February 27

Finest Acknowledgment Ever
February 27, 2011 by teofilo

Petroglyphs of Quadrupeds at Atlatl Rock, Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

In 1978 H. Martin Wobst of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst published a short article in American Antiquity entitled “The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology.”  Despite the evocative title, the article itself is a highly theoretical argument about the proper relationship between archaeology and ethnography that is unlikely to be of much interest outside those fields.  Basically,Office Standard 2010 Product Key, Wobst argues that the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies, is overly dependent on concepts drawn from ethnographic study of modern hunter-gatherer societies, even though that ethnographic research has inherent limitations in what it can observe about those societies and is further limited by the specific priorities of the scholars who conduct it.  He therefore says that archaeologists should play a larger role in developing theoretical approaches to these societies based on archaeological data, which has its own limitations but is nevertheless better suited to studying certain topics, such as large-scale regional interaction,Office 2010 Home And Business Product Key, than is ethnography.  From the perspective of archaeology,Windows 7 Professional X86, Wobst’s article is clearly situated in the processualist tradition, with its emphasis on using archaeological evidence to reconstruct social behavior and contribute to general anthropological theory.
The most interesting part of Wobst’s article, however, is the acknowledgments at the end, which begin with this remarkable dedication:
I would like to dedicate this paper to Provost Dr. Paul Puryear,Office Standard 2010 Sale, without whose failing support of Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I would have been done much earlier.
It seems that Paul Puryear was indeed in some sort of administrative position at UMass at the time, but beyond that I have no idea what Wobst is talking about here.  Still, it’s a welcome change from the anodyne expressions of gratitude that usually dominate these parts of papers.
Wobst,Buy Microsoft Office 2010, H. (1978). The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology American Antiquity, 43 (2) DOI: 10.2307/279256