonomies, such as Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian, are used as units of analysis in many research questions and interpretations. The evidential and theoretical bases defining these taxonomic units, however, are generally lacking. Here, the authors review the current state of Upper Paleolithic cultural taxonomy and make recommendations for the long-term improvement of the situation. (Reynolds & Riede, 2019)

TYPOLOGY

It Is essential to establish the ‘norm’ of an artifact as well as its approximate range of variation.

Attributes are the physical characteristics used to distinguish one artifact from another. Critically selected few of many attributes are used to classify an artifact.

Quantitative methods are used to make these decisions in taxonomy. Types maybe chronological, functional, or stylistic.

How archaeologists analyze pottery is determined by archaeological theory, sampling considerations, and available analytical techniques. The most damaging impediment to methodological advance is lack of a theory of how patterns of ceramic variation are generated. It is argued herein that Darwinian evolutionary theory (or selectionism) provides a body of concepts capable of explaining patterned variation and specifies measurements to make in testing specific explanatory statements. Most existing analytical procedures (e.g., the "Type Variety" system) are regarded as aspects of sampling, the role of which is to help reduce some of the bewildering heterogeneity in ceramic collections before attempting to measure evolutionarily significant variation. Technical analysis, often considered the domain of nonarchaeological specialists, actually produces the measurements needed to test explanatory statements made about pottery observed in the archaeological record. (Neff, 1993)        

Through the lens of literature review, archival site records, and analysis of material collections curated at the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS) and the University of Kansas (KU), are seen documentation discrepancies, problematic taxonomic units, and identical ceramic assemblages designated as Sterns Creek Ware and Grasshopper Falls Ware. After presenting the evidence, it is here observed that there are two ceramic wares that should be consolidated under one name—Sterns Creek Ware—and further comparative analysis is necessary to identify other wares present in Grasshopper Falls phase assemblages. Archaeological taxonomic designation units and artifact typologies are important analytical tools. However, when archaeologists define taxonomic units confined within modern state borders, without adequate reference to existing data and literature, they construct flawed manifestations. In an to make inferences about peoples past activities, especially complex social practices/interactions through material culture, we need to look beyond the borders of archaeological taxonomy and towards comparative syntheses. (Keehner, 2019)

         2.3.7 Interpreting Culture History

The historical tapestry unearthed by archaeologists is a result of inevitable variations, invention, diffusion, and, migration within and between cultures.

Even when dates are established, they are not easy to interpret. Because artifact styles—forms of pottery, tools, spear points—can change arbitrarily, one can’t say that a particular style necessarily represents a particular society. The near-simultaneous advent of Clovis points might represent the swift adoption of an improved technology by different groups, rather than the spread of one group. Still, most researchers believe that the rapid dissemination of Clovis points is evidence that a single way of life—the Clovis culture—swept across the continent in a flash. No other culture has dominated so much of the Americas.

So quickly did Clovis proliferate that researchers imagined it must be the first truly American culture, the people who took fire and spear across landscapes empty of humankind. But others kept offering data that the Americas were inhabited before Clovis. The vituperative debate ended only when strong evidence for a pre-Clovis settlement turned up in Chile in the late 1990s. (Mann C. C., n.d.)

Archaeological history may be approached from a processual or a historical materialist view. Processual archaeology presents a system’s or a multilinear cultural evolution pattern.

The more recent theoretical consensus is the cognitive-processual and the processual-plus.

