The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the

Contemporary Past

Oxford Handbooks Online

The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the

Contemporary Past: a Historical Investigation
Kathryn Fewster
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World
Edited by Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini

Print Publication Date: Oct 2013 Subject: Archaeology, Contemporary and Public Archaeology
Online Publication Date: Dec DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199602001.013.046
2013

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores the respective histories of both ethnoarchaeology and archaeologies of the contemporary
past. On the surface the two subdisciplines appear to have much in common-they are both involved in studies of
societies of the present and of the recent past. However, the methodologies that each employ in this goal, as a
result of specific historical choices that practitioners of each subdiscipline made, are very different. Practitioners of
archaeologies of the contemporary past generally use an archaeological methodology that was developed out of
American ethnoarchaeology in the 1980s, while post-processual ethnoarchaeology in Britain undertook a major
overhaul of these ideas. It is argued that archaeologies of the contemporary past could gain as much from an
understanding of more recent developments in ethnoarchaeology with regard to methodology and ethics of
representation, as they have from processual ethnoarchaeology.

Keywords: historical overview, ethnoarchaeology, material culture, multivocality, reductionism

2.1 Introduction

MODERN material culture studies and archaeologies of the contemporary and historical past are relatively new fields

within the discipline of archaeology, developing their own possibilities, ontologies, and epistemologies (Graves-
Brown 2000a; Buchli and Lucas 2001a; Schofield 2009b; Harrison and Schofield 2010; Holtorf and Piccini 2011).
The aim of this chapter is not to attempt a definitive overview of these emerging fields, but rather to make some
comment about the possible directions of these studies from within the context of their intellectual history. In
particular, I shall examine the relationship of modern material culture studies with regard to what may be
considered to be their obvious predecessor, and current sister subdiscipline: ethnoarchaeology. Harrison and
Schofield (2010: 30) state that, ‘…the precedents for the archaeology of the contemporary past were developed
out of early ethnoarchaeological studies in the US’ whereas more recent publications (e.g. Graves-Brown 2000a;
Buchli and Lucas 2001a) represent a ‘significant shift in orientation away from the ethnoarchaeological focus of
most of the earlier work on the archaeology of the contemporary past towards a more specific focus on
contemporary life’ (Harrison and Schofield 2010: 30). I do not necessarily disagree with either statement, but as an
ethnoarchaeologist myself, I think the trajectory is slightly more convoluted, and the two subdisciplines would
benefit from a more nuanced understanding of their intellectual roots. Many modern material culture studies read
very much like ethnoarchaeologies in terms of their methods (e.g. Zimmerman, this volume; Schofield 2009a,
2009c; Kiddey and Schofield 2011) and they represent informants’ voices in the form of oral testimonies,
interviews, blogs, etc. Others place greater emphasis on an archaeological methodology that was a facet of early
modern material culture studies, and that does not necessarily seek the opinions of living informants (e.g. Leone
1973; Salwen 1973; Rathje 1978, 1981; Buchli and Lucas 2001c; Graves-Brown 2007; Harrison and Schofield
2010). Of this second group I want to make two points: firstly that despite their stated aims to multivocality, some

Page 1 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

archaeologies of the contemporary past, by their chosen methodology, are in danger of producing the opposite;
and second, that archaeologies of the contemporary past, sometimes referred to as ‘archaeologies of us’ (first
cited in Gould and Schiffer 1981, restated in Buchli and Lucas 2001b: 8; Harrison and Schofield 2010: 12), need to
pay more attention to defining who ‘us’ includes and—more to the point—excludes.

