Several decades ago Malinowski (1935:460) dismissed “the purelytechnological enthusiasm” of ethnography, continuing a trend of undermining the significance of the study of material culture and technology and affording it a peripheral status within anthropology (Pfaffenberger 1992:492). As a consequence, contemporary studies in non-Western societies on the subject are rather limited, leaving archaeologists lacking a potentially powerful source of analogical reasoning. Following on from the discussion in Chapter 2, the result has been that archaeologists have begun to record this type of information for themselves, establishing the basis for the development of the subdiscipline of ethnoarchaeology.