Social archeology attempts to create a broader picture of a society based on the artifacts found.
Social archeology is a discipline of archaeological study that focuses on the big picture rather than the individual 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 functions of the individual artifacts found. Once this is done, it is easier to see why a particular item might have been made or used. While the discipline has a number of advantages, researchers must also be careful not to allow individual or cultural biases to influence their interpretations.
A social archaeologist needs to study the intimate details of an artifact.
Colin Renfrew founded social archeology in the 1970s and expanded on the concept in the early 1990s. He is a British archaeologist who spent much of his academic career at Cambridge University. He has published important work on the importance of social archaeology, but has also made many other contributions to the field, including a focus on preventing looting at important 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. You can provide context for when these people might have lived and how they might have lived and interacted at that particular time. This type of archeology can even pinpoint the time period of the society without the benefit of radiocarbon dating.
Social archeology goes far beyond the simple identification of artifacts found in different places. It explores human culture and seeks to transform the archaeological record into a historical narrative that tells humans a little about the relationships, classes, and governments that may have preceded them in a given place. The more objects or artifacts found together, the easier it is to determine what kind of society lived there.
To tell this story, social archeology seeks to combine the artifacts and other evidence from a site with what is already known about that site’s history. Ultimately, some interpretation must occur because a direct observation of what a culture or person used an object for is not possible. Therefore, this type of archeology can introduce a modern bias in some cases, since it tries to explain a society from a modern perspective. Archaeologists must beware of this bias, but it may be impossible to completely eliminate it. Also, some hypotheses may be impossible to test conclusively.