Ethnography and archaeological interpretation of funerary remains.

Professor Childe argued on one occasion (i958a: 4) that the value of the specific ethnographic comparison, for example between the designs of modern Australian and prehistoric Irish carvings, was 'just to show the funny kinds of meanings or purposes that may be attached to the queerer kinds of archaeological data', and such comparison, he argued, was a waste of time. However, in the same article he also stated that: 'It is no more legitimate to impute to Palaeolithic hunters or Neolithic farmers the motives and values of twentieth-century Europeans and Americans than to birds or ants.' It is clear that what is considered funny or queer by one person or culture may be thought normal by another, and there is no reason to think that modern peoples living in remote areas of the world are any more or less peculiar than ourselves, or than any of the groups who lived atvarious different times and in different areas of the ancient world. The primary use of ethnographic parallels, I have argued several times elsewhere (Ucko and Rosenfeld I967: 150-8; Ucko I968: 419-26; Ucko in press), is simple. It is to widen the horizons of the interpreter, as Childe recognized was necessary in his second statement. I have tried to show with cave art (I967), figurines (X968) and rock art (in press) that without a widely orientated approach to archaeological interpretation, the data revealed by the archaeological material itself tends to become swamped by unitary and all-embracing explanation. It is true to say that the careful use of ethnographic data has served to do one major thing to present the possibility of varied and heterogeneous reasons or causes for a practice. As far as I am concerned, the use of ethnographic parallels can only in very This paper was delivered as a lecture to the Conference of The Prehistoric Society on 'The Interpretation of Funerary Evidence' held in London on 2I-3 March 1969. I have left the text and style of this paper essentially unchanged from the lecture delivered on that occasion except for the addition of references; the final section of the paper on 'horizontal stratigraphy' is a short preliminary statement which I hope to expand in the near future. For reasons of time I omitted almost all of the introduction to this paper on the use of ethnographic parallels at the Prehistoric Society conference, but I have reinserted my views on this subject for this publication. I would like to thank the following people for their comments and interest in this paper, for without them it would have been much more restricted in scope and intention: Dr A. J. Arkell, Mrs M. J. Baldwin, Professor N. A. Barnicot, Dr Maurice Bloch, Mr Stephen Cretney, Dr J. P. Garlick, Dr Jack Goody, Mr Mark Hassall, Mr H. W. M. Hodges, Dr G. W. B. Huntingford, Dr P. Kaberry, Mr Robert Layton, Dr Joan Lewis, Dr Godfrey Lienhardt, Miss Mary-Jane Mountain, Mr Kenneth Painter, Mr John Picton, Dr Vernon Reynolds, Dr Andr6e Rosenfeld, Mr Michael Rowlands, Dr Ruth Tringham and especially Dr Peter Morton-Williams. Without the prolonged and merciless pressures exerted by my friends Drs John Alexander and Ian Longworth this paper would probably never have been written, and they would have been spared their 'glimpse into the abyss of original chaos'.

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