Internet Archaeol. 16. Phillips. Use of ethnography

1.4 The use of ethnography

Ethnography has been used for some time to assist in the archaeological interpretation of the past. Nevertheless, it was found that the discussions of ethnographers were not always appropriate to the concerns and material that archaeologists had to deal with (Renfrew and Bahn 1997, 178). Consequently, ethnoarchaeology arose out of a desire to interpret material in an objective manner as part of systems theory. The resulting tendency to develop universal laws through which to read archaeological data has since been contested. In fact Hodder (1991, 108) argued that such discussions cannot exist independently of their cultural context and should be linked more closely to anthropological and historical method and theory.

Keeping this caution in mind, the following examination, which is based on an evaluation of existing texts, is presented as a test of both the contextual definition of landscape and the Eurocentric land use assumptions inherent in spatial analyses.