Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-12T15:54:09.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Case Study in Archaeological Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2022

Gavin Lucas Open the ORCID record for Gavin Lucas [Opens in a new window]  and
Bjørnar Olsen
Gavin Lucas*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
Bjørnar Olsen
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT, Artic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
*
(gavin@hi.is, corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The case study is a familiar yet generally taken-for-granted element of archaeological theory. Typically, it is viewed as a kind of “proof of concept,” an essential way to demonstrate the value of a particular theoretical approach, if not theory in general. In this article, we examine the case study as it has been used in archaeology, exploring its different manifestations and situating them within a wider discussion of the role of cases and examples within the humanities and social sciences. Offering our own “example”—a rereading of Bonnichsen's Millie's Camp experiment from the 1970s—we argue for a different role of the case study in relation to archaeological theory.

En arqueología teórica, el caso de estudio es un elemento familiar pero que generalmente se da por hecho. Se suele ver como una especie de “prueba de concepto”, una forma esencial de demostrar el valor de una determinada aproximación teórica —o incluso de la teoría en general. En este artículo examinamos la forma en que el caso de estudio se ha usado en arqueología, exploramos sus diferentes manifestaciones y lo situamos dentro de la discusión más amplia sobre el papel de los casos y los ejemplos dentro de las humanidades y las ciencias sociales. A partir de nuestro propio “ejemplo”, una relectura del experimento de Millie's Camp de Bonnichsen, llevado a cabo en los años 70, defendemos un papel diferente del caso en relación con la teoría arqueológica.

Keywords

case studyexampletheoryarchaeologyestudio de casoejemploteoríaarqueología
Type
Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 352 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Archaeology

