Measuring Time With Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology - Rilegato

Lyman, R. Lee; O'Brien, Michael J.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0803229666 ISBN 13: 9780803229662

Casa editrice: Univ of Nebraska Pr, 2006

Riassunto

Combining historical research with a lucid explication of archaeological methodology and reasoning, Measuring Time with Artifacts examines the origins and changing use of fundamental chronometric techniques and procedures and analyzes the different ways American archaeologists have studied changes in artifacts, sites, and peoples over time.

In highlighting the underpinning ontology and epistemology of artifact-based chronometers—cultural transmission and how to measure it archaeologically—this volume covers issues such as why archaeologists used the cultural evolutionism of L. H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor, L. A. White, and others instead of biological evolutionism; why artifact classification played a critical role in the adoption of stratigraphic excavation; how the direct historical approach accomplished three analytical tasks at once; why cultural traits were important analytical units; why paleontological and archaeological methods sometimes mirror one another; how artifact classification influences chronometric method; and how graphs illustrate change in artifacts over time.

An understanding of the history of artifact-based chronometers enables us to understand how we know what we think we know about the past, ensures against modern misapplication of the methods, and sheds light on the reasoning behind archaeologists' actions during the first half of the twentieth century.

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Informazioni sull'autore

R. Lee Lyman is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Michael J. O’Brien is a professor of anthropology and an associate dean in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Lyman and O’Brien are the coauthors of Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny and Cladistics and Archaeology, among other books.

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Measuring Time with Artifacts

A History of Methods in American ArchaeologyBy R. Lee Lyman

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2006 R. Lee Lyman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780803229662

Chapter One

Ontology

In Chapter 1, we noted that ontology is the branch of philosophy that concerns the nature of entities in the world and pointed out that we consider the models and theories that explain these different kinds of entities to be variations in ontology. We explore such differences in ontology in Chapter 2, where we outline the history of evolutionary thinking as manifest among American anthropologists and archaeologists between about 1900 and 1960. We argue that although early in the twentieth century the basic evolutionary view was somewhat (if implicitly) Darwinian, arguments by Boas, Kroeber, Steward, and others who were major figures in the discipline caused a shift away from Darwinian evolution to the form of cultural evolution outlined by Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward B. Tylor, and others during the nineteenth century and popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by Leslie A. White and Julian H. Steward. Arguments to abandon Darwinism were simple. First, biological species did not hybridize, but cultures did. Second, biological (Darwinian) evolution was diversifying (or cladogenetic, to use the modern term), whereas cultural evolution was reticulate; cultures not only diversified, they hybridized. Third, biological evolution could only occur between generations, whereas cultural evolution could take place within a generation; the latter was so much faster than the former that the key mechanism of biological evolution identified by Darwin as natural selection could not possibly have influenced the evolutionary development of a culture.

In Chapter 2 and elsewhere (e.g., O'Brien and Lyman 2000, 2003) we suggest that the arguments against adapting, not just adopting, a Darwinian form of evolution to the study of cultural phenomena are misguided. One reason for this is that the equation of a culture with a species is unwarranted; what distinguishes a species is its supposed inability to hybridize with another species, but what distinguishes one culture from another is unclear in the literature produced early in the twentieth century, and this is still a problem today (Palmer et al. 1997 and references therein). Another reason we find arguments not to utilize Darwinian evolutionary theory to assist in explaining the archaeological record, one that is not explored in Chapter 2, concerns the mechanism of cultural inheritance, now typically referred to as "cultural transmission" (Boyd and Richerson 1985). This evolutionary mechanism results in the process of hereditary continuity, a critically important aspect of most artifact-based chronometers, yet it was hardly mentioned in the archaeological literature of the time (Lyman 2001). Nor is cultural transmission given detailed consideration in most renderings of the cultural evolution popular among many archaeologists today (e.g., Spencer 1997). Interestingly, it was Leslie White-arguably a cultural anthropologist who had significant influence on the emergence of processual archaeology (O'Brien et al. 2005)-who perhaps did more to clarify and explicate the cultural transmission process than any other cultural anthropologist. This is something we did not appreciate sufficiently in 1996 when Chapter 2 was written. White (1947a:693) indicated that because culture was "dependent on the use of symbols, ... its elements are readily transmitted [and thus] culture becomes a continuum; it flows down through the ages from one generation to another and laterally from one people to another." Cultural transmission-and its attendant processes of innovation, integration, and the like-constituted what White (1948:586) termed the "culture process," defined by him as "a stream of [culture] elements that are continually interacting with one another, forming new combinations and syntheses, eliminating some elements from the stream, and incorporating new ones." White's culture elements would later be called "symbolates" (White 1959a), units of cultural transmission equivalent to the cultural traits of historical ethnologists (Chapter 3).

