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Full text of article
'Hrnčíř V, Květina P, 2023: APPLICATION OF COMPARATIVE ETHNOLOGY
IN ARCHAEOLOGY: RECENT DECADES. Anthropologie (Brno) 61, 3: 229-246'. |
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| Abstract | | The use of ethnographic and ethnohistoric data to inform reconstructions of past human societies has
a long tradition. While simple ethnographic analogies have been used since the beginning of archaeological research,
since the 1950s there have been several efforts to rationalize and systematize their use. This led to the development of
several new methods, including direct historic analogy, ethnoarchaeology, and comparative ethnology. The latter is now
experiencing a resurgence, stimulated by the digitization of large ethnographic databases and the development of new
analytical methods. As part of a broader cross-cultural research approach, comparative ethnology explicitly aims to
answer questions about the incidence, distribution, and causes of cultural variation. Based on the statistical evaluation
of theories and large samples of cultures, this approach not only illustrates variation in cultural practices, but also
provides supporting arguments for archaeological hypotheses. Specifically, it can (1) reveal archaeological indicators
of human behavior, (2) test causal and non-causal associations between diverse cultural and ecological variables, and
(3) reconstruct the evolutionary paths of specific cultural traits. Despite significant development in this field over recent
decades, the application of comparative ethnology to the study of the human past is still relatively rare in the archaeological
community. Our aim is to (re)introduce this method and demonstrate its potential to address archaeological questions
through several recent case studies from two thematic research areas: hunter-gatherers and kinship systems. This paper
demonstrates the breadth and variation of topics that can be studied using comparative ethnology | | | | Keywords | | Comparative ethnology – Cross-cultural research – Hunter-gatherers – Kinship systems | | | | DOI | | https://doi.org/10.26720/anthro.23.06.27.1 | | |
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