I begin with a brief examination of Binfordian ethnoarchaeology. Binford’s Middle Range Theory was not
synonymous with the New Archaeology, and there were a number of processual archaeologists engaged in other
types of what was then termed ethnoarchaeology; including taphonomy (Gifford 1978), experimental archaeology,
and indeed what might now, in retrospect, be termed modern material culture studies (Leone 1973; Salwen 1973;
Rathje 1978), whose aim was neither law-like generalizations nor indeed analogy. Thus it emerges that in order to
find the academic bloodline of archaeologies of the contemporary past it is necessary to make a distinction
between Binfordian ethnoarchaeology and other studies which were not necessarily considered mainstream
ethnoarchaeology at the time they were produced. Although they lacked a subdisciplinary self-consciousness
(until, arguably the publication of Gould and Schiffer 1981), these approaches are the distant predecessors of
archaeologies of the historical and contemporary past. They differed from earlier ethnoarchaeology in two
important ways. Firstly, processual ethnoarchaeologies involved the observation of present human relationships
with material culture such that analogy could be made to reconstruct the dynamics of human behaviour from the
statics of material culture of the past (Binford 1967, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1983) while post-processual
ethnoarchaeologies aimed to aid archaeological interpretation (Hodder 1982). Yet many early forms of modern
material culture studies (Salwen 1973; Rathje 1978, 1981; Schiffer 1978) claimed no such ontological discipline,
expressly stating that their work was an archaeological approach to increase the understanding of the present.
Secondly, the majority of ethnoarchaeologies, especially of the post-processual school, used anthropological
methodologies to gather information from living people about their own interpretations of meanings and
connotations of their material culture (Moore 1986; Tilley 1996; Fewster 2007; Parker-Pearson and Ramilisonina
1998). This in itself was a particularly post-processual concern with the issue of subjectivity, unlike processual
ethnoarchaeologies which had been necessarily reductionistic in order to produce the laws needed for analogy.
By contrast, many early forms of modern material culture studies and later ones use a specifically archaeological
methodology, studying the contemporary period as though it were an archaeological site, devoid of human subject.
By doing so the practitioner of modern material culture studies and archaeologies of the historical and
contemporary past tends to set him- or herself up as the sole objective observer and commentator, despite the
potential presence of other living voices.

2.2 American Processual Ethnoarchaeology 1960s–1980s

The paradigm by which Binford was much influenced was logical positivism. He sought to produce a Middle Range
Theory using the hypothetico-deductive method to produce general laws of human behaviour and material culture
which could be tested to achieve a quantifiable statement of truth with regard to their accuracy as explanations of
the material culture of the past.

It is argued that as a scientist one does not justifiably employ analogies to ethnographic observations for
the ‘interpretation’ of archaeological data. Instead, analogies should be documented and used as the basis
for offering a postulate as to the relationship between archaeological forms and their behavioural context
in the past. Such a postulate should then serve as the foundation of a series of deductively drawn
hypotheses which, on testing, can refute or tend to confirm the postulate offered.

(Binford 1972: 33)

Ethnoarchaeology—the observation and recording of living human behaviour and the material cultural patterning it
produces, such that analogy could be made to the past—was the methodological tool central to the first stages of
Binford’s Middle Range Theory. Binford argued that archaeologists should carry out the ethnographic part of the
study for themselves, and not simply rely on other people’s written ethnographies. He was convinced that the
ethnoarchaeologist should remain an outside observer of human behaviour and its material consequence because
as such he or she had an observational advantage in understanding people’s relationships with their material world
that the people themselves were not able to see, being too embedded in their own lives. Thus for Binford, his
ethnoarchaeological studies were deliberately reductionistic. Binford is probably best known for his

Page 2 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

ethnoarchaeological study of the Nunamiut (Binford 1978) and his use of the ideas generated from that study to
make cross-cultural analogy to the Mousterian of France (Binford 1973). Binford himself had carried out what might
in retrospect be regarded as an archaeology of the contemporary past, in terms of its methodology, if not its aim.
During his fieldwork with the Nunamiut he paid particular attention to the observation and recording of one
particular house—Palangana’s house—at Tulugak Lake, Alaska (Binford 1983: 176–84) while it was occupied.
When Palangana’s house was abandoned, as a test of his own theories, Binford excavated it to see if he could
accurately reconstruct the gender relationships of the space he had observed using only the archaeological
evidence.

Binford had high expectations of ethnoarchaeology and its practitioners. Moreover Binford’s methodology required
two periods of original fieldwork—one among living people and another of an archaeological database. Thus for all
that Lewis Binford is associated with processual ethnoarchaeology, there are few examples of studies that
managed to carry through his Middle Range Theory to an effective end (cf. Yellen 1977; Gifford 1978; Schiffer
1978; Gould 1980). Problems with Binfordian ethnoarchaeology were highlighted from within the contemporary
archaeological community; firstly, the search for laws of human behaviour and material culture was criticized by
the culture historians (Flannery 1973: 51) and secondly, some processual archaeologists signalled their dissent
from Middle Range Theory by setting up schema of analogy of their own (see Gould 1980; Yellen 1977; Gould
1980).

