sey075

Cuexcomate, an Aztec community I’ve been struggling with the problem of relating some of my archaeological findings to social issues in the world today. In this case, my focus is on the concept of “community.” I have two reasons for exploring how Aztec communities (whose remains I have excavated) are similar or different from modern communities. One reason is public communication. I am writing a book about Aztec communities intended for a popular, non-specialist audience, and I want readers to see connections between communities today and the contexts I am describing in the book. The other reason is scientific. In line with my strong beliefs that archaeology is a social science, I want to forge conceptual and empirical links between the results of my fieldwork and research on contemporary communities. The major work on the archaeology of communities, for state-level societies, is the book with that title (Canuto and Yaeger 2000) . I never much liked the concept of community promoted in...

I am catching up on my on-line journal reading today, and a couple of things caught my eye. (1) Make your arguments and reasoning clear and explicit. The current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory is a theme issue of papers on evolutionary archaeology, each of which contains a "logicist diagram." These diagrams show the relationships between what the issue co-editors (Valentine Roux and Marie-Agnès Courty) call the two components of research: data and inferences: "Highlighting these two components and proposing their reading under the form of a diagram allow a rapid reading of the rules of inference used by the researchers to support a result and, in return, better sharing of knowledge within the discipline." I will need to stare at these diagrams and read some of the papers more fully to understand this system in more detail, but this general procedure -- diagramming one's inferential process -- is an excellent practice. I do it...