Cognitive archaeology - the study of past ways of thought as inferred from material remains - still presents so many challenges to the practitioner that it seems if not a novel, at any rate, an uncertain endeavor. That this should be so is perhaps rather odd, for generations of archaeologists have written with considerable freedom about the thoughts and beliefs of ancient peoples, about the religions of early civilizations and about the art of prehistoric communities. With the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s, however, came an acute awareness that much earlier work was in some respects not well founded, or at least that the frameworks of inference by which statements were made about past symbolic systems were rarely made explicit and were frequently defective. This realization about the potential scope of the discipline, within the context of the optimism of processual archaeology (as the New Archaeology came to be called), should ideally have led to an upsurge of well-argued papers dealing with various aspects of what we have, in the title of this volume, termed ‘The ancient mind’. But despite that early optimism, that was not the outcome, and the preoccupations of processual archaeologists were very rarely, in the early days, with human reasoning, or with symbolic structures, but rather with the more immediately material aspects of life. Culture was often defined, following Leslie White and Lewis Binford, as ‘man's extra-somatic means of adaptation’. Arguing from a standpoint which has subsequently, and not unreasonably, been characterized as ‘functionalist’, workers often placed more emphasis on economic aspects and sometimes social aspects of the past and tended to ignore the belief systems and indeed often the communication systems of early societies. (Renfrew, 1994)

Providing a younger woman's perspective and born out of the 2006 Cambridge Personal Histories event on 1960s archaeology, a ‘democratization’ of the field is lacking with an apparent absence of women, despite their relative visibility in 1920s–1940s archaeology. Focusing on Cambridge, as the birthplace of processualism, there appears the question ‘where were the women?’ in 1950s–1960s archaeology. A sociohistorical perspective considers the impact of traditional societal views regarding the social role of women; the active gendering of science education; the slow increase of university places for young women; and the ‘marriage bars’ of post-war Britain, crucially restricting women's access to the professions in the era of professionalization, leading to decades of positive discrimination in favor of men. Pointing to the science of male and female archaeologists in 1920s–1930s Cambridge, the ideas of scientific archaeology as a peculiarly post-war (and male) endeavor is challenged.  The post processual notion is that processual archaeology did not seek to democratize the field for women archaeologists. (Pope, 2011)

         2.3.8 Middle Range theory

Middle-range theory is made up of methods, theories and, ideas that can be applied to any period and anywhere in the world to explain what has been discovered, excavated, and analyzed from the past.

This theory is practice through ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology.

Middle-range theory (MRT), as the concept of intermediate theory between observed empirical data and general theories, was first formulated by the sociologist R.K. Merton in the context of the positivist waves of the 1960s as a reaction to the doctrinaire and descriptive paradigms of previous decades. Among the first archaeologists to employ this concept was L.R. Binford, whose work was particularly influential in the subsequent development of MRT in archaeology. Understanding site formation processes and the mechanisms responsible for generating, modifying and destroying traces of the past has been equated with MRT, particularly in Paleolithic archaeology. The development of MRT has played a crucial role in the formation and elaboration of field techniques, research designs, and new methodologies and, as such, stimulated new directions and new questions in the Paleolithic archaeology. (Atici, 2006)

Archaeological predictive modeling has been used successfully for over 20 years as a decision-making tool in cultural resources management. Its appreciation in academic circles however has been mixed because of its perceived theoretical poverty. The issue of integrating current archaeological theoretical approaches and predictive modeling is of importance. A suggested methodology for doing so is based on cognitive archaeology, middle range theory, and paleo economic modeling.

         2.3.9 Bioarcheology

Bioarcheology is a multidisciplinary tool used to reveal information from skeletal remains. It is similar to forensic anthropology in method and scope. The results of over 70 years of African Diasporic bioarcheology are discussed and explained as emerging from distinct interests and traditions of African Diaspora studies, sociocultural anthropology, history, physical anthropology, and archaeology, in that chronological order. Physical anthropology is the core discipline of Afro-American bioarcheology, yet it has been the least informed by cultural and historical literatures. Forensic approaches to bioarcheology construct a past that fails to be either cultural or historical, while biocultural approaches are emerging that construct a more human history of African Diasporic communities. The involvement of African Americans, both as clients and as sources of scholarship, has begun to transform bioarcheology as in the example of the New York African Burial Ground. The social history of the field examined here emphasizes the scholarship of diasporas themselves, and critiques a bioarcheology that, until recently, has little relevance. (Blakey, 2001)