2.3 Early Forms of Modern Material Culture Studies 1970s–1980s

A third group of processual archaeologists went in a different direction altogether, being more excited by the idea
of the observation of human behaviour and its correlating material dimensions in the present. In Redman’s edited
volume of 1973, Research and Theory in Current Archeology, Salwen proposed a modern material culture study of
Manhattan Island, New York. His definitive framework was explicitly based on a temporal distinction: ‘Once we cross
the line from prehistory to history, where should we draw a new temporal boundary?…it might be argued that a site
becomes the proper domain of the anthropological archaeologist as soon as the behaviour stops and as soon as
the actors leave the scene!’ (Salwen 1973: 154). He emphasized the difference between his proposed programme
of urban research with those of his ethnoarchaeological colleagues by stating that although the archaeology of
urban areas might be of use in law-making for the purpose of analogy to the past, these studies did not need to be
‘justified as aids to the prehistorian’ (Salwen 1973: 163). In the same volume Leone (1973: 136)

argued that, archeology is tied to the present. Not only are all of its models derived from the present but,
more to the point here, one of archeology’s major roles is a function of how it is used in the present. Should
not archaeology then study how it is used, how its data (i.e. material culture) are used by the present, and
how material culture, when used affects the culture doing the using?

He looked at a Mormon town in Arizona, and went beyond a simple techno-environmentalist explanation for its
layout by suggesting that for Mormon pioneers, proximity of dwelling was a means of facilitating the social and
religious order. ‘It is not just that Mormons and their religion created settlements and spatial subdivisions and made
life work; Mormonism could not exist without the spatial representation and technological devices that allowed its
population to exist’ (Leone 1973: 149).

By 1981 it appears that early versions of modern material culture studies had developed a self-conscious status in
the form of Gould and Schiffer’s edited book of that year, Modern Material Culture: The Archeology of Us. It would
appear that the rationale at that time for defining modern material culture studies was a temporal, or chronological
one, i.e. that they were studies of the material culture of the present or recent past. There were some typically
processual papers in that volume (for example, Gould 1981). However, there were also some papers in the volume
that were remarkably forward looking, given the context in which they were produced. For example, Leone (1981)
demonstrated that the presentation of the past cannot be separated from the politics of the present, by observing
inherent racism in the activities of heritage presentation at the open air museum of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
In a similarly non-processual vein, Bath (1981) attempted to map the underlying order of categorization in a
modern supermarket using structuralist principles. Finally, Rothschild (1981) introduced to the volume the non-
processual concept of human choice, or aesthetic preference being a determinant of coin distribution that
overrode functionality (Rothschild 1981: 180). Despite the potential turn in the tide demonstrated by these three

Page 3 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

studies—all using new concepts in the US processual context—there were other chapters in the volume that
demonstrated classically processual methodologies, derived from Binfordian ethnoarchaeologies. Rathje (1981)
took the extreme processual position with regard to reductionism. He had this to say about the role of informants’
testimonies:

their [i.e. that of modern material culture studies] contribution to traditional archaeological interests has yet
to be demonstrated, perhaps because of the tempting sirens archaeologists find waiting in modern settings
to lure them into other pursuits. The first bait that subverts archaeologists is encountering living informants.
With the potential to talk to people comes an interest in what peoples say, in ‘meanings and values’.

(Rathje 1981: 55).

He called the archaeologists’ attempt to elucidate belief systems in material culture ‘mentalist archaeology’, and
described it as, ‘[h]eady stuff…for an archaeologist to attempt’ (Rathje 1981: 56) Little did Rathje know that in the
following year a book would be published on post-processual theory in ethnoarchaeology in Britain that would
positively encourage archaeologists to be tempted by ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ in material culture. Moreover, it would
lay the foundation for British post-processual ethnoarchaeologists to actively seek out those ‘tempting sirens’, the
living informants that have become central to the subdiscipline today.

2.4 British Post-Processual Ethnoarchaeology 1980s–Present Day (2011)

Post-processual ethnoarchaeologies differed significantly in both methodology and ontology from their processual
predecessors. In 1982 Hodder expressed his reservations about Binfordian ethnoarchaeology and offered an
alternative, ‘softer’ approach to the use of ethnographic data in archaeology. He defined ethnoarchaeology as ‘the
collection of original ethnographic data in order to aid archaeological interpretation’ (Hodder 1982: 28). By 1985
the tide against processual ethnoarchaeology was visibly turning (Wylie 1985). Firstly, in terms of method, the
concern to prove anything about the past was not an aim, thus few post-processual archaeologies sought to
produce general laws of human behaviour and material culture from their studies of the present. Secondly,
because of the emphasis in post-processualism as a whole on hermeneutics, as well as subjectivity (Shanks and
Tilley 1987a, 1987b) post-processual ethnoarchaeologies rejected the processual method whereby the observer is
set up as the sole interpreter of material culture vis-à-vis material culture. Thus informants were now frequently, if
not overwhelmingly, consulted with regard to their own interpretations of the intrinsic meaning of their material
culture.

