Ethnoarchaeology beyond the Ethnographic Details: Observations of Technologies Relevant to the Longer Time-Scale of Archaeological Site Formation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethnoarchaeological data collected among Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers of Venezuela across 30 months of fieldwork provide unique views of tool manufacture, use, and discard. Behavior observation quantified the amount of time that women and men spend in a variety of technological production and use tasks. Observations demonstrate the importance of situational uses of technologies in activities beyond the particular functional designs of those tools. For example, during foraging trips, bows and arrows are used more frequently for non-projectile uses than to fire arrows. I look at the frequencies of production and use of organic implements compared with more durable items (wood, steel, other market tools) that are analogous to lithics or ceramics in archaeology. Organic materials and tools command more time and space use than any manufacture or use of durable raw materials or implements. The frequencies and activities observed around hearths indicates that women’s activities dominate the observed time use adjacent to hearths, and men are dramatically less tethered to these features. Ethnoarchaeology focusing on use events provides critical insight into the dynamics of technological systems. Long-term fieldwork also can get beyond the ethnographic details and address the deeper temporal scales represented in the formation of the archaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52616