ABSTRACT
Any consideration of the implications for archeological interpretation of new ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers requires an examination of the general relationship between ethnographic observations and archeological reasoning. It is frequently stated that one of the main tasks of the archeologist is the interpretation of the past and that the primary means available is reconstruction based on analogies to living peoples. Archeologists are not limited to analogies to ethnographic data as the sole basis for offering explanatory postulates; models can be formulated in a theoretical calculus some of which may deal with forms without ethnographic analogs. The chapter explains a case that provides a good example of a study in which different forms of information were relevant in the elucidation of a single variable. It exemplifies the interpretive model for the archeological data was not based on simple analogy to ethnographically known societies.
