An Archaeology of Categorization and Categories in Archaeology

As archaeologists we are accustomed to classifying and categorizing the material remains of past groups. We tend, however, to devote relatively little thought to the background and implications of our practices of categorization. In this paper, we address three elements of classifi cation : the ways in which archaeologists classify objects recovered in the context of fi eldwork, the classifications used by people in the past, and the relationship between these sets of categories. We use the example of our excavations at the Halafperiod site of Fıstıklı Höyük in Southeastern Turkey to illustrate how we came to think differently about our own set of archaeological categories as well as the ways in which Halaf inhabitants of the site may have categorized their world.