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Agamben, Giorgio 2009 The Signature of All Things. Zone Books, New York.Google Scholar
Ascher, Robert 1961 Analogy in Archaeological Interpretation. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17:317–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ascher, Robert 1968 Time's Arrow and the Archaeology of a Contemporary Community. In Settlement Archaeology, edited by Chang, K. C., 43–52. National Press Books, Palo Alto, California.Google Scholar
Bartha, Paul 2010 By Parallel Reasoning: The Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments. Oxford University Press, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Binford, Lewis 1978 Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Binford, Lewis 1980 Bones, Ancient Men and Modern Myths. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Binford, Lewis 1983 In Pursuit of the Past. Thames & Hudson, London.Google Scholar
Bonnichsen, Robson 1973 Millie's Camp: An Experiment in Archaeology. World Archaeology 4:277–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brück, Joanna 1999 Ritual and Rationality: Some Problems of Interpretation in European Archaeology. European Journal of Archaeology 2:313–344.Google Scholar
Bryant, Levi 2016 Examples. Larval Subjects (blog), July 27. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/examples, accessed on April 23, 2021.Google Scholar
Clark, Andy 2008 Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conkey, Margaret 2007 Questioning Theory: Is There a Gender of Theory in Archaeology? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14:285–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darvill, Timothy 2008 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Deetz, James 1977 In Small Things Forgotten. Doubleday, New York.Google Scholar
Deetz, James, and Deetz, Patricia 2001 The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony. Anchor, New York.Google Scholar
Dethlefsen, Edwin, and Deetz, James 1966 Death's Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries. American Antiquity 31:502–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flyvberg, Bent 2001 Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flyvberg, Bent 2004 Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research. Sosiologisk tidsskrift 12:117–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fogelin, Lars. 2019 An Unauthorized Companion to American Archaeological Theory. https://arizona.academia.edu/LarsFogelin, accessed on April 23, 2021.Google Scholar
Fowler, Christopher, and Harris, Oliver 2015 Enduring Relations: Exploring a Paradox of New Materialism. Journal of Material Culture 20:127–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geering, John 2004 What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For? American Political Science Review 98:341–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Carlo 1980 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Ginzburg, Carlo, and Biasiori, Lucio (editors) 2019 A Historical Approach to Casuistry: Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Perspective. Bloomsbury, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gomm, Roger, Hammersley, Martyn, and Foster, Peter (editors) 2000 Case Study Method: Key Issues, Key Texts. Sage, London.Google Scholar
González-Ruibal, Alfredo 2019 An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Gould, Richard 1980 Living Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hamilakis, Yannis 2014 Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory and Affect. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Heider, Karl G. 1967 Archaeological Assumptions and Ethnographical Facts: A Cautionary Tale from New Guinea. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 23:52–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, Mary 1966 Models and Analogies in Science. Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame, Indiana.Google Scholar
Hill, James 1968 Broken K Pueblo: Patterns of Form and Function. In New Perspectives in Archaeology, edited by Binford, Sally R. and Binford, Lewis, 103–142. Aldine, Chicago.Google Scholar
Hodder, Ian 1979 Economic and Social Stress and Material Culture Patterning. American Antiquity 44:446–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodder, I. 1982a The Present Past. Batsford, London.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 1982b Symbols in Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 1986 Reading the Past. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hodder, Ian 1990 The Domestication of Europe. Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 2002 Archaeological Theory. In Archaeology: The Widening Debate, edited by Cunliffe, Barry W., Davies, W.Wendy, and Renfrew, Colin, 77–90. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Hodder, Ian (editor) 1987a The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. (editor) 1987b Archaeology as Long-Term History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Højer, Lars, and Bandak, Andreas. 2015 Introduction: The Power of Example. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (special issue S1):1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, Timothy 2013 Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Matthew 2006 On the Nature of Theoretical Archaeology and Archaeological Theory. Archaeological Dialogues 13:117–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M. 2020 Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Jolles, André. 2017 Simple Forms: Legend, Saga, Myth, Riddle, Saying, Case, Memorabile, Fairytale, Joke. Verso, London.Google Scholar
Jones, Andrew Meiron 2007 Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Sian 1997 The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Jonsen, Albert, and Toulmin, Stephen 1988 The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. 1977 Second Thoughts on Paradigms. In The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, edited by Kuhn, Thomas, 293–319. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legendre, Jean-Pierre 2017 Pandora's Box: Ethnological Data as an Evaluational Tool for Archaeology. In Clashes of Time: The Contemporary Past as a Challenge for Archaeology, edited by Blaising, Jean-Marie, Driessen, Jan, Legendre, Jean-Pierre, and Olivier, Laurent, 141–157. Presses Universitaires de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium.Google Scholar
Lidén, Kerstin, and Eriksson, Gunilla 2013 Archaeology vs. Archaeological Science: Do We Have a Case? Current Swedish Archaeology 21:11–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lincoln, Yvonna S., and Guba, Egon G. 2000 The Only Generalization Is: There Is No Generalization. In Case Study Method: Key Issues, Key Texts, edited by Gomm, Roger, Hammersley, Martyn, and Foster, Peter, 27–44. Sage, London.Google Scholar
