Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 48

Evolution is characterized by change; so, to understand ancient cultural evolution, archaeologists often focus on what changed through time in the ancient society they’re investigating.

For example, around 10,000 years ago people in the Danube River valley of southeastern Europe were highly mobile foragers (hunter-gatherers) who left only short-lived campsites for archaeologists to discover. But by about 7,500 years ago, they were a rather sedentary people, living for generations at a time in riverside villages that you would normally associate with farming people. However, the folk of these villages, including the fascinating site of Lepenski Vir, weren’t full-time farmers; they continued to hunt and gather. Something, then, changed in their culture, and archaeologists want to know what it was.

Explaining how cultures changed through time is one of the most contentious issues in the field of anthropology. Many models have been proposed to account for cultural change, including

 Cultural ecology: These approaches consider the most important changes in human culture to be traced back to ecological issues, such as food and water supply. These factors are certainly important, but some argue that cultural ecology misses the importance of factors such as religion and even the individual human, inappropriately turning people into “automatons” that simply react to environmental change.

 Postmodernism: Postmodern approaches place a high value on the ability of such factors as gender, ideology, religion, myth, and the individual to change culture over time.

 Economic change models: These approaches focus on the organization of labor and the negotiation of social inequalities (haves and have-nots) in society. They have been interesting and useful for some archaeological investigations, but don’t work for periods when ancient labor wasn’t organized as it is in the industrial world, and labor divisions and social inequalities weren’t very prominent (as in the many millions of years of foraging societies).