Ethnoarchaeology of the intangible culture: A trajectory towards paleoethnology as a global discipline?

Abstract

It is well known that the "New Archaeology’s" ethnoarchaeology has essentially dealt with problems that derive from the study of a material culture that aims to recognize the patterns of behavior that produced specific archaeological traces. This materialistic procedure (i.e., the research of the natural laws that transformed human actions into archaeological remains) in any case concerns something intangible: the actions of human beings in the past. Obviously the actions that do not leave archaeological traces (speaking, singing, dancing, etc.) are twice as intangible. Generally speaking, all human actions are part of a wider cultural context, which is of course intangible and does not correspond to a set of artifacts that archaeologists find during excavations. In fact, institutions, and social, economic, and political relationships and ideological aspects cannot be directly ascertained by field research. Furthermore, the problem of archaeologically studying ancient perceptions ("Archaeology of the Senses") has recently been dealt with, and it obviously only regards intangible contexts. It could be argued that the principal questions deriving from these truisms in relation to ethnoarchaeology are: Can ethnoarchaeology help to decipher this set of intangible phenomena, going beyond material culture, in specific past contexts? If so, does ethnoarchaeology not change itself into the discipline that 150 years ago was called "paleoethnology"-albeit in a renewed way? Can this renewed way entail a global perspective? These questions will be addressed here, mentioning also two case studies from the Italian Bronze Age, which clearly express the kinds of instances that are at the basis of this proposal.