Archaeologists use the study of modern social groups to help interpret their artifact assemblages. Inference is the process of deriving logical consequences from assumed premises. Analogy is a logical reasoning that similarities in the whole are inferred by from a similarity of two or more things in the particulars. Thus the artifacts connect the past to the present. Conversely, archaeology can expand our understanding of the groups of the present by identifying simpler social organizations without the pressures of co-existing with modern nation states.
Archaeology has less emphasis on natural sciences.