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- The reconstruction of prehistory is presently pursued via two major
disciplines, archaeology and comparative linguistics.
- Although there have been numerous attempts to generate interdisciplinary
results from their merger, the impact on the great majority of
professionals has been slight.
- Human genetics has a way to go before it is really integrated into
prehistory
- There is, moreover, another tool, comparative ethnography, largely
unexplored since the 1930s, that has considerable power to shed light on
aspects of the past that are quite inaccessible to these other
disciplines.
- This presentation looks at the structure of thinking about prehistory
today, the tools that comparative ethnography could provide and gives an example of
its potential contribution.
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- Apart from these, other types of new information are on the horizon
- Palaeoclimatology
- Palaeobiogeography
- Historical iconography
- Epigraphy and new decipherments
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- A view commonly expressed concerning the inter-relation of disciplines
is that they should be pursued independently and only subsequently
consulted to see if there is a match
- While to intellectual logic of this position is clear, it is not a
realworld description of the way many researchers proceed
- Not only is there likely to be an iterative relation between the
discovery of matches between disciplines but there is also what might be
called ‘conceptual leakage’, the spread of models between
disciplines
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- This can be illustrated with a concept from linguistics
- Language phyla or subgroups are presently defined by the languages that
are either synchronically spoken or are attested from epigraphy or
historical sources.
- The Nilo-Saharan languages are one of the oldest language phyla of
Africa and so are in retreat or encapsulated in many areas
- There are no epigraphic sources for the wider extension of the phylum
- Nonetheless, a ‘bundle’ of diverse evidence, from
archaeology to iconography to contemporary material culture makes it
highly likely that Nilo-Saharan once spread over a much greater
geographical area
- If we therefore identify non-linguistic ‘bundles’ with
language phyla expansions we can then borrow such interpretations to
explain new archaeological data
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- The presentation will then focus on;
- Outlining the uses of synchronic comparative ethnography in constructing
an integrated prehistory
- Presenting two examples of how this might work
- A) the Austronesian expansion
- B) Saharan prehistory
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- Ethnoarchaeology represents an attempt to infuse more interpretative
life into prehistory, using contemporary ethnographic data to propose
likely meanings for archaeological finds.
- Thus, if we find pots are decorated using certain techniques in the
present using tools which may be perishable and thus invisible in the
archaeological record, it is a reasonable assumption that similar tools
could have been used in the past.
- But the important point about most ethnoarchaeology is that its
fieldwork in the present is driven by archaeological questions, notably
deriving from ceramics and metalworking and its use of ethnography is
therefore highly selective.
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- Enter molecular biology. From the early 1990s, the development of modern
techniques of DNA analysis constituted a major break with traditional
biological anthropology; the introduction of molecular techniques in the
early 1990s has largely revolutionised the study of human populations in
Africa.
- DNA could potentially be recovered from archaeological material and
analysis of DNA seemed to offer a way of relating present human
populations both to one another and to past materials. The earliest work
concentrated on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) but the analysis of nuclear or
paternal DNA is now regarded as of equal significance.
- DNA offered new insights into the development of modern humans, but its
claims have gone further in recent times, to encompass the
interpretation of archaeological and linguistic data.
- Despite great hopes and even greater claims, there has been deep
scepticism from other disciplines about genetics. To judge by some of
its exponents, the links between language, demographic movement and
genetics in prehistory are well-established.
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- These were enthusiastically promoted at the end of the 1980s and into
the early 1990s as the ‘New Synthesis’ or
‘Archaeogenetics’. The opus magnus of this trend was the
appearance of ‘The History and Geography of Human Genes’
(Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), which essays a major revision of the
methodology for exploring human history.
- Linguistic classifications of human populations purport to offer a tool
for outflanking simple racial models; more abstract, they appear to
provide an ideal analogue to the classificatory trees output from DNA
analyses.
- If DNA phylogenies and language trees were to correspond, this would
indeed be striking independent confirmation for models of human
prehistory. Although this continues to play well in the pages of the
journal Nature, most archaeologists and linguists remain deeply
sceptical.
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- Comparative ethnography has been long ignored, for a variety of reasons.
The diversity of societies across much of the world is complemented by
the existence of a large number of elements of their culture which are
similar across wide areas. These range from material culture to abstract
ideas and symbols.
- They change and evolve from one group to another in ways that suggest;
- they may be of considerable antiquity
- they may be linked with linguistic groupings and known demographic
movements
- that observed changes may reflect some general processes that can be
identified
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- Such ideas are hardly new; indeed the organising principles of the
Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford were intended to demonstrate something of
the kind. Pitt-Rivers used Polynesian war-clubs to illustrate the point
and certainly island societies are ideal for showing gradual change
without confounding areal influences.
- What is new is the potential for an interpretative framework, that can
combine the insights of archaeology with the results of linguistics.
- Before considering how this might work, it is useful to backtrack and
consider the practices of ethnographers early in the twentieth century,
particularly those of the German-Swedish school.
