| Abstract: |
Introduction: The importance of knowledge of contemporary societies for interpreting the past is a basic tenet of virtually all archaeology. Since the 1960s, the field of ethnoarchaeology has emerged as a discipline explicitly concerned with examining the archaeological relevance of contemporary phenomena, including such topics as site formation and depositional processes
documentation of traditional technologies, community forms, and settlement patterns
the relations between humans and their environment
and the study of the material implications of a variety of social systems and social strategies, as well as of ideologies and belief systems. A focus of much recent ethnoarchaeological work has been the identification of general patterns in human behavior and their material consequences. From this perspective, ethnoarchaeology is a search for cross-cultural regularities which, coupled with uniformitarian reasoning, can aid our interpretation of the archaeological record. As such, ethnoarchaeological research provides archaeologists with an opportunity to evaluate our models of the material implications and operation of cultural systems. In addition, ethnoarchaeological studies have greatly increased our sensitivity to the diverse environmental and cultural factors that can affect or determine the nature of the static archaeological remains that we recover. Archaeologists are now in a position to develop more sophisticated and testable models for the interpretation of archaeological sites and, more important, of the human past. Ethnoarchaeological study has also served as a warning, alerting us to the complexity of human behavior and the tremendous diversity and creativity manifest in human manipulation of the material world. For example, we have seen that items or behaviors that mark social boundaries in one cultural context may operate very differently in other contexts (Hodder 1979, 1982). As a result, we have learned to be wary of making generalizations from a single case. For the ethnoarchaeologist, South Asia, with its cultural diversity, range of subsistence and settlement strategies, and persistence of traditional crafts, is an overwhelming land of plenty (see Griffin and Solheim 1990 for a general overview ofethnoarchaeology in Asia). The seeming timelessness of the Indian village, the antiquity and apparent stability of social traditions and technologies, and the plethora of human adaptations found throughout the subcontinent provide a wealth of data for generating models to study the past. Such abundance is not without dangers, however. It is, at most, a slight exaggeration to state that in South Asia it is possible to find ethnographic parallels to virtually any type of artifact, technology, settlement, or other material consequence of human behavior that we recover from the archaeological record. The demonstration of material parallels does not, however, unequivocally demonstrate social, cultural, or behavioral parallels, or even direct historic continuity between contemporary cases and the prehistoric past (Allchin 1985). Modern communities in South Asia, from hunter-gatherers to rural villagers and urban dwellers, have a rich and complex history (see also Nagar 1975: 14). We risk oversimplifying both present and past cultural contexts if we attempt to map the present directly onto the prehistoric past. Ethnoarchaeological studies in South Asia, as elsewhere, do not provide a blueprint to the past. Rather, they provide a framework for understanding the material consequences of behaviors and technologies, as well as a rich laboratory for documenting the diversity and regularities in human behavior in well-defined cultural contexts.
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