ABSTRACT
The interpretation of ethnic groups within historical archaeology has taken place within a narrative framework derived from surviving written sources and reflects the privileged status traditionally accorded to the written word over and above material culture in the study of ‘historical periods’. This historical determinism has frequently resulted in a circular, self-referential use of documentary and archaeological evidence, and has led to the conflation of the material record with monolithic ethnic categories extracted from historical sources. In this chapter I explore some of the problems arising from such an approach in the context of recent debates about the value and use of historical versus archaeological evidence. However, rather than merely asserting the priority of one kind of evidence over another, an alternative approach is suggested based on a consideration of the ways in which material and written traditions are involved in the construction of ethnicity. Such an approach shows that attempts to seek out the archaeological correlates of historically known ethnic groups are flawed not only because they often ignore the situated and subjective nature of the historical sources, but also because they disregard qualitative differences in the manifestation of ethnicity in written sources and material culture. Recognition of these qualitative differences is essential for the development of an analytical framework for the analysis of ethnicity in which both archaeological and documentary evidence are ‘seen as equal and potentially opposing elements in the dialectical process of knowledge’ (Austin 1997: 35).
