Ethnoarchaeology

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.