Compare methods

	Ethnoarchaeology	Experimental Archaeology
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1979
Originator	Developed by many; synthesized by Nicholas David & Carol Kramer	Developed by many; systematized in the later 20th century (e.g. Coles, Schiffer, use-wear analysts)
Type	Ethnographic analogy-building research pipeline	Controlled experimental and actualistic research pipeline
Seminal source	David, N., & Kramer, C. (2001). Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521661058	Renfrew, C., & Bahn, P. (2016). Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice (7th ed.). Thames & Hudson. ISBN: 9780500292105
Aliases	Ethnographic Archaeology, Living Archaeology, Action Archaeology, Material-Culture Ethnography	Replicative Experimentation, Actualistic Studies, Controlled Archaeological Experiment, Replication Studies
Related	2	2
Summary	Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of living societies undertaken specifically to interpret the archaeological record. Archaeologists observe how people in the present make, use, organize, and discard material culture — how potters shape and fire vessels, how households arrange space and dispose of refuse, how hunters butcher and share game — and document the relationships between those behaviors and the material residues they leave. These observed behavior-to-residue links become analogies and middle-range bridging arguments for inferring past behavior from excavated traces. Synthesized in Nicholas David and Carol Kramer's Ethnoarchaeology in Action, the approach is not the study of any one people but a deliberate use of the living world as a laboratory for the relationships between action and material patterning, complementing experimental archaeology with naturalistic, culturally embedded observation.	Experimental archaeology is the controlled replication of past materials, technologies, and behaviors in order to test hypotheses about how the archaeological record was produced. By making stone tools, firing pottery, building and burning structures, butchering with replica implements, or letting bone and refuse decay under monitored conditions, the experimenter generates traces — debitage, use-wear, residues, decay rates — that can be compared with those found archaeologically. The logic is uniformitarian: if a known process reliably produces a particular trace today, the same trace in the record is evidence of that process in the past. Systematized in the later twentieth century by scholars such as John Coles and integrated with behavioral archaeology and use-wear analysis, experimental archaeology is a cornerstone of middle-range research, building the bridging arguments that connect static finds to dynamic behavior.