Ethnoarchaeology

Both involve observing living societies, but ethnoarchaeology is organized around archaeological problems and focuses on the relationship between behavior and the material residues it leaves. An ethnographer might describe how a household functions socially; an ethnoarchaeologist records how that household's activities translate into spatial patterns of refuse, breakage, and discard that could survive in the ground. The aim is to document the behavior-to-residue links that archaeology needs to interpret excavated patterning, making the living world a source of analogies and middle-range bridging arguments rather than an end in itself.

No — and avoiding that fallacy is central to its methodology. David and Kramer stress that ethnoarchaeology does not claim any living society directly represents a past one. Instead it seeks general, causally grounded regularities linking behavior to material trace, and it builds relational analogies whose relevance must be argued from the strength of the underlying causal link, not from cultural resemblance. The range of present-day variation is itself studied to judge how far an analogy can extend, so the method is a disciplined way of using the present to interpret the past, not a simple projection.

Both are forms of actualistic, middle-range research that build bridges between observable processes and the archaeological record, but they differ in setting and control. Experimental archaeology replicates processes under controlled, documented conditions to isolate behavior-to-trace relationships; ethnoarchaeology observes those relationships in their natural cultural context, capturing the social embedding and variability that experiments strip away. They are complementary: experiments give precision and repeatability, ethnoarchaeology gives realism and cultural relevance, and together they strengthen the analogies used to interpret excavated patterning.