Archeology as Long-Term Ethnography

Behavioral variation from year to year is archeologically invisible, yet it may have important effects on the archeological record. Moreover, much of current theory demands that we give attention to such variation. Rather than adopting normative reconstructions from ethnographies, archeologists must view the archeological record as a long-term ethnography, confounded by such variations in behavior. Using an ecological perspective, patterns of behavioral variation can be linked to environmental characteristics, with implications for the archeological record of settlement and subsistence. The Paleolithic and Mesolithic of southwest Germany are used to illustrate this approach.