Compare methods

	Ethnoarchaeology	Experimental Archaeology	Formation Process Analysis
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1979	1987
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)	Michael B. Schiffer (behavioral archaeology)
Type	Ethnographic analogy-building research pipeline	Controlled experimental and actualistic research pipeline	Inferential framework and analysis pipeline for record formation
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	Schiffer, M. B. (1987). Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. University of New Mexico Press. ISBN: 9780826309631
Aliases	Ethnographic Archaeology, Living Archaeology, Action Archaeology, Material-Culture Ethnography	Replicative Experimentation, Actualistic Studies, Controlled Archaeological Experiment, Replication Studies	Site Formation Analysis, C-transforms and N-transforms, Behavioral Archaeology Formation Theory, Archaeological Record Formation
Related	2	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.	Formation process analysis is the framework for identifying the cultural and natural processes that transform materials from their living, systemic context into the archaeological record we excavate. Developed by Michael Schiffer within behavioral archaeology and codified in his 1987 Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record, it insists that the archaeological record is not a fossilized snapshot of past life but the cumulative product of how things were discarded, lost, reused, and disturbed (cultural or C-transforms) and how they then decayed, moved, and mixed in the ground (natural or N-transforms). Because every deposit has been filtered and rearranged by these processes, sound inference about past behavior requires first reconstructing the formation history of the record and correcting for it. Formation process analysis is therefore foundational to interpretation, linking excavation, geoarchaeology, and taphonomy.