Yusufzai Pakhtun-Pushtun of the Peshawar Valley An Ethno-Archaeological Study
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Date
2014
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Department of Archaeology
Abstract
Ethno-archacology as a subject is not very old. Ethnographers and
archaeologists have themselves been producing schemes of human development and
Progress. Strongly influenced by Darwin's ideas about evolution, the British
anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832 — 1917) and his American counterpart Lewis Heary
Morgan (1818 — 1881), both published important works in the 1870's arguing that
human societies had evolved from a primitive state of savagery (primitive hunting)
through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society).
Morgan's book, Ancient Society (1877), was partly based on his great knowledge of
living North American Indians. His ideas — particularly the notion that people had once
lived in a primitive state of communism, sharing resources equally — strongly
influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who drew on them in their writings about
RR:
A study ofthe social organization and other features ofthe present day Pakhtün
Society, with particular reference to the Yüsufzais in the valley of Peshäwar, on the
basis ofits material culture in order to draw conclusions about its past, is the main
objective of this thesis. This line of research would be technically termed as ethno —
archacology. Ethnographers work backwards from known to unknown by living among
contemporary societies with the specific purpose of understanding how such socictics
use their material culture. The present writer, being himself a Pakhtün, lives in the
Pakhtün society and is fully acquainted with its material culture.