ANTH 235, CULTURE & ADAPTATION:
ARCHAEOLOGY AS ANTHROPOLOGY
First, to re-cap: modern anthropology is comprised of four principal sub-disciplines: social orcultural (or sociocultural) anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. A “fifth sub-discipline,”applied (or engaged) anthropology, is actually an integral part of the other four.
Archaeologists attempt to describe the formof the past, in part through decoding artifacts’ functions and, ultimately, seek to understand processes of change.
Culture is the primary means by which humans adapt.
culture versus Culture
(e.g., Diné or Navajo culture versus human Culture)
Myriad definitions of “culture” abound:
UNESCO (2002) has defined culture as “...the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group which encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”
Culture is an extra-somatic adaptive mechanism.
- Culture is uniquely human.
- Culture is learned (e.g., lower-case “c,” culture, is not “hard-wired” in humans, although maybe the preadaptation for upper-case “C,” Culture, is).
- Culture is cumulative and transmitted, largely through language.
- Culture has moral force.
Culture creates context. Most humor, for example, literally does not translate easily.
The problem with “translation” is not purely linguistic, but culture-contextual. For example, the cartoon below is understandable to modern residents of, say,Boston or Beijing, but what about the highlands of New Guinea?
By the same token, youprobably don’t find anything especially compelling about this package of Japanese Doritos, but that’s the whole point: youlikely don’t have the context, created by culture, to appreciate why this particular image might induceyou to eat Doritos (the packaging reads, roughly, “return of the electric massage…”)
And then, of course, there’s the traditional festive Halloween Tree…
HOW DO ARCHAEOLOGISTS STUDY CULTURE?
Culture is functional; it serves a purpose (and that purpose is adaptation).
The fossil record complete biological organism.
The archaeological record systemic, living culture.
Culture change and evolution are both responses to adaptive challenges.
Modern anthropologists, including archaeologists, seek to understand the complexity of change within human culture by studying it from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
The important distinction is resolution (sociocultural anthropology) versus depth (archaeology) of the data. It is precisely this distinction that defines the operational limits of both sub-disciplines, even though the basic questions addressed by both are the same.
Finally, if the relationship between biology and culture in shaping human evolution is of special interest to you, you might enjoy reading:
Richerson, Peter J. and Robert Boyd. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, Melissa J., editor. (2008). Explaining Culture Scientifically. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
And, if quasi-cultural behavior among non-human primates (includingtool use), interests you, you might enjoy:
Ottoni, Eduardo B. and Patrícia Izar. (2008). “Capuchin monkey tool use: overview and implications.” Evolutionary Anthropology17(4):171-178.
Perry, Susan and Joseph H. Manson. (2008). Manipulative Monkeys, the Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.