Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually focusing on the material remains of a society, rather than its culture. Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. Archaeologists can then infer that ancient societies used the same techniques as their modern counterparts given a similar set of environmental circumstances. Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphe = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on months or years of fieldwork. ... Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from Greek: αρχαίος, archae, ancient; and λόγος, logos, knowledge) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. ... Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning to cultivate), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ...

Ethnography can provide insights of value to archaeologists into how people in the past may have lived, especially with regard to their social structures, religious beliefs and other aspects of their culture. However, it is still unclear how to relate most of the insights generated by this anthropological research to archaeological investigations. This is due to the lack of emphasis by anthropologists on the material remains created and discarded by societies and on how these material remains vary with differences in how a society is organised. Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = people and graphein = writing) refers to the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ...

This general problem has led archaeologists (for example, London [2000]) to argue that anthropological work is not adequate for answering archaeological problems, and that archaeologists should therefore undertake ethnoarchaeological work to answer these problems. These studies have focused far more on the manufacture, use and discard of tools and other artefacts and have sought to answer such questions as what kinds of objects used in a living settlement are deposited in middens or other places where they may be preserved, and how likely an object is to be discarded near to the place where it was used. Anthropology (from Greek: ἀνθρωπος, anthropos, human being; and λόγος, logos, knowledge) is the comparative study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity through the examination of historical and present geographical distribution, cultural history, acculturation, and cultural relationships. ... In archaeology, an artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human culture, and often one later recovered by some archaeological endeavor. ... A midden, also known as kitchen middens, is a dump for domestic waste. ...

One good example of ethnoarchaeology is that of Brian Hayden (1987), whose team examined the manufacture of Mesoamerican quern-stones, providing valuable insights into the manufacture of prehistoric quern-stones. Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the European discovery of the New World by Columbus. ... Quern-stones are a pair of stone tools for hand grinding a wide variety of materials. ... Prehistory (Greek words προ = before and ιστορία = history) is the period of human history prior to the advent of writing (which marks the beginning of recorded history). ...

Bibliography

• Hayden, B. ed. 1987 Lithic studies among the contemporary Highland Maya, University of Arizona Press.
• London, G. 2000 Ethnoarchaeology and interpretation, In Near Eastern Archaeology 63:2-8.