The course alpha of this course, ANTH, indicates it is an anthropology course. Your instructor is an anthropologist, trained as an archaeologist, as are the authors of your text, Douglas Price and Gary Feinman. The course will cover world prehistory, up to approximately 1500, but from an anthropological and archaeological perspective. What exactly does that mean?
Anthropology is the systematic study of humanity from a totally holistic perspective. That means in part that the perspective is global; not only are anthropologists interested in humans and human culture anywhere in the world, there is no assumption or bias that any area is of more importance than any other area. Holistic also means that anthropologists have no limitations as to time, and we study humans from the very beginning of human evolution to the present. Holistic also means anthropologists study humans as both cultural and as physical, biological beings, and believe that both are necessary to understand humanity.
Anthropology is normally divided into three major branches, as follows:
Cultural Anthropology is the description and comparison of cultural adaptations made by human groups in the world's diverse ecosystems. One of the major subfields of cultural anthropology is ethnography, which is the descriptive study of one culture or subculture based upon actual fieldwork and direct observation of the people. A quick definition of culture might be that culture is the learned, shared behavior of a human group; or more broadly, culture is everything people think, do, and make.
Physical or Biological Anthropology studies Homo sapiens as biological beings in both the present and the past. One of the major subfields of physical anthropology is human paleontology, or paleoanthropology, which studies human biological evolution by looking at the fossil evidence.
Archaeology is the systematic study of culture from the material remains of that culture. It primarily deals with past cultures, and attempts to reconstruct their lifestyle and adaptation to their environment. In terms of the definition of culture given above, archaeologists focus on what people make and how their actions have modified the landscape (their technology and subsistence or adaptive strategy), and from that try to infer what people think and believe. This includes their economy, social organization, ideology, and cosmology. (See text, pp. 27-30)
As a course in anthropology, this class will make more use of the information from the above branches of anthropology than would perhaps be typical of most classes studying the human past from the beginnings up to 1500. While other types of evidence and information will be used, the primary source of information will be archaeology.
Archaeology is the major way to study cultures that do not have a written language. That includes all cultures of the world until some 5,000 BP (before the present), and many (even most) cultures until well into the 19th and even 20th centuries. Archaeology has also been the major way to study many of the early states that did develop a written language, since either very little of the culture was recorded in writing, or the writing could not be deciphered until recently, or both. Archaeologists are interested in broad patterns of cultural change and adaptation wherever humans have gone, and all cultures that ever existed are of interest. [Adaptation, a term that really comes to us via ecology, is the process by which an organism copes with the physical, biological, and social environment in order to obtain what it needed for survival. Culture has become the primary adaptive mechanism of humans, and in Unit 1 we will be looking at how that happened.]
Archaeologists study cultural remains, and human paleontologists study physical remains, but their techniques are very similar and overlap, and both types of specialists are often working at the same site. Both these fields are based on science, and both strive to be objective in their study. As such, like all anthropology, they try to remain free of ethnocentrism, which is basically the belief that the values, ideas, beliefs and practices of one's own culture are the best, the most valid, or the most natural for all humanity. Most importantly, like all of anthropology, the approach of archaeologists and human paleontologists is dependent upon the scientific method, and is concerned with actual physical evidence to prove or disprove specific hypotheses.
As a result of its dependency on science, the findings of archaeology and paleoanthropology can conflict with deeply held beliefs of specific cultures and individuals. Many Christians in America still believe that humans were miraculously created by the Christian God some 6,000 years ago. Many Native American religions believe that Native Americans were in the Americas from the time of creation, whenever that was, and did not originate on other continents. China officially believes that the fossil Homo erectus was the direct ancestor of modern Chinese. Human paleontologists and archaeologists rely on the evidence, which currently does not support any of these three points of view. As in any science, new evidence may require changes in interpretation. And regardless, archaeologists are anthropologists, and try to do their work with respect for cultural beliefs that may have different answers.
In the next few lessons, I will discuss the nature of scientific evidence, and the basic techniques that archaeologists and paleoanthropologists use in their study of human evolution and cultural adaptations. These techniques are also discussed in Chapt. 1 of the text, as well as in many of the chapters in the text.