According to White (1948:586), the culture process "has its own principles and its own laws of change and development," and he insisted that "culture as culture can only be explained in terms of culture, i.e., culturologically." As we point out in Chapter 2, White (1943:339) rather arrogantly proclaimed that the "culturologist knows more about cultural evolution than the biologist, even today, knows about biological evolution." Thus there was no need to consult with a Darwinist about possible principles and laws of change and evolutionary development. Rather, it seems that White would have argued that the consultation should be the other way around; biologists should be consulting culturologists. Whether White was correct or not, the history of the ontology of evolution within anthropology and how that ontology changed during the early twentieth century had a significant influence on how archaeologists went about building chronometers and the units that attended them. It is important to have a firm grasp of the basics of that ontology so as to understand why it was thought that the chronometers worked the way that they did.

In Chapter 2 we describe two evolutionary ontologies that American archaeologists variously used (often implicitly) to help explain the archaeological record. We bring the story up to the early 1960s, when what is generally referred to as "processual archaeology" emerged (O'Brien et al. 2005). We focus particularly in Chapter 2 on two sets of differences: that between the evolution of Charles Darwin and that of Herbert Spencer, and that between A. L. Kroeber's conception of history and evolution and the conceptions of Leslie White. Spencer and White subscribed to a version of evolution referred to in biology as orthogenesis. We reserve detailed discussion of orthogenesis for Chapter 7, where the nuances of that version serve to highlight the ontology underpinning the direct historical approach.

Chapter Two

The Concept of Evolution in Early Twentieth-Century American Archaeology

Culture historians had as one of their goals the writing of the evolutionary histories of cultural lineages (Lyman et al. 1997b). They implicitly used various models or theories of evolution founded on distinct ontologies to assist their writing. Given that different models of evolution-how it works and why it works the way that it does-serve as the (typically implicit) explanatory basis of archaeological research focused on building archaeological chronometers based on artifacts and also as the basis of writing the developmental histories of cultural lineages, it is critical to consider the history of evolutionary approaches in American archaeology. Two models-Darwinian evolution and cultural evolution-played major roles in American archaeology during the twentieth century. In this chapter we do two things. First, we outline how the two evolutionary models differ in biology and in anthropology. Second, we document how and why the cultural model made its way into archaeology during the 1950s and replaced the Darwinian model. American archaeologists early in the twentieth century made efforts to incorporate elements of Darwinian evolution in their work, but that version of evolution fell from favor in the 1940s. More or less simultaneously, archaeologists began to shift their attention from building and using artifact-based chronometers to more anthropologically oriented pursuits. The temporal correlation of these two events suggests a causal linkage between them. We explore aspects of that linkage here and focus on one such aspect in Chapter 7.

Culture History: The Backbone of the Discipline

Documenting and interpreting culture change-usually referred to as "cultural development" by archaeologists early in the twentieth century-were the central themes of American archaeology beginning with the birth of the culture history paradigm in the second decade of the twentieth century (Lyman et al. 1997a, 1997b). As Wissler (1917b:100) remarked in what can be taken as the birth announcement of that paradigm, American archaeology not only now had some important questions to answer, but it also, for the first time, had a way to produce answers:

[H]ow long has man been in America, whence did he come, and what has been his history since his arrival? ... [T]he archaeologist finds in the ground the story of man and his achievements. The new, or the real archaeology is the study of these traces and the formulation of the story they tell.... [The archaeologist] must actually dissect section after section of our old Mother Earth for the empirical data upon which to base his answers. It is not merely the findings of things that counts; it is the conditions and interassociations that really tell the story.

This had been the goal of archaeology since the beginning of the twentieth century. As Boas (1904:521-522) remarked, "the sequence of types of culture as determined by the artifacts of each period [is among] the fundamental problems with which archaeology is concerned. The results obtained have the most immediate bearing upon the general question of the evolution of culture, since the ideal aim of archaeology practically coincides with this general problem, the solution of which would be contained in a knowledge of the chronological development of culture." Establishing the sequence involved the use of artifact-based chronometers; Wissler was speaking particularly about stratigraphic excavation when he mentioned dissecting "section after section of our old Mother Earth." Other techniques for addressing the issues raised by Wissler and Boas-the latter having recognized that "in the study of American archaeology we are compelled to apply methods somewhat different from those used in the archaeology of the Old World" (Boas 1902:1)-involved studying the fluctuation of frequencies of artifact types through time, with the passage of time initially confirmed and later established by the stratigraphically superposed positions of the artifacts themselves (Chapter 8).