Longacre, William 1970 Archaeology as Anthropology: A Case Study. Anthropological Papers No. 17. University of Arizona, Tucson.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, Gavin 2005 The Archaeology of Time. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Lucas, G. 2010 Time and the Archaeological Archive. Rethinking History 14:343–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, G. 2015 The Mobility of Theory. Current Swedish Archaeology 23:13–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, G. 2017 The Paradigm Concept in Archaeology. World Archaeology 49:260–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John 1989 Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy. Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Malafouris, Lambros 2013 How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, Yvonne, and Alberti, Benjamin 2014 A Matter of Difference: Karen Barad, Ontology and Archaeological Bodies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24:19–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, Randy H. 1982 Ethnicity in Historical Archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1:159–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKeon, Richard (editor) 2001 The Basic Works of Aristotle. Random House, New York.Google Scholar
Montelius, Oscar 1899. Typologien eller utvecklingsläran tillämpad på det menskliga arbetet. Svenska fornminnesföreningens tidskrift 10:237–268.Google Scholar
Moore, James A., and Keene, Arthur S. (editors) 1983 Archaeological Hammers and Theories. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Morgan, Mary 2014 Case Studies. In Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, edited by Cartwright, Nancy and Montuschi, Eleonora, 288–307. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
O'Connell, James 1987 Alyawara Site Structure and Its Archaeological Implications. American Antiquity 52:74–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olivier, Laurent 2011 The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.Google Scholar
Olivier, L. 2019 The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6:16–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsen, Bjørnar 2010 In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.Google Scholar
Olsen, Bjørnar 2013 Memory. In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, edited by Graves-Brown, Paul, Harrison, Rodney, and Piccini, Angela, 204–218. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Pétursdóttir, Þóra, and Olsen, Bjørnar 2018 Theory Adrift: The Matter of Archaeological Thinking. Journal of Social Archaeology 18:97–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane Fox 1875 Principles of Classification. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 4:293–308.Google Scholar
Plog, Stephen 1983 Analysis of Style in Artifacts. Annual Review of Anthropology 12:125–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preucel, Robert 2010 Archaeological Semiotics. Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Ravn, Mads 1993 Analogy in Danish Prehistoric Societies. Norwegian Archaeological Review 26(2):59–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, and Bahn, Paul 2016 Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. 7th ed. Thames & Hudson, London.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Artur 2019 Science, Data, and Case Studies under the Third Science Revolution. Current Swedish Archaeology 27:115–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sackett, James 1985 Style and Ethnicity in Kalahari: A Reply to Wiessner. American Antiquity 50:154–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffer, Michael B. 1983 Toward the Identification of Formation Processes. American Antiquity 48:675–706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffer, Michael Brian, with Andrea R. Miller 1999 The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London, Routledge.Google Scholar
Shanks, Michael 1992 Experiencing Archaeology. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Shanks, Michael, and Christopher, Tilley 1987 Re-Constructing Archaeology. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Silliman, Stephen (editor) 2018 Engaging Archaeology: 25 Case Studies in Research Practice. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simms, Stephanie R. 1992 Ethnoarchaeology: Obnoxious Spectator, Trivial Pursuit, or the Keys to a Time Machine? In Quandaries and Quests: Visions of Archaeology's Future, edited by Wandsnider, LuAnn. Center for Archaeological Investigations Occasional Paper No. 20. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.Google Scholar
Skibo, James, Schiffer, Michael B., and Kowalski, Nancy 1989 Ceramic Style Analysis in Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology: Bridging the Analytical Gap. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8:388–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sørensen, Marie-Louise 2000. Gender Archaeology. Polity, Cambridge.Google Scholar
South, Stanley 1979 Historic Site Content, Structure, and Function. American Antiquity, 44:213–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spriggs, Matthew 2008 Ethnographic Parallels and the Denial of History. World Archaeology 40:538–552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spriggs, Matthew (editor) 1984 Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Stewart, Kathleen 2008 Weak Theory in an Unfinished World. Journal of Folklore Research 45:71–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stiegler, Bernard 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, John 2008 Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory. In Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by Malafouris, Lambros and Knappett, Carl, 37–55. Springer, Berlin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Symonds, James, and Vareka, Pavel 2014 Cowboys and Bohemians: Recreation, Resistance, and the Tramping Movement in West Bohemia. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1:165–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamm, Marek 2013. Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies. History Compass 11:458–473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Julian 1996. Time, Culture and Identity. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Tilley, Christopher 1991 Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Tilley, C. 1994 The Phenomenology of Landscape. Berg, Oxford.Google Scholar
Tilley, C. 2008 Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.Google Scholar
Ucko, Peter 1969 Ethnography and Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains. World Archaeology 1:262–280.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Urban, Patricia, and Schortman, Edward 2019 Archaeological Theory in Practice. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Van Dyke, Ruth (editor) 2015 Materiality in Practice: An Introduction. In Practicing Materiality, edited by Van Dyke, Ruth, 1–32. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.Google Scholar
Varien, Mark D., and Mills, Barbara J. 1997 Accumulations Research: Problems and Prospects for Estimating Site Occupation Span. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4:141–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varien, Mark D., and Ortman, Scott G. 2005 Accumulations Research in the Southwest United States: Middle-Range Theory for Big-Picture Problems. World Archaeology 37:132–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, Patty Jo, LeBlanc, Stephen, and Redman, Charles 1971 Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Wiessner, Polly 1983 Style and Social Information in Kalahari San Projectile Points. American Antiquity 48:253–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, Alison 1985 The Reaction against Analogy. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:63–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yellen, John 1977 Archaeological Approaches to the Present. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar