Beginning in the 1950s archaeologists such as Grahame Clark (1954) at Star Carr in England began the systematic recovery of faunal and plant remains in order to reconstruct prehistoric subsistence. Clark (1952) himself had sought material for analogy in European folk practices, and, both then and now, archaeologists have turned for assistance to a rich ethnographic, experimental, ethnobotanical, and historical literature. Merely to give an indication of the range of such sources, and limiting ourselves to North America, we might cite Wilson's (1917) Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians, Wright's (1993) simulated use of experimental maize grinding tools, Nabhan's (1985) Gathering the desert, and Crader's (1984) use of historical sources in her study of the zooarchaeology of Thomas Jefferson's residence at Monticello. So rich and varied indeed is the literature that, when ethnoarchaeologists have undertaken studies of subsistence, they have done so with very particular archaeological questions in mind.

We start the chapter by introducing relevant concepts and ideas of middle range theory, especially those concerned with processes relating to the transfer of materials from the systemic to the archaeological context (S–A processes). We then survey their application to deposits and sites and consider the effects of processes such as curation on the archaeological record. A processual and a postprocessual case study relating to residues are presented and critiqued, and the chapter concludes with a consideration of the ethnoarchaeology of abandonment.

Middle range theory from S to A

Some regard “the reconstruction of prehistoric lifeways in the form of prehistoric ethnographies to be an appropriate goal for archaeology,” while others consider rather “that we should be seeking to understand cultural systems, in terms of organizational properties,” as Binford (1981b: 197) argued in his “Pompeii premise” paper. Many take an intermediate view:

In this chapter we revisit some ethnoarchaeological studies, and introduce others that suggest ways in which archaeologists might think about architecture. Some of the topics we explore have to do with relationships between vernacular and other (especially state-run) building enterprises; relationships between built habitats and household size, organization, and economic status; the importance of sampling, and the “production” of space. We note that some ethnoarchaeological discussions of architecture consider gender, and a (very) few consider the building trades as crafts involving specialists. Most, but not all, of the accounts below are firmly in the processualist mode. One we will not consider, but which is suggestive of what might be done in postprocessualist mode, is Bourdieu's (1973) reading of the Berber house, an archetypal study of the Structuralist (with capital S and definitely not poststructuralist) school. This is hardly ethnoarchaeology, but rather a model distilled from the author's ethnographic experience.

“Vernacular” architecture

Archaeologists are drawn to architectural remains largely because they are sometimes comparatively substantial and well preserved. As such, they provide physical and humanly constructed contexts for artifacts and their spatial and chronological distributions.

While rarely devoid of information on people's beliefs and ways of thinking about the world and their place in it, few ethnoarchaeological studies probe this aspect of culture and its expression in material things. Usually such research involves semiotic analysis of material culture and other behaviors, and employs a hermeneutic approach; however some research on the disposal of the dead is not of this kind at all, but rather seeks patterning in mortuary practice that relates to social structure and status. While some authors are concerned to understand systems of thought, others emphasize ideology in the narrower sense of assertions underlying a political program. However, inasmuch as elements of the former are politicized and incorporated into the latter, it is often difficult to maintain a distinction between the two concepts, this depending largely upon the attitude of the researcher to her or his material. Linda Donley(-Reid)'s (e.g., 1982, 1990b) papers on the houses of the Swahili elite and on their uses of porcelain, beads, and utilitarian pottery are explorations of systems of thought.

As ethnoarchaeology is an approach rather than a true discipline we should not expect overall progress of the kind observed in a subject like physics where research leads to ever deeper understandings of matter and energy and to applications of that knowledge. But neither is it, as in painting, a matter of the invention and perfection of techniques and the creation of masterworks that are not bettered but rather overtaken by new developments, technical and conceptual, in new historical contexts. Like other social sciences, ethnoarchaeology advances not on its own but in partnership with its disciplinary siblings, archaeology and ethnography, and within the larger context of social science and its philosophy. Early classic studies retain value but, unlike a Rembrandt masterpiece, their imperfections and lacunae (and not merely their differences) become apparent through developments in and beyond ethnoarchaeology. On the other hand, just as art students copy old masters, so too can we imbibe knowledge and know-how by analyzing earlier studies.

In this chapter we discuss living space and activity areas of peoples, focusing especially on hunter-gatherers and others who do not produce substantial built structures. When approached archaeologically, such situations require that both the living context of the remains be inferred and the activities that took place within and around it. Where there are architectural remains (see chapter 10), artifacts and other debris can be directly related to structures and the spaces between and around them. We begin by sampling the ethnoarchaeological literature on the site structure of hunter-gatherers, the latter term requiring somewhat liberal interpretation, and proceed to survey evidence relating to peoples practicing other subsistence strategies. The chapter ends, rather than concluding, with discussion of studies that consider the extent to which gender is associated with activities, and whether these are likely to be archaeologically identifiable.

When in early 1997 we decided to start writing the book about ethnoarchaeology that we had talked about for years, we both naïvely thought that this could be achieved by little more than putting our course notes together and filling in some blanks. Our experience has been very different. We never intended to write a text for beginning students but rather a stocktaking of a subdiscipline of anthropology some 45 years after its inception, and to do this we have had to think through our understandings of the topic, and to expand them by much further reading. In this we were greatly assisted by the Bibliography of ethnoarchaeology and related studies (David et al. 1999) that Nicholas David (hence-forth, except in references, ND) had been compiling and developing for several years. However, the magnitude of the task and the inevitability of our failure to do a thorough job is apparent in its accumulation, as of the day this is written, of 883 items classified primarily as ethnoarchaeology. We wished not to produce a catalogue, a collation, or an encyclopedia, but rather, via a critical reading of case studies, to guide the reader towards an informed understanding of theoretical, methodological, and substantive issues in ethnoarchaeology at the turn of the millennium. Decisions had to be made.

The first was to adopt a restrictive definition of ethnoarchaeology, one that requires the involvement of ethnographic fieldwork in elucidation of relationships between material culture and culture as a whole.