Analogy (Archaeology)

Considerable quantities of Nordic/Baltic amber occur in Irish later Bronze Age deposits. This exotic material reached Ireland through exchange networks that may have stretched all the way to the coasts of Denmark. This paper reviews some of that evidence and then looks to the texts of medieval Ireland in a search for analogies of how such travel might have been socially facilitated.

The present text concerns the social implications of the material world, focusing on the sociality of materialities rather than their possible meaning and symbolism. It is argued that the interpretative approach only permit things and objects to be active within a conscious human discourse. It is suggested that archaeology would benefit from approaching materialities from a less humanocentric perspective and acknowledge a greater variety of ways in which materialities are involved in the structurating process of society. This, however, does not imply that the material world is equal to the human in terms of agency, nor does it suggest a symmetrical relationship between the living and the material. What is socially significant in the material context, and to which degree, is something that needs to be considered in each given case. A second issue concerned is the construction of models or fictions that we employ in our analysis of socio-material worlds. Given the great importance of such fictions for the outcome of our studies they need to be thoroughly discussed, and, considering that we might expect to encounter practices and ways of thinking that is no longer represented in contemporary societies, a creative element is also called for.

The relations between archaeology and anthropology have been debated from time to time over the years. There has been both antagonism and repeated calls for collaboration and theoretical exchange between the two brothers in arms. From an outside point of view, the sometimes heated debate might seem curious since both  fields share a similar goal: to understand human diversity and the ways in which people live and interact in different worlds. Yarrow (2010) and lucas (2010) have recently argued that the perception of  fields of anthropology and archaeology has always centered on a lack in archaeology—the absent subject—which has created an asymmetry that is diffcult to bridge. indeed, working only with things and traces of action (archaeology) is not the same as working with things and people (anthropology). However, this distinction is based upon an ontology in which people and the material world are perceived as belonging to separate spheres (culture and nature). In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of neomaterialism in the humanist and social sciences, which suggests a redistribution of action from the realm of the human to the material world. It is, however, not simply a question of associating agency with things and objects, but also a displacement of the human as a logical point of departure (anthropocentrism) to perceive the human and the nonhuman as ontologically inseparable. A question that arises is whether such a nonanthropocentric perspective that focuses more on the material world might marginalize the importance of interviews and observing social practice typical of traditional anthropological  eldwork. Archaeology is also affected by such a turn of perspective because it includes a different view of the material as not only a product of culture but rather as a co-creator of culture. indeed, such a displacement of the human as a natural and given point of departure certainly has ramifications for both anthropology and archaeology.  The question is, how far-reaching will the consequences of such a shift be? Will it bring anthropology and archaeology closer together, perhaps even conflating them, or will the two disciplines diverge even further? in either case, it will affect the way we study human societies, whether they are contemporary or in the past. In this chapter I explore this varied and heterogeneous body of material-oriented research and point out certain areas where the relations between archaeology and anthropology may be affected.

Abstract: We hereby emphasize the good possibilities of analogy/comparison from the block of information available for the castra of Dacia. Despite the fact that the research of these is not so advanced as it is generally argued by many specialists outside the circle of reserchers which study them, the level of knowledge on the Dacian castra is nevertheless satisfactory.

In this book the concept of mobility is explored for the
archaeology of the Amazonian and Caribbean region. As
a result of technological and methodological progress in
archaeology, mobility has become increasingly visible on
the level of the individual. However, as a concept it does
not seem to fit with current approaches in Amazonian
archaeology, which favour a move away from viewing
small mobile groups as models for the deeper past.
Instead of ignoring such ethnographic tyrannies, in this
book they are considered to be essential for arriving at a
different past. Viewing archaeological mobility as the sum
of movements of both people and objects, the empirical
part of Amotopoan Trails focuses on Amotopo, a small
contemporary Trio village in the interior of Suriname.
The movements of the Amotopoans are tracked and
positioned in a century of Trio dynamics, ultimately
yielding a recent archaeology of Surinamese-Trio
movements for the Sipaliwini River basin (1907-2008).
Alongside the construction of this archaeology, novel
mobility concepts are introduced. They provide the
conceptual footholds which enable the envisioning of
mobility at various temporal scales, from a decade up to a
century, the sequence of which has remained a blind spot
in Caribbean and Amazonian archaeology.

