Resumen. El presente artículo se basa en algunas cuestiones tecnológicas y sociales de una población indígena americana tradicional con el fin de aportar una reflexión sobre las dificultades para generar una interpretación holística de los cambios en la cultura material de una sociedad, en particular en aquellas ya desaparecidas. Se propone para ello recorrer el sentido inverso a las investigaciones etnoarqueológicas tradicionales: a partir de la revisión tecnológica de materiales cerámicos de un grupo étnico actual conservados en museo, se interactúa con las fuentes documentales, los alfareros indígenas, sus descendientes y otras personas cualificadas en el tema. De esta manera, la cerámica realizada por los alfareros qom durante distintos momentos de los dos últimos siglos se interpreta a la luz de varias alternativas: desde un mero elemento material definido por ciertas características tecnológicas y estéticas, a su documentación como objeto, la contextualización de la vida cotidiana y de la actividad cerámica en la sociedad qom tanto en el pasado reciente como en la actualidad, y la importancia que tiene en todo el proceso de cambio el apego a la identidad y a valores supramateriales como el territorio, factores que exceden la mera observación corpórea del objeto. Palabras clave: Cambio tecnológico; identidad; tradición; interpretación; colecciones de museo.[en] Ancient Territories and Missing Pottery. Qom Ceramics from the Grand Chaco (Argentina)Abstract. This article relies on some technological and social conditions of a South American indigenous population to reflect on the handicaps to reach a holistic interpretation of the changes in material culture, particularly in past societies. It is thus proposed to follow the opposite direction to traditional etnoarchaeological research: from the technological revision of the pottery vessels produced by a modern ethnic group found in museum collections to the interaction with indigenous potters, their descendants and other qualified people. Hence, vessels made by Qom potters in different periods of the last two centuries are considered from different perspectives: from a material element analysed in terms of technological and aesthetic features, to their documentation as objects, the contextualisation of Qom daily activities and pottery-making -both in the recent past and nowadays-and the significance of the preservation of identity and supramaterial values such as the territory in this change process, elements which surpass the sole corporeal observation of the object.

In this article, I overview ethnoarchaeology's historic relations to positivism and argue for an explicit redefinition of how we understand the sub-discipline's core objectives. The New Archaeology and, to a lesser extent, Behavioral Archaeology charged ethnoarchaeology with producing "middle range theories" made up of "behavioral-material correlations" that would facilitate archaeological testing. I propose instead that we reaffirm ethnoarchaeology's ties to analogical reasoning by viewing it as a source-side "tack" within archaeology's emerging post-positivist epistemology. As a tack, ethnoarchaeology finds its primary role in the production and assessment of the background knowledge that archaeology uses to interpret the past. I suggest that the use of ethnographic engagements to assess archaeology's interpretive principles makes the subfield complementary with various forms of alternative and indigenous scholarship.

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This article examines how the consumption of domestic vessels allows women from the Inland Niger Delta of Mali to negotiate the political economies they enter following their marriage. Enamel serving vessels are the centrepieces of wedding trousseaus that decorate women's houses during the early years of their marriage. I suggest that these objects display a bride's social and economic power in a way that shelters her from exploitation within patriarchal households. Enamel consumption provides an example of how the 'materiality' of commodities may be enlisted to construct new senses of selfhood during periods of social liminality. More generally, my case study shows how women employ the ambiguities embodied in commodity consumption to confront patriarchal control of their labour and income.

Many readers (and especially those English-speakers under ~50 years of age) primarily employ secondhand knowledge of the writing of Marx and Engels. Basic Marxist concepts that structure analysis (such as mode of production) have been filtered through the writings of anthropologists and understood under different names and are now attributed to scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. We therefore begin by reviewing key concepts from Marx and Engels’ original writings and define basic Marxist terms.

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In recent years, ethnoarchaeology and the use of ethnographic analogy have come under increasing criticism. Analogy seems necessary because, as post-industrial academics, archaeologists worry that they do not possess the knowledge necessary to interpret archaeological materials directly and thus must consult with coeval ‘premodern’ peoples to develop interpretive baselines. In this paper, we draw attention to a form of scholarly enquiry – 19th-century Bible customs books – that faced a similar challenge and used methodologies that parallel archaeology's use of ethnoarchaeological data. These were books written by missionaries who lived in Palestine for extended periods of time and studied Palestinian life to make sense of obscure elements of the biblical text, believing that life there had remained fundamentally unchanged for the past three thousand years. Using the Bible customs books as a kind of ‘cautionary tale’ typical of ethnoarchaeology, we argue that a consideration of this literature brings into focus some of the challenges faced by archaeologists’ use of analogy. Specifically, Bible customs books expose significant issues in how relations are conceptualized between archaeologists, others and ancients, and show how a strict empirical focus in ethnographic research can insulate key assumptions from critical scrutiny.

With the 57th volume of the Ethnographisch-Archaeologische Zeitschrift (EAZ), we are delighted to relaunch one of the oldest academic forums of cross-disciplinary