That the goals of culture history never varied for the next several decades is clear from the remarks of one of the parents of the paradigm, A. V. Kidder:

Archaeologists, noting that modern biology has mounted above the plane of pure taxonomy [that is, classification], have attempted to follow that science into the more alluring fields of philosophic interpretation, forgetting that the conclusions of the biologist are based on the sound foundation of scientifically marshalled facts gathered during the past century by an army of painstaking observers. This groundwork we utterly fail to possess. Nor will it be easy for us to lay, because the products of human hands, being unregulated by the more rigid genetic laws which control the development of animals and plants, are infinitely variable. But that is no reason for evading the attempt. It has got eventually to be done, and the sooner we roll up our sleeves and begin comparative studies of axes and arrowheads and bone tools, make classifications, prepare accurate descriptions, draw distribution maps and, in general, persuade ourselves to do a vast deal of painstaking, unspectacular work, the sooner shall we be in position to approach the problems of cultural evolution, the solving of which is, I take it, our ultimate goal [Kidder 1932:8].

Kidder's remarks outline the goals of the culture history paradigm and indicate how culture historians conceived of the phenomena they were studying. Cultures evolved; a historically documented culture had a developmental heritage or lineage, and it was the job of the culture historian to describe that lineage and to determine why it had the form that it did. Kidder correctly indicated that archaeology lacked both the basic data and a theory consisting of cultural processes parallel to the biological ones of genetic inheritance and natural selection to help explain a culture's lineage in evolutionary terms. Despite the fact that Wissler (1916c) had earlier noted that cultural phenomena had "genetic[-like] relations," Kidder, like his contemporaries (Lyman 2001), never really discussed the theoretical role of what today would be referred to as cultural transmission (this process creates lineages), choosing instead to focus on another issue that underlies Darwinian evolutionary theory-the documentation of variation. Compiling the data and building the theory would take some work, Kidder suspected, and in the long run, only the former has today been met with any sort of empirically verifiable success. Chronologies of artifact types and larger units variously termed cultures, phases, complexes, and the like have been constructed, tested, refined, and empirically verified and are now available for many areas of the Americas. Darwinian explanations of those sequences are, however, lacking. Instead, another kind of evolutionary explanation is available for many sequences (see the various chapters and references in Maschner [1996] and references in Spencer [1997]). To understand why this is so, we must begin with a consideration of the differences between the two kinds of evolutionary explanations.

The Ontologies of Evolution

In biology (better known as "natural history" at the time), Charles Darwin's (1859) version of evolution was not the first or the only version available in the nineteenth century. For example, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck had a version, and at one time or another it was as popular with segments of the scientific community as Darwin's came to be. But in the end, Darwin's version took hold. Relative to biology, our concern here is only with Darwinian evolution. There also was a theory of evolution that concerned nonbiological phenomena, including such things as human society and technology. This was the version of evolution that Herbert Spencer was selling in the mid-nineteenth century; it is quite different than Darwin's version (Alland 1972, 1974; Carneiro 1972, 1973; Dunnell 1980; Freeman 1974; Mayr 1982; Rindos 1985). Throughout this chapter, we use the term "cultural evolution," or "Spencerian evolution," to denote the kind of evolution espoused by Spencer and his intellectual descendants, including such luminaries as Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor during the nineteenth century and Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, Morton Fried, and Robert Carneiro during the twentieth century.

To denote the kind of evolution introduced by Darwin, we use the term "biological evolution," or "Darwinism." Darwinism was not some monolithic theory that swept through biological science in the 1860s and set it on an unwavering course (Mayr 1982, 1991). Just as with its biological subjects, Darwinian theory evolved. Darwinian evolution of the 1980s was not the same theory that it was in the 1880s or that it was in the 1930s. Understanding both the evolutionary history and the ontological underpinnings of Darwinian evolutionary theory is key to understanding why American archaeology ultimately rejected it and adopted cultural evolution in the 1950s.

We use the unmodified term "evolution" to denote change, regardless of the mechanism, process, or form. As indicated above, culture historians since the second decade of the twentieth century were interested in documenting, studying, and explaining cultural change. Theirs was a historical science, in many ways similar to that of paleobiologists, whose business it is to document and explain the phylogenetic histories of organisms. But whereas paleobiologists were able to erect an explanatory theory of biological change after the synthesis of genetics and natural selection took place in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Mayr 1982), archaeologists of that period followed a different path and adopted a different approach to explaining their subject matter. The most significant difference between paleobiology and American archaeology resides in the fact that by adopting different theories of evolution, the two fields adopted different ontologies. Biologists in the early twentieth century subscribed to an essentialist ontology, and it was not until the mid-1950s that they began to replace it with Darwin's materialist ontology (Gould 1986; Mayr 1982). