Abstract:
Archeology, history and culture are seen as capable of contributing to
national development. The three things are linked because the three have a strong
bond. In the opinion of the author, archaeology, history and culture are in harmony of
each other. This is because archeology is part of history and cultural data, including
the paleo-environment data (ecofact), which are the primary data in archaeological
research. However, this view would conflict with those who adhere to the idea that
'archeology is anthropology or it is nothing. It is the faith of those who subscribe to
the "New Archaeology" born in America.
The movement began in the late 1950’s when American researchers began
to move the entire discipline away from the study of artifacts to the study of people
behavior. Work of Gordon Willey and Philip Philips in ‘Method and Theory in
American Archaeology’ stated that “American archaeology is anthropology or it is
nothing (Whillwy and Phillips 1958: 2). The idea implied that the goals of
archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer
questions about humans and human society. This was a critique of the former period
in archaeology, the culture-historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any
information which artifacts contained is about past people and their way of live once
the items are included in the archaeological record. All they felt that could be done
was to catalogue, describe and create timelines based on artifacts (Trigger, 1989).
In 1960’s, scholars like Lewis Binfood, David Clarke, David Leonard and
others suggested that archaeology must be more scientific, with explicit theory and
rigorous methodologies. Lewis Binfood in his book New Perspectives in
Archaeology published in 1968 stressed on: i) the need to use new technologies
such as the computer for statistical and matrix analyses of data; ii) the concept of the
ecosystem for the understanding of the economic and subsistence bases of
prehistoric societies; iii) an evolutionary view of culture; iv) the use of models of
cultures that could be viewed as systems; v) incorporation of an evolutionary
approach to culture change; and vi) a close relationship between archaeology and
anthropology. In Britain, David Clarke and David Leonard, in the book entitled
Analytical Archaeology, also published in 1968, took up similar themes, emphasizing
particularly the application of systems theory to archaeological modeling.