A room with many well-preserved artifacts was excavated at Tell Halif in a level associated with Ancient Judah. By using analogy the use of these artifacts can be compared with that of other similar objects. Analogy is at the heart of archaeological interpretation and allows a more explicit determination of the possible uses of artifacts and their patterning. The artifacts serve as evidence for reconstructing life in and around an archaeologically excavated space. By discerning the patterns of artifact distribution we can interpret how the space might have been used. The room excavated at Tell Halif has strong evidence for food processing, closely integrated with storage. Textile production was also carried out in the room. Other artifacts point to food consumption, play, personal ornamentation and the use of symbolic images. The patterning of the artifacts indicates a busy multi-use space.

In this comment I argue that ethnoarchaeology is not the only means for an archaeological engagement with living traditional communities. I suggest that some practices can be better labelled ‘archaeology of the present’, due to their lack of interest in providing analogical frameworks of inspiration for archaeology. Instead, the archaeology of the present aims to better understand living societies by using archaeological methods and theories. Rather than pitting one sub-discipline against the other, however, I suggest that they are both necessary and complementary.

This article is focus on an endscraper made from quartzite of Tušimice type, which was found in 2009 at the bank of Seč dam (Seč district). The endscraper dated to the Mesolithic period is a linking element of a fictional story, by which are described different aspects of life of Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers societies. Described situations are supported by the concrete archaeological and ethnoarchaeological observation, environmental data or by the results of archaeological experiments. Firstly, outcomes of environmental analyses have served for reconstruction of past landscape (fauna and flora composition). Secondly, ethnoarchaeological studies have used to explain obtaining of stone raw material, spatial arrangement of settlement and human subsistence strategy. Finally, results of archaeological experiments have suggested a way of production and use of artifacts, in this case of stone endscrapers. The article shows one of existence variants of selected stone artifact, circumstances of its creation, use and extinction. Chosen written form represents an effort to see beyond the "dead" artifacts a living human of past.

Analogy is inextricably linked with human perception, discovery and cognition (Edgeworth, 2003, pp. xiii, 13). Analogical reasoning is a form of inferential logic whereby likely relationships are implied between similar entities with varying degrees of probability (Binford 1967, p. 1; Van Reybrouck 2000, p. 42; Wylie 1982, pp. 392-393). Since the 19th Century, archaeologists have used ethnographic analogy to understand the human past behind the archaeological record (Charlton 1981, pp. 133-134, 136; Wylie 2002, pp. 137-138). They illustrated ancient prehistoric hunter-gatherers' lifeways using ethnographic analogies. Sir John Lubbock utilised general analogical research to "throw some light on" (1865, pp. xiii, 1) prehistoric peoples. He contended that contemporary Inuit scrapers were "absolutely identical" to common prehistoric tools, so their use is thus "entirely explained" (Lubbock 1865, p. 407), regardless of dissimilarities (Van Reybrouck 2000, p. 71). William John Sollas (1911, pp. 91, 94) similarly believed that knowledge of modern hunter-gatherers was useful for analogies to understand prehistoric people, by directly comparing Tasmanian Aboriginals with Palaeolithic peoples. Yet, without this ethnographic-based beginning, "few identifications or comparisons would be possible" (Kent 1994), as the archaeological record "cannot speak to us ... cannot tell us how or why they were made or what they mean" (Peregrine 2001, p. 1). However, such uncritical social evolutionary-based similarity studies are not useful archaeological tools (Stiles 1977, p. 89).