But perhaps the greatest influence on post-processual etshnoarchaeology came from anthropological
archaeology. In 1986 Henrietta Moore studied the Marakwet of Kenya, who have a strong sexual division of labour
in which men keep goats and women are responsible for cereal agriculture. Moore recorded the physical
structures of Marakwet compounds and showed that the two houses on them, one for males and the other for
females, are interpreted by the Marakwet as symbolic of the binary oppositions between men and women (Moore
1986: 45 (fig. 18)). The physical mapping of social space by the Marakwet extends to the deposition of waste—ash,
goat dung, and chaff—whereby each is carefully deposited in areas outside the compound separate from one
another but related to the positions of the female and male houses. Moore argued that: ‘the most common reason
the Endo [Marakwet] give for not mixing ash, animal dung and chaff is the relationship between refuse and burial:
“Not good to mix takataka [rubbish] because when a woman dies she should be buried where the chaff is,
because her work is to dig and remove the chaff…[o]ld men should be buried near the goat dung”’ (Moore 1986:
102). Thus Moore argued that material culture was created according to social meaning and this meaning was
imbued with issues of gender, power, and time. Moreover the meaning of the material culture of the Marakwet was
gleaned, not by herself, as scientist-observer, but rather by consulting the subjects of the study themselves. She
actively sought the insider’s, or the emic view. Similarly, in 1998, in order to aid his interpretation of Stonehenge,
England, Mike Parker Pearson carried out ethnoarchaeological research in Madagascar with Ramilisonina, an
archaeologist from the University of Antananarivo. Although their ultimate aim was to make a cross cultural
generalization separated by geography and time, law-like statements linking human action and material culture
were eschewed and instead Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998) made an analogy of materiality. This was a
direct influence from modern material culture studies. Although there are perhaps criticisms that could be made of
some of the interpretations (see Barrett and Fewster 1998), the paper is seminal in that it plays out the struggle

Page 4 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

between the archaeologists’ desire to use ethnoarchaeology as an interpretive tool but not to get caught up in
processual epistemology.

By 2001 ethnoarchaeology was sufficiently confident that it would survive as a subdiscipline under the new
paradigm. This is demonstrated in Nic David and Carol Kramer’s (2001) book Ethnoarchaeology in Action. The
theoretical approaches discussed in the book included both American processualism and the British post-
processualism of the 1980s and 1990s and the aim was synthesis. By this time ethnoarchaeologists were also
beginning to realize that they could use their methodologies to understand the present, and the possible future,
without necessarily having to make ethnoarchaeological fieldwork purely for the purposes of analogy. It was within
this intellectual context that one of my own ethnoarchaeological studies (Fewster 2007) was set. Fieldwork was
undertaken in Spain to explore why people in the village of Solosancho had differential knowledge of, and regard
for, the medieval and Iron Age remains in their locality. During interviews with informants, and the observation of
their physical engagement with the artefacts and architectures of their own past, I came to understand that it was
linked to the pervasive rural narrative of anxiety about increasing social inequality in the village as a result of
mechanization, rural–urban migration, and misguided agricultural policy in Spain. Although this research looks like
a modern material culture study, and it certainly benefited from developments in modern material culture studies, I
call it ethnoarchaeological because I alone would not have been able to interpret the action of people in the
present with regard to their material culture without listening to the testimonies of those people themselves. This is
a critical difference between the methodology of ethnoarchaeology and the archaeological methodologies of
modern material culture studies. It is a methodological difference which has important ethical implications with
regard to the means by which the subjects of study are represented. It gives the researcher more clues about the
significance of modern material culture to people, which act as insights to narrative linking material culture to wider
processes of social life and social change, and in that sense it facilitates an archaeology of practice. It does not
set the scientist-observer (myself) up as the sole interpreter of modern material culture, as though it were an empty
archaeological site, but it acknowledges the various accounts of the users of that material culture. It is a means by
which multivocality, as far as is possible, may be achieved. For example, a retired farmer, José Martín Muñoz,
showed me his collection of ‘old stuff’ and spoke while he played with the leather braids on an old ploughing yoke,
designed to keep the flies out of the oxen’s eyes. He said,

each farmer braided these tassles for his own plough team, and he decorated them individually using
different colours and knots. It was a source of great pride and some competition…farmers cosseted their
plough oxen, they loved them, and they loved showing them off. Now the tractor has changed all that.
Whoever felt enough love for a tractor to decorate it? It has destroyed so much of what we valued.

