Quetzil Castaneda - Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices

The use of ethnography in archaeology is not at all new and has been expressed in a wide range of forms. The professionalization of the discipline in the early-twentieth-century United States as a university-based science may have only formalized a limited number of the most explicit uses while allowing for other forms to remain active in a diffuse and pervasive manner within archaeology (see Hollowell and Nicholas, chapter 3). Despite the range of uses and forms of combining archaeology and ethnography, there is a bit of inconsistency and lack of consensus in the labeling of past and present-day initiatives. For example, while ethnoarchaeology has a well-established meaning, archaeological ethnography and ethnographic archaeology have no definitive or consistent meaning. At times these phrases refer to the same thing, and sometimes to different, even opossing, approaches, methods, or problems.

It is not surprising, then, that the variety of ways in which ethnography has been, is, and can be used within archaeology might appear as a GOK pilea god only knows series of diverse practices and possibilities. Consider, for example, Edgeworths (2003:1113) use of the term ethnoarchaeology as shorthand for what he calls the ethnography of archaeology. Meanwhile, Meskell (2005a,b) uses the phrase archaeological ethnography to do what is clearly ethnography (without adjectival qualification) of archaeology but in a dramatically different, perhaps incompatible, manner than that envisioned and practiced by Edgeworth. To complicate even further, Hodders discussions (e.g., 1999:80104) of archaeological excavation practices at the trowels edge are also clearly ethnographic, yet his presentation of this as ethnographic is mostly suggestive and rhetorical: His thick description of practices primarily functions as evidence in his argument about epistemology in which he advocates reflexive and multivocal archaeological (not ethnographic) methods.

This chapter, therefore, has a primary task of providing a frame by which to sort out this confusion of labels and activities by categorically and conceptually differentiating three distinct types or modes of associating ethnography and archaeology. These are: (1) archaeological ethnography; (2) ethnography of archaeology; and (3) ethnographic archaeology. These three modes are identified and differentiated according to four criteria or axes: first, the definition of the basic research agenda ; second, the specification of the object of study ; third, the role of ethnography and its relationship to archaeology; and, fourth, the goal or purpose and rationale of the research.

The first mode is labeled archaeological ethnography and defined by the use of ethnography as a method of studying the past in terms of traditionally conceived archaeological purposes and goals (see

Ultimately, these methodological strategies tend to rely upon analogy of the present to the past. This analogy takes the form of an analysis and interpretation of the value of the results of the archaeological ethnography.5 On this point, a crucial difference between archaeological ethnography and ethnographic archaeology can be identified. In the latter, ethnography is used to produce knowledge about the present to understand something about the present . In the former, ethnography is used to produce knowledge about and in the present that is theoretically or analytically construed as an analog-model of the past as a way to explain the past for example, material patterns in the formation of sites. This first mode is based on specific theories that provide a strategic use of ethnography as a methodology subordinated to the archaeological agenda oriented by the problem of the past and shaped by specific theoretical frameworks.

Thus, interpretive postprocessual archaeology also has recourse to ethnoarchaeology, which is nonetheless formulated differently than in processualist research. Ethnography can be used as a method to study the contemporary meanings of archaeological materials as held by descendent cultural communities and stakeholders that identify with the past in its material forms (e.g., Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999). At atalhyk, for example, framed as ethnoarchaeology, ethnography was a central methodology in the interdisciplinary study of contemporary materiality (Matthews, Hastorf, and Ergenekon 2000). The ethnographic exploration of these meanings and materiality, nonetheless, are still subordinate to the epistemological frame of analogy and the task of defining an archaeological interpretation of the site. That this interpretation is construed to be fluid and flexible or momentary and always subject to change (Hodder 2000a:9, 1999) does not radically change the strategic use, meaning, and practice of ethnography in the categorical sense outlined here: It is still a subordinated tool to study the past. Ethnography has a different relationship to archaeology in types two and three.