Traditional debates on analogical thinking, which is at the root of all knowledge about the past, were founded on the scientific-methodological postulate of the striving for increased control of conditions that affect the research situation, that is, the pre-methodological consensus on the need for objec tifying, depersonalizing and regulating research. Faithful to the inherited ideals of objective social science, the archaeological discussion on analogy has for decades focused exclusively on logical-epistemological issues of general methodology; however, it has actually contributed very little to overcoming the fact that the past is not objectively knowable. By introducing the concept of reflexivity into the debate on the analogical character of archaeological thinking, the paper aims to recontextualize the analogy debate which aspires to the positivist ideals of a social science, into a debate on archaeology as a social practice which inevitably and continually draws analogies between the past and the present and thus establishes the meanings of the world we live in. Rethinking archaeological analogies by means of a conceptual apparatus developed in anthropological and sociological debates on reflexivity provides a new research perspective in which the use of analogies moves beyond the sphere of debates on logical consistency and becomes
a social practice aware of the semantic and hence also political implications of the knowledge it produces

El sitio arqueológico de Malagana, en el suroccidente de Colombia, es ampliamente
conocido por la gran cantidad de piezas de oro y cerámica muy elaborada provenientes de contextos
funerarios, así como por las estructuras de tierra de carácter monumental que delimitaban el sitio. Estas
estructuras de tierra, erigidas en el Periodo Bolo Temprano (400 a. C.-800 d. C.), han sido interpretadas
principalmente como canales masivos de drenaje. En este artículo se evalúan interpretaciones alternativas
sobre la función de estas estructuras y se afirma que la función defensiva es mucho más coherente, con
la evidencia disponible, que la interpretación de una función “hidráulica”.

The analogy has been used to establish relations between past and present since the birth of archaeology and ethnology as scientific disciplines.

The repeated incursions of archaeologists in the territory of ethnologists will lead, at the end, to the creation of an hybrid sub-discipline, ethnoarchaeology. In the last decades many scholars questioned the ability of analogy to connect past and present realities, advocating a more restrictive appliance, the use of analogy being now considered as the principal weakness of this kind of studies.

In this communication I propose to address why there is probably no future for ethnoarchaeology beyond analogy, trying to understand if there is any other suitable way to connect past to present. In the course of this paper, I will use the case study of ceramic vessel wine making tradition as example of how Actor-Network-Theory can offer an alternative, and why it will oblige first to reconsider what Tradition is.

Silva, A. J. M. da, “Does the Ethnoarchaeology have a future beyond the analogy?”, in Alarcón García,  Eva; Padilla Fernández, Juan Jesús, Arboledas Martínez, Luis  and Chapon, Linda (eds.), Something more than galbos and pots. Ethnoarchaeology and ceramic experimentation, Menga – Journal of Andalusian Prehistory (Monography 4), vol. 8  (nº4), 2018, p. 31-43.

The archaeological site of Malagana, Southwestern Colombia, is well-known in the archaeological literature for the outstanding quantity and quality of grave goods, recovered from looted tombs, and the monumental earth structures surrounding the site. These structures, built during the Early Bolo Period (400 BC-800 AD), have been interpreted as drainage channels by previous researchers, providing a peaceful version of the past. In this article different functions for these structures are evaluated and it is claimed that a defensive function is a more coherent interpretation according to the available empirical evidence. Key-words: Malagana, earth structures, drainage channels, defensive structures, warfare, function. 176 / Boletín de Antropología, Vol. 31 N.o 52, julio-diciembre de 2016. Universidad de Antioquia As estruturas da terra do sítio de Magdalena, sudeste da Colômbia Resumo. O sítio arqueológico de Malagana, no sudeste da Colômbia, é amplamente conhecido pela grande quantid...

Abstract: In this work, it will be analyzed to what extent the archaeology of the Mayan culture can be useful to clarify the debate about the organization and political interaction on the island of Crete during the Neopalatial period. This analogy is not whimsical; since this topic has generated intense debates in the field of Cretan archaeology, some researchers have considered that the models used for the lowlands of Mesoamerica may be useful to provide new answers. However, this type of comparison has not been studied in sufficient depth. Faced with this situation, this research has four general objectives: first, to offer some theoretical-methodological bases to carry out this analogical analysis; second, briefly describe the state of the art in Minoan studies on the debate about the political organization; third, to systematize the different models proposed for the Mayan culture considering their epistemological and hermeneutical bases; and, finally, evaluate the merits (and defects) of using this analogy.

