Expert: Ralph Salier - 3/22/2011

Question
Hello, I've been doing some research into social archaeology, but I haven't been successful in finding the information I want, and I was hoping you could shed some light into what Social Archaeology actually is and where I could find more information about it. I'm a double major in Sociology [Social Psychology] and Anthropology, and wanting to make my studies more interdisciplinary. I understand that Social Archaeology is the study of past social structures and how their societies worked, but I cannot find any in-depth material on the subject. Thank you very much.

Answer
Hi TJ,

I'm not surprized that you've had this difficulty.  Archaeology, as you are aware looks at the artifactual materials left behind by our ancestors. The "social" side of this can only be determined by inferance. So, if you have a burial mound, and the folks buried in the center with all of the grave goods, one makes the inference that these folks were the "high and mighty" and were placed in a position of respect.  BUT this is a supposition. In the case of the Maya, with a written language we can now figure out, the high and mighty can be more critically defined and their graves understood.  However, the rest of the society, the peasents, craft guilds etc... are not well understood primarily because we DON'T have written records on them.

There are always dangers in making assumptions.  Read the book "hotel of the mysteries" to get an idea of how this could play out.  

Take a look at some of the work done by "garbologists" and more recent industrial archaeological works where the documentation is matched up with the written records of the time period.  This would be much more educational then any of the prehistoric suppositions  that are out there.  

One of the better prehistoric ones was written by Stewart Stevenson on the Koster Culture.  It is written in something like a novel format.