Siding
with Laming-Emperaire, trying to extract the cultural meaning of a piece of
work is difficult but imperative to the study of any cultural artifact. Even if
the conclusion is that the piece has no deeper meaning then what is physically represented,
that negative still tells us more about the people who created it.
Part
of neither group, balance is the key. What we can obtain from a purely empirical approach to
artifact analysis is limited. Though it is a good starting point, there need to
be a point in our work. To learn from the past we must picture and question the
past. It will never amount to more then a hypothesis; nevertheless the
questioning it takes to create that hypothesis is a necessary step in the
debate of cultures. First there is a general hypothesis and the reason for your
work. Then there must be solid, physical evidence, which is extracted in the
field, followed empirical analysis that will support or disprove the hypothesis.
A danger to avoid is getting too
attached to a hypothesis. Allowing the hypothesis to be a guideline, fluid when
working and then solidified into a conclusion at the end.
There
is another approach to anthropology, and archaeology in particular that has
emerged after the 1980’s. Referred to as Post-Processionalism or
Post-Modernism, this movement takes the concept of ‘trying to wring a vivid,
living past from historical remains’ and takes it a step further by asking how
we know really came to that idea of their reality and how the cultural mindset
at the creation of different views of the past effect how the theory was built.
“Such is the richness of the human innovation that one can generally find some
way to support his thinking.” It is this fallacy, as worded by Laming-Emperaire,
which Post-Processionalist try to avoid. It takes artifacts and applies them in
an attempt to reconstructing who the people of that culture were as humans. This
humanistic approach challenges the studying anthropologist to imagine the
everyday reality of that artifact
Other
Sources:
Mills, Peter. Class Lecture.
Archaeology. University of Hawaii at Hilo. Fall 2010
A Brief History of Archaeology.
Fagen, Brian. University of California at Santa Barbra.
I had no idea that anthropologists and archaeologist came up with the term post-modernism for really trying to get more of an insiders perspective to get better ideas of their realities. I also agree with the fact that archaeology uses both of those categories in order to make the most complete picture of the past.
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