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- When the main sources of information about exotic peoples were
missionary reports and objects brought back to Europe by collectors of
curiosities, it is unsurprising that material culture studies played a
major role in interpreting world prehistory.
- The late nineteenth century was the century of colonial museums, and the
period when most of the major ethnographic collections were accumulated.
Although this occurred across the European/American world, the
theoretical edifices erected on the basis of these collections were most
highly developed in Germany.
- Although it is an intellectual commonplace to link these collections
with the formation of colonial empires, in fact the most enthusiastic
imperialists, Spain, England and France, never developed the rich
intellectual superstructure that evolved in Germany, Sweden and to a
lesser extent, the United States.
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- The founders of the disciplines, such as Adolf Bastian and Bernard
Ankermann, thought that culture could be divided into discrete traits
and these could be mapped, a process which would reveal ‘cultural
layers’. Such layers had an evolutionary subtext, in that there
were ‘primitive’ layers and more evolved ones and these were
reflected in the complexity of material culture.
- To do these scholars justice, such labels were sparingly applied and the
concern was more to uncover a rich archaeology of layers. It was
believed that material culture, religious beliefs and social
organisation were associated in complexes and that detailed analysis
would allow a more complete characterisation of such complexes.
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- Musical instruments played a considerable role in these early analyses
partly because the morphology of sound-producers is very distinctive and
partly because there seemed to be a link between formal complexity and
‘high civilisation’ (we have pianos, hunter-gatherers have
rattles).
- The enterprise was global but Africa played a major role in the German
imagination and many major scholars worked on African material culture.
Frobenius, for example, conceived an Atlas Africanus which would map
African material culture in great detail and some folios of this were
published, but much more was collected and today it lies unused in the
archives of the Institute that bears his name in Frankfurt.
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- The German enterprise had two major offspring, the Swedish ethnologists
and the students of American material culture. Both were astonishingly
energetic in collating information and publishing monographs on material
culture, both in regional, ethnic and single-item studies.
- Sture Lagercrantz, who died only in November 2001, began publishing
distributional studies in the 1920s, and the journal Ethnos became the
home of this type of publication as well as the monographs of Studia
Ethnographica Uppsaliensis.
- In America, this type of data collection is associated with Franz Boas,
but the Field Museum in Chicago was probably mostly active in publishing
studies of material culture, especially Wilfred Hambly.
- Swedish and American scholars were much less clear about the
intellectual yield of these studies, and Lagercrantz in particular
seemed quite content to publish maps and discussions of sources with no
further conclusions are regards history or social and economic
significance, let alone links to linguistics or archaeology.
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- This literature has been largely forgotten; few students of prehistory
make use of it. How has this occurred?
- When the new breed of social anthropologists developed, principally
under the influence of Malinowski at the London School of Economics, one
of their principal concerns was to discount previous types of
scholarship. They took an easy target, the Egyptological speculations of
Elliott Smith and William Perry, labelled these
‘diffusionism’ and took these were frivolous speculations
and most likely false.
- No effort was made to actually disprove the findings of earlier
scholars; they were simply declared irrelevant to the business at hand.
- It is hard not to see a link with the colonial enterprise in this
sea-change; the goal had changed from making sense of exotica sent back
by missionaries to developing practical understanding of ‘native
peoples’ in order that they be governed more effectively.
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- In case this presentation
appears to be unduly positive, in the light of modern scholarship there
are also many problems with the German-Swedish school
- Ironically, most of these
are not the problems social anthropologists charged them with
- The most curious one is that
most of these authors were not interested in archaeology, except in so
much as there were occasional records of material culture items they
were studying
- Even more strangely, they
were not interested in linguistics and make almost nothing of the
sometimes evident connections with linguistic families
- They seem to have been blinded by the ‘cultural’ layer
ideology
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- The other side (and this is
the one that makes people uneasy) is that the hypotheses were of
‘cultural layers’ and ‘culture strata’ and that
these were implicitly or otherwise linked to ideas of cultural
evolution, that more ‘evolved’ societies were higher up the
tree, as it were
- Ironically, this type of
discourse is exactly similar to the World Bank, and numerous other
international development agencies. ‘Developed’ countries
with their economic hegemony and politically correct value-systems are
the ideal ‘developing’ countries should aspire to.
- In many ways, Ankermann,
Frobenius et al. took a much more positive view of Africa than these
insufferably smug developers.
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- Since ca. 2000 a new type of
material culture studies has begun to surface in a variety of journals,
often statistics driven and very much related to the quantitative
methods used in genetics.
- The value of this material can be debated, but a crucial assumption of
the methods is the availability of historical documentation. To study,
say, the evolution of European brass instruments over time with any sort
of quantitative strategy
requires both that historical records exist and that a
pre-existing scholarly industry has undertaken to describe them
- These conditions are not met
and never will be met for most of the material under discussion here.