The sexual division of labor permeated many aspects of social life in the Greater Southwest, including household activities, communal events, and ceremonial rituals. It is proposed that sexual divisions in labor were particularly meaningful during the Pueblo IV period (A.D. 1275-1600). This project tests the proposition that archaeologically and ethnographically documented sex-based differences in habitual labor are reflected on the human skeleton. Human skeletal remains from Grasshopper Pueblo, a large Ancestral Puebloan village in east-central Arizona occupied during the Pueblo IV period, are examined for evidence of sexual differences in the expression of musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSMs). These stress markers occur at musculoskeletal origin and insertion points as a result of bone remodeling in response to repetitive motion, which results in a distinctive skeletal feature. Analysis is concentrated on those areas of the bones of the upper limb (clavicles, humeri, radii, ulnae, and metacarpals) where muscles, ligaments, and tendons originate from or insert onto the periosteum. Patterning of adult skeletal MSMs is considered one indicator of labor organization within populations. The degree to which the nature and intensity of labor is structured along sexual lines reflects the operation of social power. Aspects of the relationship between labor differentiation and social power are manifested archaeologically in the material remains of activities such as hunting, weaving, food processing and production, and ceramic manufacture. Testing the degree to which such labor differentially impacted the skeletal bodies of men and women in this Ancestral Puebloan community can substantiate conclusions regarding sex roles derived from other categories of evidence. In this study, skeletal evidence forms the basis of a model of the operation of social power in the construction of sex, gender, and status in the North American Southwest. (Perry, 2004)

         2.3.10 Managing the Past 

In the broadest sense, cultural resource management (CRM) is the vocation and practice of managing cultural resources, such as the arts and heritage. It incorporates Cultural Heritage Management which is concerned with traditional and historic culture. It also delves into the material culture of archaeology. Cultural resource management encompasses current culture, including progressive and innovative culture, such as urban culture, rather than simply preserving and presenting traditional forms of culture. There have been seven cultural resource management legislations enacted in the United States from 1960 onwards.

There three phases of CRM fall under identifying, assessing and managing cultural resources.   Since CRM is the dominant field of research in the US, it is difficult to produce research results of acceptable quality, record, and curation.   

Public archaeology and archaeological tourism face dangers of protecting archaeological remains from damage.

With the definition of cultural tourism, come complex problems of the term as it is proved to be a controversial issue in tourism, since there is no adequate definition existing. In the absence of a uniformly accepted definition, cultural tourism can be characterized both from the perspective of supply and demand and also from the point of view of theoretical and practical approach.

The purposes of this the UNESCO Convention  for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 are:
(a) to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage;
(b) to ensure respect for the intangible cultural heritage of the communities, groups and individuals concerned;
(c) to raise awareness at the local, national and international levels of the importance of the intangible cultural heritage, and of ensuring mutual appreciation thereof;
(d) to provide for international cooperation and assistance.

(Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003, n.d.)

2.4 Biology

        2.4.1 Human biological adaptations

Adaptation has been examined at three overlapping levels: (i) those represented by differences in the extent of inherent capacities in subpopulations long exposed to different conditions, such as differences in the inherited determinants of body form and skin pigment in peoples in different climatic zones; (ii) adaptations acquired during the growth period of the individual such as residual stunting and reduced caloric needs in individuals receiving low caloric diets throughout childhood; and (iii) reversible acclimatization to the immediate conditions such as the changes which make it easier to work at high altitudes after the first few days there. (Lasker, 1969)

        2.4.2 Biological explanations for culture

Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionist bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reifications thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists. (Steklis, Walter 1991)

        2.4.3 Biological explanations for language

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace9s apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens , including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hyper- sociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome. (Pinker, 2010)

        2.4.4 Human biological variation

What is the relationship between the patterns of biological and sociocultural variation in extant humans? Is this relationship accurately described, or best explained, by the term 'race' and the schema of 'racial' classification? What is the relationship between 'race', genetics and the demographic groups of society? Can extant humans be categorized into units that can scientifically be called 'races'? These questions underlie the discussions that address the explanations for the observed differences in many domains between named demographic groups across societies. These domains include disease incidence and prevalence and other variables studied by biologists and social scientists. (Keita, et al., 2004)