(José Martín Muñoz recorded in Fewster 2007: 96)

It is at this point of frisson, this moment of co-presence, this fingering of braided tassles with thick old farmer’s
fingers, that I feel closest to an understanding of the concerns of a human being other than myself, and
archaeologies of the contemporary past that adhere to a predominantly archaeological methodology (Rathje 1978,
1981; Buchli and Lucas 2001c; Graves-Brown 2007; Harrison and Schofield 2010) could benefit from this
methodological privilege (see Harrison 2006).

2.5 Modern Material Culture Studies and Archaeologies of the Recent and Historical Past 1980–2000

Although there was a lot of work done around issues of cultural identity which dealt with the contemporary past
(e.g. Shennan 1994; Kohl and Fawcett 1995), between 1980 and 2000 there was a hiatus in formal (university-
based) modern material culture studies, whilst there was a growing body of eclectic studies on the margins of the
discipline—in art, performance, wreckology, popular and commercial activity—by which people were finding their
own ways of engaging with the material culture of the present and recent and historical past. Eventually, it could be
argued that it was these various studies that pushed archaeologists into formulating an academic route through
which they could channel some of these ideas themselves. For example, as Holtorf (2007) later describes,
archaeology was becoming popularized outside of academia in literature, film, computer games, and heritage
theme parks to a degree that it became obvious that people’s archaeological knowledge and experience of
archaeology was dominated by sources other than the university, and that these sources had little desire to
engage professional archaeologists in consultation of ‘authenticity’ or ‘truth’ (see also Graves-Brown, this volume;

Page 5 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

Holtorf, this volume). Holtorf realized early on that if archaeologists did not find a way of understanding the ways
that people were engaging with the material culture of the present (see also Holtorf 2011) they would become
obsolete. At around the same time, artists and performers appeared to be having much more fun with modern
material culture than were professional archaeologists; examples of this include Richard Long’s (2002) Walking
the Line and Cliff McLucas’s (2000) ‘Ten Feet and Three Quarters of an Inch of Theatre’, both of which explored
the recounting of narrative through movement and performance, materiality and space.

2.6 Modern Material Culture Studies and Archaeologies of the Recent and Historical Past 2000–
Present Day (2011)

Thus at the time ethnoarchaeology was going through a major overhaul, both epistemological and ontological,
modern material culture studies experienced a hiatus of development of some two decades and were not adopted
formally into British universities until the noughties, when they made a fully self-conscious resurgence with the
publication of two edited volumes (Graves-Brown 2000a; Buchli and Lucas 2001a). This meant that early forms of
modern material culture studies were not subject to the same degree of challenge as when the twenty years of
theoretical battles saw processual ethnoarchaeology replaced by post-processual ethnoarchaeologies. The result
is that while modern material culture studies in the noughties are situated within eclectic post-processual ontologies
(popular culture, embodiment, multivocality, performance, storytelling, etc.) their methodologies (epistemologies)
have changed little since the eighties.

There is no doubt that some modern material culture studies have contributed greatly to the discipline despite this.
Some of the very best modern material culture studies are guided by the sociology of modern life and appear to be
truly pushing the boundaries of sociological theory aiding our understanding of the modern human condition in a
way that only a modern material culture study could. Graves-Brown studies the modern phenomenon of the
privatization of experience in a series of case studies (2000b, 2009, 2011). Another example of this is Holtorf’s
(2011) exploration of the ‘experience economy’ as an aspect of modernity. Others are using material culture
studies to explore new ways of telling history. Piccini’s (2011) extraordinary micro road movie retells parts of the
history of Bristol and links the story to the present by using the materiality of the road itself as a narrative device. It
is also clear that modern material culture studies and archaeologies of the contemporary and recent past have
added immensely to the archaeologist’s understanding of the dualistic nature of human action and material culture
with ‘an awareness that material culture is not passive and reflective but can act back upon us in unexpected
ways’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001b: 5; see also Latour 2000; Graves-Brown 2007).

