Keeping People at the Center of Long-Term Knowledge Transfer

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Past persons were agents, cognitive entities that moved and acted in the world as part of a complex network of relationships: within communities and environments; with non-human animals, materials, architecture, and landscapes. Long-Term Knowledge may be built on different ontologies, cosmologies and epistemologies, an analysis of which is indispensable to understand the context and roots of knowledge. Ethno-archaeology, when done together with research partners who understand world views beyond the Western academic one, allows a study of the dynamic aspects of ancient society, including communication, performance, social practice, ritual, making, and being in the world. Yet, for the archaeologists, the static nature of our data has traditionally resulted in methodological approaches that focus on what is made, rather than making, on typologies, dating and technological changes, rather than on the person to person knowledge transfer underlying these. Ethnoarchaeology has the potential to provide insights into Long-Term Traditional Knowledge, but we need to carefully balance three conflicting problems: of projecting backwards; of denying development, agency and change to populations that lived in the past; and of disallowing people of the present to claim their heritage on their own terms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53018