Chapter 2. Humility, Time, and the Ethnoarchaeological Other

ABSTRACT

Analogical reasoning has long been identified as an unavoidable component of archaeological interpretation. Ethnoarchaeology is understood to be a specialized subfield within archaeology that conducts research on the “source side” of the analogical equation to discover and build interpretive security for the various inferences archaeologists use to make history. However, much of the current literature continues to associate ethnoarchaeology with research among so‐called “premodern,” “traditional,” or “precapitalist” societies because these are thought to be similar to the ancient settings archaeologists study. In this discussion, I argue that ethnoarchaeology's future depends on a thorough rejection of this temporal trope. Rather than a search for the vestiges of ancient lifeways among coeval peoples, ethnoarchaeology is better understood as the self‐critical analysis of archaeology's standpoint limitations. Redefined through the lens of feminist standpoint theories, ethnoarchaeology has the potential to become a vital component of a postpositivist archaeology.