As a methodological principle analogy is present in all scientific disciplines even
though, from a logical standpoint, strictly observed, it does not satisfy the criteria
which would qualify it as a reliable means of deduction. The queastion of relevacy of
the analogic deduction was particularly important for archaeology which, striving towards scientific objectivity, tried to find out what was the past like. However, the history of that academic tendency to a scientific ideal has uncovered an essential unreliability (dubiousness), logical inconsistency and finally the bias of all archaeological
conclusions about the past, pointing to the fact that everything we learn about the
past, we learn, or better said, we interpret by analogy of (on) the present.
Key words: archaeological epistemiology, deduction by analogy, Middle-range
theories, ethnoarchaeology, relation archaeology.

As riverine and lacustrine environments expanded across north tropical Africa during early Holocene times, certain characteristic fishing or " aquatic hunting " strategies became widespread. This paper investigates one such strategy and an associated technology: selective fishing and barbed bone " harpoon " points in the Turkana Basin, northwest Kenya. These tools have a geographically widespread distribution across Africa, primarily north of the equator, and can shed light on hunter-gatherer technology and resource acquisition in the face of environmental and social change. Interviews with contemporary Turkana fishers highlight near-shore fishing practices analogous to those of early Holocene hunter-gatherers. For example, Turkana fishers exploiting deltaic " yellow waters " have traditionally employed selective harpoon-like tools to acquire large aquatic fauna like Lates niloticus (Nile perch) and Synodontis sp. (catfish), while using non-selective traps, hooks and nets to catch smaller and deeper-water species. These practices have changed over several decades in response to local socioeconomic and environmental shifts. Today these selective strategies show a marked seasonality and regional variability that the archaeological record of this region has thus far been ill-equipped to investigate. Through carefully constructed analogy, this preliminary work contributes to a better understanding of human technological and behavioral responses to shifting lakeshore environments today and during early Holocene times.

Ethnography describes most Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer (H-F-G) as egalitarian societies in which sexual division of labour is a consequence of the biological features of women and men, or a technical strategy based on the complementarity of both sexes. However, a non-biased, complete analysis of the ethnographic information shows that actually sexual division of labour and social inequality between males and females are two main basic universal features in H-F-G societies. Despite their universal appearance, the variability and intensity of the different cases demonstrates that these relationships are clearly a social option. In order to find out when and why all started we have to improve archaeological methodology and search archaeological indicators of H-F-G social organization. 20 years of ethnoarchaeological experimentation in Tierra del Fuego has been an encouraging first step in this research.

Analogical reasoning has played a great role in architectural design, manifesting and manipulating form, structure, and function from ancient until our modern and contemporary/visionary architecture as well. It has been inferred in classical theories as well as the evolutionary ones. AR has succeeded to exist in most of the architectural schools inferring many types changing the form from geometric, abstracted forms to fluid and soft ones. Structure was first bound by the nature of the material inferring ad-hoc analogy, and then it has been freed to follow biological structures inferring biological analogy. Even the function has been affected by analogy to be efficient imitating a machine then by computer science and modern technologies to have no limits in space and serving systems inferring philosophical analogy. Also, Function was seeking sustainable behavior of buildings by inferring Darwinian analogy. Architects ain't no creators, God is the superior creator. Architect just imitates, derives, transforms what he witnesses around him from God's creatures and nature seeking and serving his needs and aspirations, while finding solutions.

У статті запропоновано історіографічний аналіз проблеми залучення етнографічних аналогій у первісній археології.

This article is dedicated to the historiographical analysis of the question how to use ethnographical analogies in archaeology.

In the following discussion, I overview ethnoarchaeology’s historic relations to positivism and argue for an explicit redefinition of how we understand the sub-discipline’s core objectives.  Ethnoarchaeology was charged by the New Archaeology and Behavioral Archaeology with producing “middle range theories” made up of “behavioral-material correlations” that would facilitate archaeological testing.  I propose instead that we should reaffirm ethnoarchaeology’s ties to analogical reasoning by viewing it as a source-side “tack” (following Alison Wylie) within archaeology’s emerging post-positivist epistemology.  As a tack, ethnoarchaeology finds its primary role in the production and assessment of the background knowledge that archaeology uses to interpret the past.  I suggest that the use of ethnographic engagements to assess archaeology’s interpretive principles potentially makes the subfield complementary with various forms of alternative and indigenous scholarship.