Indeed the Kulturkreislehre school was premised on working in areas where historical documents
are absent
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- Austronesian undoubtedly begins with Dempwolff in the 1930s as a
linguistic concept, although his Austronesisch is what today would be
called Malayo-Polynesian or extra-Formosan.
- It was probably first picked up as an archaeological concept by Peter
Bellwood in the 1970s and has developed rich associations in different
disciplines since then.
- Which is not to say detractors do not exist; Solheim, Meacham and
Terrell being major names. However, it seems to supporters that they
simply do not engage with the non-archaeological evidence
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- Madagascar
- East African coast
- West Africa?
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- Malagasy language closely related to Barito languages of Borneo
- However, many areas of vocabulary seem to be borrowed from Malay, in
particular, sailing terminology
- Bob Blust has recently shown that the languages of the Bajau Laut, the
sea nomads, form part of the Barito group
- Pallesen argues the Bajau Laut split up following the expansion of the
Srivijaya Malay in the 7th century.
- If so, this would fit well with the archaeological evidence, which has
the first settlement of Madagascar about this time
- The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first century seaman’s guide
to the East Africa coast, suggests Graeco-Roman mariners or their
contacts had some knowledge of Madagascar, perhaps making an appearance
in the text as the ‘Great island of Menouthias’, a source
for tortoise-shell.
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- However, this does not entirely explain a great deal of significant
cultural evidence for Austronesian presence on the East African coast,
some of it well before the settlement of Madagascar proper
- Pliny refers to the ‘men who come across the great ocean on rafts
[rati]’ in contrast to the coastal traders. These could well be
Austronesians, if rati is an outrigger canoe
- These Austronesians were almost certainly unconnected with those who
settled Madagascar and probably came from somewhere in the Philippines;
however, linguistic evidence is slight
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- Some of the evidence for this exchange is the transfer of elephantiasis
to Africa and the import of African malaria, the import of SE Asian
fighting cocks and bananas, huti, to the East African coast, and a type
of goat (?) to island SE Asia
- Is there any direct archaeological evidence? Not yet. But neither was
there for the Graeco-Roman trade until a couple of years ago, despite
the documentary evidence.
- Postulating two (or three counting later Malay trade contacts) distinct
Austronesian contacts with the EA coast solves many problems related to
try and roll all the evidence into one package.
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- Evidence for this is so far entirely textual
- Balâdurî (9th c,) et al-Tabarî mention the Sayâbiga
[=Sumatrans] in the Gulf prior to Islam and they were apparently
enrolled as mercenaries, forming a garrison at Bahrein in the reign of
Calif Abû Bakr (632-634) as well as becoming guardians of the
treasury at Basra and taking part in naval expeditions against India in
AD 775.
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- Recent evidence (published in American Antiquity, 2003) suggests that
there was contact between the Chumash Indians and Polynesians in
Southern California between 400 and 800 A.D.
- This is based on the unique design of their boats, sewn plank canoes,
rather than dugouts used elsewhere along the coast and perhaps more
strikingly, typically Polynesian compound fish-hooks
- Chumash is essentially dead as a language but work continues
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- Polynesian contact with South America has long been the subject of
speculation (Heyerdahl etc.) but model was confused, having Amerindians
voyaging in the Pacific, despite their known lack of ocean-going craft
- Probably the crack in scholarly scepticism was the clear evidence that
the sweet potato reached Eastern Polynesian, under its Peruvian name, kumara,
in pre-Spanish time.
- Since then, a considerable amount of other evidence has turned up,
notably in human genetics where the presence of the 9 base pair deletion
on the West Coast of South
America points to Polynesian presence
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- Another curious, but convincing piece of evidence is the
‘blue-egg’ chicken, a variety of fowl encountered by the
first explorers in this region. This is likely to be a descendant of the
Polynesian chicken. And you can buy its eggs in Sainsbury’s
supermarket..
- So some of Heyerdahl’s evidence may not be completely wrong,
despite his interpretation
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- Recent large-scale modeling of arid zones is making possible a new
vision of ‘corridors’ of dispersal
- And possible links with material culture, languages and genetics
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- A possible future configuration for reconstructing prehistory can be
imagined.
- The primary requirement is that disciplinary specialists move away from
their training and re-orient themselves towards their goal. In other
words, rather than ‘doing’ archaeology or linguistics, the
goal should be to reconstruct the past with whatever tools are to hand.
- This is often difficult, given the structure of university careers and
the system of academic rewards, but the potential is considerable.
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- The availability of
computers, GIS systems and rapid access to on-line catalogues has made
the time necessary to compile this type of material much shorter
- If the intellectual will
were present, then much of this older material could be digitised and
linked to archaeological and linguistic databases.
- This would require that
anthropologists and others see the point and this is rather unlikely.
Anthropologists seem to be increasing embarrassed by museum collections
and act to distance themselves from these ‘colonial’
acquisitions.
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