Social archaeology studies the bigger picture of a society by analyzing individual artifacts to understand their roles and context. Colin Renfrew founded the discipline and its benefits include identifying cultures and time periods. However, researchers must avoid biases and use interpretation to tell a historical narrative.
Social archeology is a discipline of archaeological study that focuses on the bigger picture, rather than the single object or person, trying to put each of these things into context. In other words, it attempts to build a model of what a society might have been like by determining the roles of the individual artifacts found. Once that’s done, it’s easier to understand why a particular item might have been produced or used. While the discipline has a number of benefits, researchers must also be careful not to let individual or cultural biases influence their interpretations.
Colin Renfrew founded social archeology in the 1970s and expanded on the concept in the early 1990s. He is a British archaeologist who has spent most of his academic career at Cambridge University. He has published a major work on the importance of social archaeology, but has also made many other contributions to the field, including a focus on preventing looting at major historic sites around the world.
The benefits for social archeology are numerous. It can help distinguish and identify cultures and people that may have been found in the same area. It can provide context for when those people may have lived and how they may have lived and interacted at that particular time. This type of archeology can also identify the time period of society without the benefit of radiocarbon dating.
Social archeology goes far beyond simply identifying artifacts found at different sites. Explore human culture and try to transform the archaeological record into a historical narrative that tells humans something about the relationships, classes and governments that may have preceded them in a particular place. The more objects or artifacts found together, the easier it can be to determine what kind of society lived there.
To tell that story, social archeology seeks to combine the artifacts and other evidence at a site with what is already known about the history at that place. Ultimately, some interpretation must take place because direct observation of what a culture or person has used an object for is not possible. Thus, this type of archeology can introduce a modern bias in some cases, as it attempts to explain a society through a modern perspective. Archaeologists need to guard against this bias, but it may be impossible to eliminate it completely. Similarly, some hypotheses may be impossible to prove conclusively.
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