2.7 Multivocality and the Archaeology of Us?

However, there are two interrelated problems that stem from the fact that modern material culture studies and
archaeologies of the contemporary and recent past did not go through the same post-processual ring of fire that
ethnoarchaeology did. Many modern material culture studies characterize their work as being ‘the archaeology of
us’ (Gould and Schiffer 1981), while at the same time stressing a commitment to multivocality. Us is defined
variously in socio-economic terms as modernity, post-modernity, after modernity (Harrison and Schofield 2010),
Capitalism, Consumerism, or mass consumption—of which it surely cannot be suggested that all people have the
same material experience. Harrison and Schofield (2010: 3) qualify the term ‘after modernity’ as being a deliberate
choice because it is a ‘non-period’ and homogeneity cannot be assumed, but then define themselves in terms of
time. They argue that, ‘the “contemporary” period cannot be fixed to a precise chronological bracket, and
unusually it might be best to see this as a period defined in reverse, from the present day back to a time when the
past seems (subjectively) no longer recent (2010–1950, as opposed to the more conventional form of 1950–2010)’
(Harrison and Schofield 2010: 5). The problem of definition extends into a problem of methodology. For example,
when Harrison and Schofield argued that they were capable of interpreting the material culture of the
present…‘[b]ecause we have lived and experienced this period [2010–1950]’ (Harrison and Schofield 2010: 5) and
Buchli and Lucas (2001b) argued that archaeological methods of the studies of contemporary material culture
could render ‘the familiar unfamiliar’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001b: 9), they denied the voices of their subjects by
leaving no epistemological mechanism that would allow multivocality to be ‘known’. For example, when Buchli and
Lucas (2001c) excavated a recently abandoned British council house they made a strong case for adopting an
archaeological methodology. ‘What characterises this study above all, is the archaeological context in which the

Page 6 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

work was done; there were no informants—just like an archaeological site, the people had left, leaving only their
material culture behind’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001c: 159). In the absence of informants, Buchli and Lucas
categorized the material culture in the house on ‘broad consumption divisions, such as one might find in a
department store’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001c: 158). This assumes that Buchli and Lucas’s experience of a
department store is the same as that of the council house tenants, and denies them the voice of their own
belongings. This was an opportunity for material culture studies to display its potential for demonstrating, not
assuming, the multivocality that is expressed in material goods. Buchli and Lucas are from what is, after all, the
specific material cultural background of academe and they cannot simply assume an a priori familiarity with their
subjects’ material culture simply because of a putative shared experience of ‘modernity’, ‘consumerism’, or time
line.

If ‘us’ is to be defined implicitly as a shared experience of material culture, who does ‘us’ include, and who is
excluded? Are only those icons of heteronormativity—white, male, educated adults—to be included? (Dowson
2009). What about blind people, children, mothers with prams, old men? Are certain mental states such as autism
and psychosis to be excluded? As Williams and Costall (2000) note: ‘the difficulties children with autism have in
dealing with and making sense of objects are a significant problem for themselves and their caregivers, not least
because their idiosyncratic way of relating to objects sets them apart from other people’ (Williams and Costall
2000: 108). This raises serious ethical issues. As Harrison and Schofield argue: ‘Clearly, when dealing with recent
history, the ethical questions that should be a part of all archaeological practice…become even more urgent’
(Harrison and Schofield 2010:15; see also Moshenska 2008).

2.8 Conclusion

In the period since the first modern material culture studies were published in the 1970s and 1980s,
ethnoarchaeology has undergone major epistemological changes in Britain as a result of the post-processual
critique. Over the same time period there was a general absence of developmental work in modern material culture
studies in the university context (other than the body of work on cultural identity, mentioned above) until Paul
Graves-Brown’s (2000a) and Buchli and Lucas’s (2001a) books were published. Both claimed vague historical links
to the early American school of modern material culture studies (1970–80). Perhaps because of the two-decade
gap in its development, at a crucial time in the history of the discipline, modern material culture studies missed out
on some of the theoretical developments made in post-processual ethnoarchaeology in Britain. It is this that
perhaps explains the current differences in modern material culture studies and post-processual
ethnoarchaeology.

