Question 1: Archaeology is the study of the past through its material remains, (Johnson 2010, 1). This includes field studies, excavations and interpretations. Interpreting the past is a very tricky business. “Humans have always speculated about their past, and most cultures have their own foundation myths to explain why society is how it is,” (Renfrew and Bahn 2012, 22). Anthropology is ripe with theories. Theory is a hard term to define with regard to archaeology, but essentially it is an interpretation of the past based on material data analysis. Archaeological site interpretation is a fundamental aspect to understanding the past. An archaeological narrative cannot be determined by lining up material data from the past and only …show more content…
Analogies are assumptions about the middle range, the ‘space,’ between the past and the present, (Johnson 2010, 51). We take our knowledge of the present and superimpose those assumptions on the material data collected under the impression these assumptions are the ‘norm’ use of an artefact. He wrote an article titled, “Smudge pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Analogy in Archaeological Reasoning,” where he emphasizes the need to use analogy for data interpretation. He uses the example of smudge pits found from the Toothsome site. He compares the archaeological features of these pits with relevant ethnographic observations. He then uses these analogies to conclude the pits were used for hide …show more content…
This differed from processualists by rejecting the emphasis on the scientific method and the need for generalizations. Post-processualists laid emphasis instead on unique aspects of each culture and the need to study those cultures in their entirety, (Renfrew and Bahn 2012, 44). They also emphasized the role of the individual and human agency. This was not a key factor in processual interpretations, who strove to generalize culture process using the scientific method to quantify data. Hodder’s critique of processual archaeology was “that there is no single, correct way to undertake archaeological inference,” (Renfrew and Bahn 2012, 43). He strove to reform interpretations on all levels in archaeological research. He claimed that excavation techniques needed to be ‘fluid and flexible,’ a reflexive archaeology; however, Hodder’s critiques of processual excavation were not new