We begin by explaining why and how ethnoarchaeology came to be, and give an example from Peru as an illustration of what it is. Then, after explaining the plan of this book, we define the subject and offer a periodized history, concluding the chapter with a glimpse of what it is to be an ethnoarchaeologist.

Why ethnoarchaeology?

Archaeological interpretation is founded and ultimately depends upon analogy – a form of inference that holds that if something is like something else in some respects it is likely to be similar in others. We use it to recognize a flint flake as an artifact or, built into a long chain of reasoning, to impute a tributary mode of production to early civilizations (Trigger 1993: 45–6). Archaeologists draw upon their lives and upon everything they have read, heard about or seen in the search for possible analogies to the fragmentary remains they seek to interpret. By the mid-1950s attention was turning to a new range of questions about the past, to approaches to understanding the patterning in artifact assemblages that would lead beyond cultural chronologies and time-space systematics, the organization of cultural variety into convenient temporally and spatially limited packages such as phases and cultures (Willey and Phillips 1958).