I have been working on this article "The Archaeology of Ancestors: The Saxe/Goldstein Hypothesis Revisited" by Ian Morris (1991).
I am by no means an archaeologist, nor is archaeology my focus of my undergrad; however, I am incredibly interested in the treasures and stories that lie beneath our feet.
If you ever wanted to be humbled by text, read this article. The intro alone had me googling terms every other sentence. There is just so much about how the discipline of archaeology came to be that I do not know.
So, when the little light bulb went off I was more than excited. A cheshire grin spread across my face when I finally realized something about this paper. It wasn't exactly a summary of the paper's findings, but rather a simple interjection - it was something I might blurt out at a cocktail party discussion on anthropologists asserting themselves as scientists.
"Why are we looking for a universal truth? Why do the things humans do have to be described as scientific law?"
This article really highlighted for me that the use of ethnography is quite important in aiding interpretation of a site, a burial site more specifically. Of course we don't have ethnographic recounts of cultures buried beside the remains... but it sure would help.
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