Method and Theory in Archaeology

Course Description

Method and Theory in Archaeology covers the history and evolution of archaeological methods and theory in the United States. Major schools of thought and currently developing ideas are compared and contrasted: sampling theory, site formation, geosciences. The catalog states that permission is required.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours, with ANT3101 as prerequisite.

The reason theory is taught as history rather than as a settled framework is that archaeological theory has changed repeatedly, and each change was a response to a real limitation in what came before. Culture history could order material in time and struggled to explain change; processual archaeology sought scientific explanation and was criticised for treating people as passive responders to environment; post-processual approaches restored agency and meaning and were criticised in turn for relativism. Knowing the sequence is what lets you read the literature — because a paper's assumptions are usually legible from the tradition it is arguing with.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's course catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. There is therefore no institution-stated figure to quote, and every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived.

The figure shown applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated within this prefix by the live ANT2000 (Introduction to Anthropology) at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the actual meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the history of archaeological theory in the United States.
• Describe culture history and its aims, achievements, and limits.
• Describe the processual programme and its scientific commitments.
• Describe middle range theory and its purpose.
• Describe post-processual critiques and what they added.
• Describe current theoretical developments and syntheses.
• Relate theoretical position to research design and method choice.
• Describe sampling theory and its application to archaeological problems.
• Evaluate sampling designs and their consequences for inference.
• Describe probabilistic and judgemental sampling and when each is appropriate.
• Describe site formation processes in detail.
• Distinguish cultural and natural formation processes.
• Describe taphonomy and its effects on assemblage composition.
• Describe geoarchaeological approaches and what they contribute.
• Describe soils, sediments, and stratigraphic interpretation.
• Describe dating methods and the assumptions each rests on.
• Evaluate chronological arguments critically.
• Describe analogical reasoning and its role in interpretation.
• Describe ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology.
• Assess the strength of an archaeological inference.
• Identify unstated assumptions in a published interpretation.
• Construct a defensible research design for a stated question.
• Describe how theory and method have responded to ethical and legal change.
• Write critically about archaeological method and theory.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe agency, practice, and materiality approaches.
• Describe evolutionary and behavioural archaeology.
• Describe Indigenous and decolonising archaeologies.
• Describe complexity science approaches.
• Describe quantitative modelling in archaeology.
• Describe the philosophy of science as it bears on archaeology.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• History of archaeological theory
• Culture history
• The processual programme
• Middle range theory
• Post-processual critiques
• Current developments
• Theory and method choice
• Sampling theory
• Evaluating sampling designs
• Probabilistic and judgemental sampling
• Site formation processes
• Cultural and natural formation
• Taphonomy
• Geoarchaeology
• Soils, sediments, stratigraphy
• Dating methods and assumptions
• Evaluating chronological arguments
• Analogical reasoning
• Ethnoarchaeology and experiment
• Assessing inference strength
• Identifying assumptions
• Research design
• Theory, ethics, and law
• Critical writing

Optional Topics

• Agency, practice, materiality
• Evolutionary and behavioural archaeology
• Indigenous archaeologies
• Complexity science
• Quantitative modelling
• Philosophy of science

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Middle range theory — the bridge every archaeological argument needs and few state

• Archaeology observes a static present and wants to describe a dynamic past. The deposit sitting in the ground is the outcome; the behaviour that produced it is what you want. Something has to connect them, and that connection is an argument rather than an observation.
• ⚠ That is what middle range theory is for — independently grounded links between material patterning and the processes that produce it, built from ethnoarchaeology, experiment, taphonomy, and geoarchaeology.
• ⚠⚠ The failure mode is circularity. Using the same assumptions to interpret the record that you set out to test against it proves nothing, and this is the commonest hidden flaw in archaeological argument. The bridging argument has to come from somewhere else.
• Ask of any interpretation: what would this deposit look like if the claim were false? An interpretation compatible with every possible outcome is not an interpretation.
• Analogy is unavoidable and it is not free. Reasoning from known societies to archaeological ones requires justifying why the analogy holds — and an analogy asserted rather than argued is where a great deal of confident nonsense enters.
• Experimental work grounds inference — replicating manufacture, use, and discard establishes what traces a process actually leaves.
• Formation processes come before interpretation. Establish how the deposit got there before asking what it means; a great deal of apparent patterning is depositional rather than behavioural.
• ⚠ State the inference chain explicitly in writing. Evidence, bridging argument, conclusion, and the alternatives considered — a conclusion whose reasoning is not visible cannot be checked, and unfalsifiable archaeology is not archaeology.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction — this is the discipline's founding constraint

• An archaeological site can be excavated once. Removing an artefact destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is — an object without its associations is a curiosity rather than evidence.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The excavation produces notes, drawings, photographs, elevations, and samples; the site itself is gone, and the record is all that survives of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not excavate what does not need excavating. Modern practice presumes preservation in place: survey, non-invasive methods, and leaving the deposit for better techniques later are frequently the professionally correct answer, and a research question that could be answered without digging should be.
• Sample deliberately and leave some of the site intact where you can, so future archaeologists with better methods have material to work with. Everything we can do now, someone will do better in fifty years.
• ⚠ Excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps. See the curation note below — artefacts that cannot be housed, catalogued and kept accessible have not been saved.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unpublished excavation is a recognised and serious failure in this discipline, and a substantial amount of twentieth-century fieldwork sits unreported in boxes.
• Record what you did not find as well as what you did. Negative evidence is evidence, and it is routinely discarded.
• ⚠ Stratigraphy cannot be reconstructed after the fact. If the layers were not recorded as they were removed, the sequence is lost, and with it the chronology.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT4115 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, with ANT3101 as prerequisite and permission required.