This process of joining objective analysis to lived experience is perhaps the most proper task of anthropology, the one that distinguishes it from other social science…
Abstract
It has been said that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” And so archaeologists have become conversant in and contributors to cultural theory. Other archaeologists have undertaken ethnoarchaeological studies on material culture when ethnographers have not supplied the data needed. Yet archaeologists might undertake more traditional participant-observation fieldwork to help nuance the cultural questions we ask and to render our tales of the past more convincing, in particular, when we purport to speak of the sensuous and meaningful experience of the “prehistoric other.” This article discusses the venturing of one archaeologist in Madagascar tracking aspects of the classic problem of state origins across archaeology, oral history, ethnoarchaeology, and ethnography.
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Kus, S. Archaeologist as anthropologist: Much ado about something after all?. J Archaeol Method Theory 4, 199–213 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02428061
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02428061