Although it is sometimes claimed that archaeology is ‘the past tense of cultural anthropology’ (Renfrew and Bahn 1991:9), the relationship between archaeology and sociocultural anthropology is actually rather complex and varies greatly according to regional or national disciplinary traditions. In universities of the United States, archaeology is normally considered one of the †four fields or integrated subdisciplines (along with sociocultural, *biological/physical, and *linguistic anthropology) that combine to form a ‘department of anthropology’. On the other hand, in European nations (and their former colonies which have been influenced by European disciplinary concepts), the archaeology of recent prehistoric periods has generally tended to be more closely allied to *history, meaning especially national history, and seen as an extension of that intellectual endeavour. In European universities this kind of archaeology is often housed in separate departments or institutes of archaeology (or prehistory and protohistory) with close ties to history; while archaeologists focused on the deeper periods of prehistory (i.e. the Paleolithic) tend to be more closely linked institutionally to geology and natural history. These kinds of institutional separation from anthropology are rare in the United States. However, in both American and European universities, archaeologists studying the ancient complex societies of certain regions (especially the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Near East) usually tend to be incorporated with other, text-orientated, humanistic scholars in highly specialized departments or institutes (e.g. Classics, Egyptology, Near Eastern Studies, art history) often having limited contact or intellectual rapport with anthropology.
The contribution of sociocultural anthropology to archaeology is various and important. Anglo-American archaeologists have for many years relied upon analogical models of various kinds drawn from comparative surveys of the ethnographic literature as a basis for making inferences about past societies. They have also generally looked to sociocultural anthropology for appropriate research goals and interpretive theory that can be adapted to their data. This has been less true of a number of Continental European schools of archaeology where comparative ethnographic models and anthropological theory have frequently been eschewed in favour of direct historical analogy and where history has provided a more frequent source of interpretive inspiration.
The contribution, or potential contribution, of archaeology to sociocultural anthropology is perhaps less obvious (and certainly less acknowledged), but no less important. The most subtle and pervasive contributions are an insistent concern with cause and process, a sense of the deep antiquity of human cultural development, and the confrontation of the the very compressed experience of ethnographic *fieldwork with the archaeological perspective of the longue durée. Exposure to archaeology should provoke a realization of the dynamic record of continual social and cultural change in prehistory that belies notions of static, pristine, ‘traditional’ cultures of the kind projected in older *functionalist ethnographies. The archaeological demonstration of the shallow temporal depth of Melanesian *exchange circuits such as the *kula in their current form (Kirch 1991) is but one striking example of the need for this kind of long-term historical perspective in ethnographic studies.
As sociocultural anthropologists continue to expand their current rediscovery of the importance of history, archaeology has the potential to play an increasingly integrated and crucial role in studies that link history and anthropology. For people without their own written records, archaeology provides a unique source of access to the long stretch of history beyond the memory of living people which is not dependent solely upon the alien recorded observations of colonial agents. Ironically, the much desired restoration of the history of the ‘people without history’ by sociocultural anthropologists has to date often turned out to be little more than an account of their encounter with the *capitalist *world system, parting from a static baseline conception of a timeless traditional culture before colonial contact. Archaeology has the potential to redress this problem by demonstrating the equally dynamic history of societies before the colonial encounter, as well as adding important sources of information to an analysis of the process of colonial entanglement and interaction. The rich potential of a closer integration of archaeology and historical anthropology in this vein is well demonstrated by the recent pioneering collaborative study of Kirch and †Sahlins (1992) on Hawaii.
Archaeology also offers the possibility of adding to the theoretical understanding of the expansion of the modern capitalist world system by providing information about the numerous precapitalist colonial encounters that were a common feature of the ancient world. It is important for purposes of comparative understanding to examine the historical dynamics of such processes in as many different contexts as possible, and especially in cases that predate the development of the European capitalist world system. Indeed, archaeological information is critical for resolving debates in this realm between those (e.g. Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein) who see the modern world system as a fundamentally new phenomenon which developed in Europe during the sixteenth century and those (e.g. André Gunder Frank) who see it as the inexorable result of a continuous process of expansion of a system which began over four millennia ago.
Another important contribution of archaeology has been the reawakening of an interest in the ethnographic study of material culture, a subject long neglected in mainstream Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. As Appadurai has noted, material things ‘constitute the first principles and the last resort of archaeologists’ (1986:5). In fact, all archaeological inference about past societies hinges critically upon an understanding of the relationship between material and nonmaterial aspects of *culture and *society. Yet, as archaeologists became more sophisticated in their use of ethnographic information for the construction of interpretive models during the 1960s, it became increasingly evident to them that only a rudimentary understanding of this relationship existed. Under the influence of †structural-functionalism and *structuralism, material culture had ceased to be a focus of serious interest for most sociocultural anthropologists; and when information was collected it was generally not recorded in a form that was useful to archaeologists. For example, there was little attention paid to intra-cultural variation, to the spatial distribution of objects and styles, to the process of production and creation, to learning networks and the process of apprenticeship, or to the social roles and *symbolic meaning of material culture.
Beginning in the 1970s, a new research subfield, known as ‘ethnoarchaeology’, was born in which some archaeologists began to remedy this dearth of information by conducting ethnographic studies themselves. They focused particularly upon understanding material culture in a living social context in ways that were potentially useful for archaeological interpretation. Many of these ‘ethnoarchaeologists’ found that focusing on material culture provided a remarkably revealing way of penetrating and illuminating social relations and cultural categories and that objects were crucially important elements of symbolic practice (cf. Miller 1985, Kramer 1985). The ethnoarchaeological focus on new ways of understanding material culture has undoubtedly influenced the recent renewal of a more general interest in the subject in sociocultural anthropology, particularly in American cultural anthropology. In any case, it is clear that there is now a good deal more mutual interest and communication between archaeologists and cultural anthropologists studying objects and *consumption (e.g. Appadurai 1986), and ethnoarchaeologists have made important contributions to this discussion.
In France, there is a more long-standing tradition of mutual influence and collaboration between certain archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists in the study of material culture, although this work is still little known in Anglo-American circles. The archaeologist †Leroi-Gourhan, who was himself inspired by the work of †Mauss, had a marked influence in the development of a school of the anthropology of *technology, called ‘technologie’ or ‘technologie culturelle’ by Haudricourt, one of its most prolific practitioners. This approach, which is today best exemplified in the Parisian journal Techniques et Culture., focuses on understanding the social embeddedness of technological choices and technical systems. Its adherents have developed a novel analytical methodology and an impressive body of case studies (e.g. Lemonnier 1993).
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