Thus it is worth investigating Harrison and Schofield’s (2010: 30) statement that

the precedents for the archaeology of the contemporary past were developed out of early
ethnoarchaeological studies in the US in the 1970s and early 1980s’ and that the development of the
subdiscipline saw simply a ‘significant shift in orientation away from the ethnoarchaeological focus of most
of the earlier work on the archaeology of the contemporary past towards a more specific focus on
contemporary life.

(Harrison and Schofield 2010: 30)

A more nuanced history of the intellectual roots of the archaeology of the contemporary past would benefit this
emergent field, highlighting perhaps that it embraced ethnoarchaeology at its processual worst, and veered away
from it at its post processual best. Thus many archaeologies of the contemporary past adhere to an archaeological
methodology of the 1970s–1980s and remain affiliated to a concept, ‘the archaeology of us’ (first cited in Gould
and Schiffer 1981, restated in Buchli and Lucas 2001b: 8; Harrison and Schofield 2010: 12) that perhaps hampers
it in its claim to multivocality and ethical representation of subject (although see Zimmerman, this volume; Schofield
2009a, 2009c; Kiddey and Schofield 2011). Notwithstanding, some archaeologies of the contemporary past have
undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of social theory and contributed greatly to our understanding of the
relationships between human social behaviour and material culture. For these the subdiscipline has contributed not
only to archaeology and to ethnoarchaeology, but to the social sciences as a whole.

My heartfelt thanks go to Paul Graves-Brown. The work is dedicated to the memory of Marek Zvelebil. Like

Page 7 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

everything I do, it is because of Quentin.

Barrett, John C. and Fewster, Kathryn J. 1998. Isthe Medium the Message? (Reply to Parker-Pearson and
Ramilisonina ‘Stonehenge for the Ancestors’). Antiquity 72: 847–52.

Bath, Joyce E. 1981. The Raw and the Cooked: The Material Culture of a Modern Supermarket. In Modern Material
Culture: The Archeology of Us, ed. Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 183–95. New York: Academic
Press.

Binford, Lewis R. 1967. Smudge Pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Analogy in Archeological Reasoning. American
Antiquity 32: 1–12.

——— 1972. An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Seminar Press.

——— 1973. Interassemblage Variability: The Mousterian and the ‘Functional’ Argument. In The Explanation of
Culture Change: Models in Prehistory, ed. Colin Renfrew, pp. 227–54. London: Duckworth.

——— 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press.

——— 1983. In Pursuit of the Past. London: Thames and Hudson.

Buchli, Victor and Lucas, Gavin (eds.). 2001a. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.

——— 2001b. The Absent Present: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. In Archaeologies of the Contemporary
Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, pp. 3–18. London: Routledge.

——— 2001c. The Archaeology of Alienation: A Late Twentieth-Century British Council House. In Archaeologies of
the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, pp. 158–67. London: Routledge.

David, Nicolas and Kramer, Carol. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dowson, Thomas. 2009. 0053 Hrs, 12 October 1998: The Murder of Matthew Wayne Shephard: An Archaeologist’s
Personal Defining Moment. In Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century, ed. John
Schofield, pp. 135–45. BAR International Series 2005. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford.

Fewster, Kathryn J. 2007. The Role of Agency and Material Culture in Remembering and Forgetting: An
Ethnoarchaeological Case Study from Central Spain. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 20: 89–114.

Flannery, Kent V. 1973. Archeology with a Capital ‘S’. In Research and Theory in Current Archeology, ed. C.
Redman, pp. 47–58. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Gifford, Diane P. 1978. Ethnoarchaeological Observations of Natural Processes Affecting Cultural Materials. In
Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, ed. Richard A. Gould, pp. 77–102. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.

Gould, Richard A. 1980. Living Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——— 1981. Brandon Revisited: A New Look at Old Technology. In Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of
Us, ed. Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 269–81. New York: Academic Press.

Gould, Richard A. and Schiffer, Michael B. (eds.). 1981 Modern Material Culture: The Archeology of Us. New York:
Academic Press.

Graves-Brown, Paul M. (ed.). 2000a. Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London: Routledge.

——— 2000b. Always Crashing in the Same Car. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul M. Graves-
Brown, pp. 155–65. London: Routledge.

——— 2000c. Introduction. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul M. Graves-Brown, pp. 1–9. London:
Routledge.

Page 8 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

——— 2007. Concrete Islands. In Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, ed. L. McAtackney, M.
Palus, and Angela Piccini, pp. 75–81. BAR International Series 1677. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford.

