Ethnoarchaeology and classical archaeology (Answer in 150 words)

- Ethnoarchaeology and classical archaeology (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Both study material remains, but they ask opposite questions of them. Classical archaeology interprets the objects of a known civilisation; ethnoarchaeology observes living people in order to learn what objects mean.
Body
1. Data and question: classical archaeology takes the excavated art, architecture, epigraphy and ceramics of literate civilisations, mainly Greece and Rome, and asks what they say about that civilisation. Ethnoarchaeology takes present-day behaviour and asks what material traces it leaves.
2. Method and aim: the first works by excavation, stratigraphy, typology, art-historical and textual comparison, and aims at chronology and cultural history. The second works by participant observation among living potters, herders and foragers, and aims at general correlations between behaviour and residue.
3. How they meet: ethnoarchaeology supplies the bridging argument, Binford's middle-range theory, that gives excavated patterning behavioural meaning. Binford among the Nunamiut and Daniel Miller among the Dangwara potters of Malwa built such inferences.
Conclusion
Classical archaeology recovers a past; ethnoarchaeology supplies the reasoning by which any excavated record is read. The risk in the second is assuming that the behaviour-residue link has never changed.