        2.4.5 Are we still evolving?

From a biological perspective, there is no such thing as devolution. All changes in the gene frequencies of populations--and quite often in the traits those genes influence--are by definition evolutionary changes. The notion that humans might regress or "devolve" presumes that there is a preferred hierarchy of structure and function--say, that legs with feet are better than legs with hooves or that breathing with lungs is better than breathing with gills. But for the organisms possessing those structures, each is a useful adaptation. Nonetheless, many people evaluate nonhuman organisms according to human anatomy and physiology and mistakenly conclude that humans are the ultimate product, even goal, of evolution. That attitude probably stems from the tendency of humans to think anthropocentrically, but the scholarship of natural theology, which was prominent in 18th-and 19th-century England. (Dougherty)

2.5 Academic and Applied Anthropology

        2.5.1 The scientific method    

Encyclopedia Britannica defines the scientific method as: Scientific method, mathematical and experimental technique employed in the sciences. More specifically, it is the technique used in the construction and testing of a scientific hypothesis. The scientific method is applied broadly across the sciences.   

        2.5.2 The role of academic anthropology

Academic anthropology has fallen out of favor and the practical totality of anthropologists appear to have turned to the application of the discipline. The relationship between academia and professional practice is sometimes difficult, however, as some practitioners feel stigmatized or excluded by academics, while others inhabit professional spaces where academic anthropology is largely irrelevant. While anthropologists often speak of a "divide" or "split" between academic and practicing anthropology, this view overlooks the fact that much work in the discipline maintains a presence both inside and outside of higher education institutions. Not only do anthropologists often form collaborative partnerships among members with diverse professional commitments, but individual anthropologists may simultaneously maintain both academic and non-academic affiliations, and they may move among professional spheres over the course of their career. If we are to reach a full understanding of the profession, we must move beyond a simplistic "academic / practitioner" dualism to consider these diverse professional contexts and work-life trajectories. (Ginsberg 2019)

        2.5.3 The role of applied anthropology

Early in the 19th century, anthropology was a religious philosophy that examined how to view the place of humans in the cosmos. This began to change by the mid-19th century, and people who were to become the founders of what is called anthropology today began to look at the earthlier nature of humanity. One of these individuals was Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan, who was an attorney, began to work with the Iroquois in the 1840s on legal issues involving railroad right of ways. This may have been one of the first, if not the first, application of the nascent but as yet still inchoate discipline.

Across the Atlantic, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the “father of anthropology” who defined “culture,” considered anthropology to be a “policy science” that should be implemented to ameliorate the problems of humanity. James Hunt, who founded the Anthropological Society of London, began to use the term practical anthropology by the 1860s, and in 1869, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (this was later to be titled the Royal Anthropological Institute) was formed.  By 1940s brought about the efflorescence of the field with the founding of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) by Margaret Mead, Conrad Arnsberg, and Eliot Chapple. They published the journal Applied Anthropology to counter what they saw as academic bias against practical, nontheoretically work. In 1949, the name of the journal was changed to Human Organization, and the SfAA code of ethics was created. Despite this, Melville Herskovits taught in the late 1940s that applied anthropology was racist and should not be practiced, according to one of his former students. One of the more revealing remarks concerning applied anthropology has been offered by Claude Levi-Strauss who, while suggesting that applied work ought to be considered the most important aim of the discipline, confessed that he had little personal interest in the subject. Applied endeavor in anthropology is typically viewed as lacking in intellectual rigor, ethically suspect, unimaginative, bereft of theoretical sophistication, and somehow essential to our future. Unfortunately, it has been our tradition to approach applied anthropology as an attitude or employment opportunity, rather than as a major subfield in its own right. This means that application is almost inevitably viewed as a partial and dependent expression of discipline, general­ly a use of some other perhaps "purer" inquiry, or at best as a "real world" stimulus for the more profound labors of theoreticians and basic researchers. (Chambers, 1987)