The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology

The study of ancient genomes has burgeoned at an incredible rate in the last decade. The result is a shift in archaeological narratives, bringing with it a fierce debate on the place of genetics in anthropological research. Archaeogenomics has challenged and scrutinized fundamental themes of anthropological research, including human origins, movement of ancient and modern populations, the role of social organization in shaping material culture, and the relationship between culture, language, and ancestry. Moreover, the discussion has inevitably invoked new debates on indigenous rights, ownership of ancient materials, inclusion in the scientific process, and even the meaning of what it is to be a human. We argue that the broad and seemingly daunting ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges posed by archaeogenomics, in fact, represent the very cutting edge of social science research. Here, we provide a general review of the field by introducing the contemporary discussion points and summarizing methodological and ethical concerns, while highlighting the exciting possibilities of ancient genome studies in archaeology from an anthropological perspective.

Practice and history in archaeology

A new paradigm is emerging in archaeology herein dubbed ‘historical processualism’. A review of three contemporary approaches to the study of the past – neo-Darwinism, cognitive-processualism, and agency theory – suggests that the standard notions of ‘behavior’ and ‘evolution’ are being replaced in archaeological explanations by ‘practice’ and ‘history’. Behavioral analogies, commonly used to construct inferences about ‘why’ cultures changed, are problematic. In their place, archaeologists should substitute the study of cultural practices – what people did and how they negotiated their views of others and of their own pasts – as these were and are the actual processes of cultural change. The emphasis on practice entails the elevation of historical explanations, in the process altering the questions that archaeologists ask and the data that they must gather to address those questions. The importance of this paradigmatic shift is exemplified by contrasting contemporary explanations of Mississippian pottery and political change in the pre-Columbian American midcontinent.

The neural basis of moral cognition: sentiments, concepts, and values

The human moral nature has perplexed laymen and academics for millennia. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience are opening new venues for unveiling the complex psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underling human morality and its impairments. Here we review these lines of evidence and key topics of debate and explain why investigating the mechanisms of cognition-emotion interaction and of the neural bases of moral sentiments and values will be critical for our understanding of the human moral mind.

The Archaeology of Religious Ritual

Archaeologists traditionally assumed that rituals were understood best in light of religious doctrines, beliefs, and myths. Given the material focus of archaeology, archaeologists believed that ritual was a particularly unsuitable area for archaeological inquiry. In the past 25 years, archaeologists have increasingly started to address ritual in their research. Some archaeologists with access to extensive historical or ethnohistorical sources continue to see rituals as the enactment of religious principles or myths. Other archaeologists have adopted a more practice-oriented understanding of ritual, arguing that ritual is a form of human action. In emphasizing ritual practice, archaeologists reject a clear dichotomy between religious and nonreligious action or artifacts, focusing instead on the ways that the experience of ritual and ritual symbolism promotes social orders and dominant ideologies.

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BODY

Under the influence of phenomenological approaches, a semiotic perspective on the body is being replaced in archaeology by analysis of the production and experience of lived bodies in the past through the juxtaposition of traces of body practices, idealized representations, and evidence of the effects of habitual gestures, postures, and consumption practices on the corporal body. On the basis of a shared assumption that social understandings of the body were created and reproduced through associations with material culture, archaeology of the body has proceeded from two theoretical positions: the body as the scene of display and the body as artifact. Today, the body as a site of lived experience, a social body, and site of embodied agency, is replacing prior static conceptions of an archaeology of the body as a public, legible surface.