Archaeology, Culture and History: Concept and Their Contribution in Malaysia

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.