——— 2009. March 1993: The Library of Babel: Origins of the World Wide Web. In Defining Moments: Dramatic
Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Schofield, pp. 123–34. BAR International Series 2005. British
Archaeological Reports, Oxford.

——— 2011. The Privatisation of Experience and the Archaeology of the Future. In Contemporary Archaeologies:
Excavating Now, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini, pp. 201–14. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Harrison, Rodney. 2006. An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberly Points and the Technologies of Enchantment.
Current Anthropology 47(1): 63–88.

Harrison, Rodney and Schofield, John. 2010. After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary
Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hodder, Ian. 1982. The Present Past: An Introduction to Anthropology for Archaeologists. New York: Pica Press.

Holtorf, Cornelius. 2007. Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture.
Oxford: Archaeopress.

——— 2011. Imagine This: Archaeology in the Experience Economy. In Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating
Now, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini, pp. 47–64. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Holtorf, Cornelius and Piccini, Angela (eds.). 2011. Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang.

Kiddey, Rachael and Schofield, John. 2011. Embrace the Margins: Adventures in Archaeology and Homelessness.
Public Archaeology 10(1): 4–22.

Kohl, Philip L. and Fawcett, Clare (eds.). 1995. Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2000. The Berlin Key or How to do Words with Things. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed.
Paul M. Graves-Brown, pp. 10–21. London: Routledge.

Leone, Mark P. 1973. Archeology as the Science of Technology: Mormon Town Plans and Fences. In Research and
Theory in Current Archeology, ed. C. L. Redman, pp. 125–50. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

——— 1981. Archeology’s Relationship to the Present and the Past. In Modern Material Culture: The Archeology of
Us, ed. Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 5–14. New York: Academic Press.

Long, Richard. 2002. Walking the Line. London: Thames and Hudson.

McLucas, Cliff. 2000. Ten Feet and Three Quarters of an Inch of Theatre. In Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place
and Documentation, ed. N. Kaye, pp. 125–38. London: Routledge.

Moore, Henrietta. 1986. Space, Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Moshenska, Gabriel. 2008. Ethics and Ethical Critique in the Archaeology of Modern Conflict. Norwegian
Archaeological Review 41(2): 159–75.

Parker Pearson, Michael and Ramilisonina. 1998. Stonehenge for the Ancestors: The Stones Pass on the Message.
Antiquity 72: 306–26.

Piccini, Angela. 2011. Guttersnipe: A Micro Road Movie. In Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, ed.
Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini, pp. 183–200. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Rathje, William L. 1978 Archaeological Ethnography … Because Sometimes it is Better to Give than to Receive. In
Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, ed. Richard A. Gould, pp. 49–76. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Page 9 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014
 The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the
Contemporary Past

——— 1981. A Manifesto for Modern Material Culture Studies. In Modern Material Culture: The Archeology of Us,
ed. Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 51–6. New York: Academic Press.

Redman, Charles L. (ed.). 1973. Research and Theory in Current Archeology. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Rothschild, Nan A. 1981. Pennies from Denver. In Modern Material Culture: The Archeology of Us, ed. Richard A.
Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 161–81. New York: Academic Press.

Salwen, Bert. 1973. Archeology in Megalopolis. In Research and Theory in Current Archeology, ed. C. L. Redman,
pp. 151–63. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Schiffer, Michael B. 1978. Methodological Issues in Ethnoarchaeology. In Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, ed.

Richard A. Gould, pp. 229–48. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Schofield, John. 2009a. Aftermath: Readings in the Archaeology of Recent Conflict. New York: Springer.

——— (ed.). 2009b. Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century. BAR International
Series 2005. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford.

——— 2009c. Peace Site: An Archaeology of Protests at Greenham Common. British Archaeology 104: 44–9.

Shanks, Michael and Tilley, Christopher. 1987a. Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

——— 1987b. Social Theory and Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Shennan, Stephen J. (ed.). 1994. Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity. London: Routledge.

Tilley, Christopher. 1996. An Ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric Societies in Scandinavia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Emma and Costall, Alan 2000. Taking Things More Seriously: Psychological Theories of Autism and the
Material–Social Divide. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul M. Graves-Brown, pp. 97–111. London:
Routledge.

Wylie, Alison. 1985. The Reaction against Analogy. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, ed. Michael
B. Schiffer, Volume 8, pp. 63–111. New York: Academic Press.

Yellen, John E. 1977. Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past. New York:
Academic Press.

Kathryn Fewster
Kathryn Fewster, Independent writer.

Page 10 of 10

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford
Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2014