Expanding Archaeology is the first attempt to define behavioral archaeology comprehensively and to establish its place among competing theoretical frameworks. Among other objectives, this volume demonstrates that a behavioral approach—the study of material objects regardless of time or space to describe and explain human behavior—provides a means whereby religion, gender, and other seemingly unknowable elements of prehistory can be inferred through systematic, empirical analysis.
Expanding Archaeology begins with three retrospective analyses by J. Jefferson Reid, William Rathje, and Michael Schiffer, followed by seven case studies exploring various avenues offered by this approach. A third section contains five critiques that serve as a counterpoint to the behavioral approach. Although the editors do not suggest that behavioral archaeology should be the universal archaeology, they do suggest that this approach permits pre-historians to expand into new areas of investigation.
Chapters address place-making in Chaco Canyon, recent trends in landscape archaeology, the formation of identities, landscape boundaries, and the movement associated with these aspects of place-making. They address how interaction of peoples with objects brings landscapes to life. Representing a diverse cross section of Southwestern archaeologists, the authors of this volume push the boundaries of archaeological method and theory, building a strong foundation for future Southwest studies.
This book will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as students working in the American Southwest.
Behavioral archaeology, defined as the study of people-object interactions in all times and places, emerged in the 1970s, in large part because of the innovative work of Michael Schiffer and colleagues. This volume provides an overview of how behavioral archaeology has evolved and how it has affected the field of archaeology at large.
The contributors to this volume are Schiffer’s former students, from his first doctoral student to his most recent. This generational span has allowed for chapters that reflect Schiffer’s research from the 1970s to 2012. They are iconoclastic and creative and approach behavioral archaeology from varied perspectives, including archaeological inference and chronology, site formation processes, prehistoric cultures and migration, modern material culture variability, the study of technology, object agency, and art and cultural resources. Broader questions addressed include models of inference and definitions of behavior, study of technology and the causal performances of artifacts, and the implications of artifact causality in human communication and the flow of behavioral history.
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