The ethnoarchaeology of a science project in a modern laboratory offers a splendid opportunity to monitor many activities and people–artifact interactions. A few scholars have done ethnographic research in laboratories (e.g., Goodfi eld 1991 ; Latour and Woolgar 1979 ; Traweek 1988 ), but I am unaware of any ethnoarchaeo-logical study. I anticipate that some archaeologists will move in this direction, and for them I supply the following template to guide the gathering of basic behavioral data in the service of varied research problems.
1. Is the laboratory part of a corporation, university, or government agency?
2. What is the nature of the project and its disciplinary context?
3. What is the expected outcome(s)?
4. What resources are necessary for pursuing the project?
5. Of what spaces and places does the laboratory consist?
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6. What apparatus and supplies are found in the laboratory?
7. Where in the laboratory’s spaces are the apparatus and supplies located, and what are their relationships to facilities and utilities such as benches, storage facilities, sinks, lighting, and electrical outlets?
8. How are the apparatus obtained (legacy of earlier projects, purchased on a grant or contract, received as a gift, etc.)?
9. Is the laboratory home to several related projects? If so, which apparatus are shared and which ones are dedicated to the target project?
10. Who are the project’s participants?
11. What is the project’s social organization?
12. Does the project have an ideology?
13. What are the project’s frequent and infrequent activities, including rituals, and where do they take place?
14. What performances of people and/or apparatus cue the initiation of specifi c activities?
15. In what ways, and how often, do the project’s participants interact with the apparatus in those activities?
16. What skills are required to operate the apparatus and how do participants acquire those skills?
17. Are materials, apparatus, personnel, or information exchanged with other laboratories?
18. Are unexpected obstacles encountered? If so, do they lead to changes in the project’s activities, apparatus, or personnel?
19. What was the project’s outcome(s) and did it accord with the one(s) originally envisioned?
The above questions, when pruned or augmented, can supply fi ne-grained behav-ioral data for problem-oriented ethnoarchaeological research. For example, if I were interested in how social power is exercised in coordinating the project’s activities, I would privilege information about social organization, social roles, and on how specifi c activities are cued. Likewise, if I had an interest in identifying factors that affected the project’s design, I would gather data on how its activities are distributed over time and space.
As ethnoarchaeological studies of laboratory-based projects accumulate, we may be able to undertake a generation of controlled comparisons that illuminate the sources of intra- and interdisciplinary variation in investigations.
References
Arnold, Dean E. 1985. Ceramic theory and cultural process . Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Braun, David P. 1983. Pots as tools. In Archaeological hammers and theories , eds. Arthur Keene and James Moore, 107–134. New York: Academic Press.
Clark, J. Desmond, and Hiro Kurashina. 1981. A study of the work of a modern tanner in Ethiopia and its relevance for archaeological interpretation. In Modern material culture: The archaeol-ogy of us , eds. Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, 303–321. New York: Academic Press.
Contributions of Ethnoarchaeology
David, Nicholas, and Carol Kramer. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in action . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodfi eld, June. 1991. An imagined world: A story of scientifi c discovery . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Henrickson, Elizabeth F., and Mary M.A. McDonald. 1983. Ceramic form and function: An eth-nographic search and an archeological application. American Anthropologist 85: 630–643.
Hester, Thomas R., and Robert F. Heizer. 1981. Making stone vases: contemporary manufacture of material-culture items in upper Egypt. In Modern material culture: The archaeology of us , eds.
Richard A. Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, 283–302. New York: Academic Press.
Landriani, Marsilio. 1784. Dell’Utilità dei Conduttori Elettrici . Milan.
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: The social construction of scientifi c facts. Sage Library of Social Research , No. 80.
Linton, Ralph. 1944. North American cooking pots. American Antiquity 9: 369–380.
Rice, Prudence M. 1987. Pottery analysis: A sourcebook . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roux, Valentine. 2007. Ethnoarchaeology: A non historical science of reference necessary for interpreting the past. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14: 153–178.
Schiffer, Michael B. 1978. Methodological issues in ethnoarchaeology. In Explorations in ethno-archaeology , ed. Richard A. Gould, 229–247. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
———. 2008. Expanding ethnoarchaeology: Historical evidence and model-building in the study of technological change. In Oxford handbook of engineering and technology in the classical world , ed. John P. Oleson, 821–835. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. Ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology, and the “American School.”
Ethnoarchaeology 1:7–26.
———. 2011. Studying technological change: A behavioral approach . Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Schiffer, Michael B., Kacy L. Hollenback, and Carrie L. Bell. 2003. Draw the lightning down:
Benjamin Franklin and electrical technology in the age of enlightenment . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schiffer, Michael B., and James M. Skibo. 1997. The explanation of artifact variability. American Antiquity 62: 27–50.
Skibo, James M. 2013. Understanding pottery function . New York: Springer.
Skibo, James M., and Michael B. Schiffer. 2008. People and things: A behavioral approach to material culture . New York: Springer.
Smith Jr., Marian F. 1985. Toward an economic interpretation of ceramics: Relating vessel size and shape to use. In Decoding prehistoric ceramics , ed. Ben A. Nelson, 254–309. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press.
———. 1988. Function from whole vessel shape: A method and an application to Anasazi Black Mesa, Arizona. American Anthropologist 90: 912–923.
Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and lifetimes: The world of high energy physicists . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
Archaeometry is the application of physical and biological science expertise and technologies to archaeological materials (Bowman 1991 ; Killick 2008 ; Malainey 2011 ); its host of subfi elds range from archaeometallurgy to zooarchaeology. In modern archaeology, archaeometric analyses are a necessity in most projects because they furnish unique evidence for inferring past human behavior, societal organization, and environmental contexts. Archaeometry is also a prolifi c contribu-tor to the archaeology of science, as many studies provide information for modeling generalizations.
Ideally, archaeometry is practiced by people trained in both archaeology and another science. However, archaeologists also collaborate with outside specialists, especially when there is a need—as in the modeling of recipes—to employ instru-ments of modern chemistry and physics for characterizing materials at the atomic, molecular, or crystalline levels. To illustrate archaeometry’s role in modeling reci-pes, I turn to Maya blue, a very unusual pigment, and cylinder jars from Chaco Canyon, a rare vessel form; the former illustrates recipes of manufacture, the latter recipes of use.