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Giorgio Buccellati, Critique of Archaeological Reason
Excerpts and Synopses
Hayden
Excerpts from 1984 "Are Emic Types Relevant to Archaeology?"
Classification
| refers to virtually any system used for grouping objects together. Such systems do no pretend to relate artifact categories to concepts of their makers, users or any other of evolutionary or anthropological importance (although they may). Good examples of classification are provided by museum collections of the 18th and early 19th centuries, which were organized according to such varied criteria as size of artifacts, aesthetic compatibility of artifacts, country or regional location of donors and the social status of donors, among others. .
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Typology
| should properly refer to systems of categorization which purport to, or at least aim to reveal something about the nature of human behavior in relation to artifacts, whether this information is by nature evolutionary, functional, technological, temporal, social or other. In short typologies aim to classify objects in order to solve anthropological problems.
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Taxonomy
| has been used in biology and zoology almost exclusively to refer to typologies oriented to elucidated historical relationships between units of study, the term "taxonomy" might best be reserved for typologies with similar goals in archaeology.
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Emic
| refers to the way indigenous groups classify objects or behavior which they use. It is basically what might be termed an "ethnographic" classification.
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Etic
| refers to the way "scientists" (in this case, archaeologists) classify objects or behavior to resolve specific problems or find out specific types of information.
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