Archeology

Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago . Peter Bellwood.
Recent Advances in Indo-Pacific Prehistory . V. N. Misra and Peter Bellwood , eds.     

Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Beyond Criticizing New Archeology

This article was presented as the Distinguished Lecture in Archeology at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, December 4, 1992, in San Francisco.     

Archeology as Long-Term Ethnography

Behavioral variation from year to year is archeologically invisible, yet it may have important effects on the archeological record. Moreover, much of current theory demands that we give attention to such variation. Rather than adopting normative reconstructions from ethnographies, archeologists must view the archeological record as a long-term ethnography, confounded by such variations in behavior. Using an ecological perspective, patterns of behavioral variation can be linked to environmental characteristics, with implications for the archeological record of settlement and subsistence. The Paleolithic and Mesolithic of southwest Germany are used to illustrate this approach.     

Book Reviews: Archeology

Book reviewed in this article:
The Collapse of Complex Societies . Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations . Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill , eds.     

Archeology and the First Americans

The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them—as if it must be clinging even to their corpses—some authenticity.