Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation

3. The Prehistory of Race and Archaeological Interpretation, Part II: Ethnicity over Race

Chapter 3 The Prehistory of Race and Archaeological Interpretation, Part II Ethnicity over Race Archaeologists have been interested in documenting the relationship between human variability and the material expressions of daily life ever since they realized that artifacts from the past could be visualized as more than historical documents. As an anthropological-historical approach gained acceptance in archaeology, greater numbers ofthe field's practitioners were compelled to attempt "to draw ethnographical conclusions from archaeological data" (Childe 1926: 200). As shown in the previous chapter, the convention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually dictated that "race" was the frame of reference of most pioneering social archaeologists. By the 1960s, however, professional archaeologists had largely abandoned the concept of race as a reified, subjective entity, and had substituted for it the more anthropologically supportable concept of ethnicity. As a result, if Childe had published The Aryans in 1986 instead of 1926, he probably would have chosen the term "ethnic" over "racial" in his assessment that "The correlation of cultural with racial groups is generally hazardous and speculative " (1926: 200). Processual archaeologists, because of their overt interest in social and cultural systems, quickly recognized the importance of ethnicity. David Clarke (1968), for example, wrote about the archaeology of "ethnic subcultures." Employing the systems theory jargon of the New Archaeology , Clarke (1968: 236) perceived an ethnic subculture as a type of "cultural assemblage system" composed of "genetically related and discrete minorities existing within an 'alien' culture, either as engulfed authochthons or as intrusive immigrants." His use of the term "genetically related" suggests perhaps that a subtle racial strain still existed within archaeological thought at this time. Clarke proposed that archaeologists can recognize ethnic subcultures by their "traditional attributes 76 Chapter 3 and artefacts," but said that these subcultures would lose their identity over time. He thus proposed that archaeology offered a unique avenue for identifying the cultural traits of relict ethnic subcultures before they had suffered the effects of culturally modifying assimilation. The anthropological relevance of the archaeological task outlined by Clarke was immediately clear to archaeologists who desired to transform archaeology into a more socially oriented discipline. As some archaeologists began to think specifically about cultural complexity and social variation, many began to debate the effects ofdivergent group variation as opposed to evolutionary change. In a famous example, Fran~ois Bordes (1973; Bordes and De Sonneville-Bordes 1970) equated different styles of paleolithic tool kits with "different cultural variants" that could be shown to be contemporaneous. Binford challenged Bordes's view that the "cultural variants" could be constructed with ethnic meaning, and cited Bordes's failure to document unambiguous ethnic distinctions within the various archaeological assemblages (Binford 1973; Binford and Binford 1966). The Binford/Bordes debate is still somewhat unresolved (Renfrew and Bahn 1991: 343), but Bordes's interpretation is significant-independent of its veracitybecause it aptly demonstrates the difficulty identified by Childe as early as 1926. The archaeological consideration of ethnicity became more sophisticated as archaeologists familiarized themselves with more ethnographically grounded understandings ofethnicity (see Horvath 1983). Perhaps the greatest advance in archaeologists' understanding of ethnicity came with Fredrik Barth's (1969) conception of an "ethnic group" as a discrete aggregate of people who seek to maintain their sense of self through the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. Barth's ideas represented a significant turning point in ethnic group research (McGuire 1982: 160-61; Jones 1997: 60), because, for example, archaeologists, especially those trained in documenting large-scale cultural histories, understood the many problems posed by cultural boundaries. The concept of ethnic boundary maintenance transformed the attempt to identify past ethnic groups through the accompanying perception that a people united in lifeways and traditions will strive to maintain this unity. Conceivably, their material culture should also reflect their cultural unity and concomitantly, their base-level differences from other peoples. In a purely archaeological sense, then, ethnic differences should appear as distinct assemblages of objects. Thus the associated archaeological identification of past ethnicity initially appears relatively straightforward. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the determination of ethnicity from archaeological collections "is as difficult today as it has ever been" (Dongoske et al. 1997: 600). Even among living peoples The Prehistory of Race and Archaeological Interpretation, Part II 77 "Ethnicity has a will-o'-the-wisp quality that makes it extremely hard to analyze" (Maybury-Lewis 1997: 59). Through the examples they have presented in their detailed ethnographic accounts of...