Euro-American ethnic markers are everywhere among us, which is why we
don't necessarily notice them.  Our material culture and the way we use
and think about it comprise a part, a suggestion, and an outgrowth of our
our own culture's "myths" (see Barthes).  Our material culture and
attitudes, of course, do change, but there may be specific artifactual
evidence of such change.  See, for instance, Leone and Shackel's work on
the emergence of hierarchy and the ideology of the "Georgian order"
suggested by the artifactual evidence of the Chesapeake region.  I, for
one, would accept artifacts reflective of a "Georgian" world view as
characteristically Euro-American in the modern era.
 
Most American historical archaeologists are essentially studying
Anglo-American culture, and so tend to notice differences within that
culture, but not the commonalities (hey, I've given up waiting for grand
theories in any discipline, but I always heard that anthropologists were trying
to reach some kind of synthesis or general statements about homo
sapiens, at least within self-defined groups).  Comparison with other
cultures certainly tends to hold up a mirror to our own.  We may think it
odd that "headhunters" don't use a sheet or a bottle as it was intended,
but we don't always ask why we do use them that way, and how that came to
be.  Euro-American culture is all the more invisible to those of us from
that background simply because it is so pervasive.  Euro-American
material and popular culture is a world-wide venture.  To many of
us, concepts like democracy, capitalism, secularism, humanism, and
"bed sheets" are descriptions of "the way things are" or the way
things ought to be.  Not that we can (or should) reach any normative
conclusions, but we can try to understand how and why these things
came to be.  We may too often treat the ideologies (I hate to use
that word in a non-political context, but it serves) of our culture as
familiar background, with only the artifacts changing over time (after
all, that one reason why historical archaeology had a tough birth--many
considered it modern junk which could tell us little).  But writers
like Glassie, Leone, and Shackel have shown us some ways in which a
people's social, political and economic relations have shifted through the
use of artifacts which appear much less dramatic than factories and
houses of parliaments.  Perhaps we need some "headhunter" ethnographers
studying our culture, so that we might notice the things that are as
familiar to us as the backs of our hands.  Hey, I never noticed that
freckle before....
 
Tim Dennee
Alexandria Archaeology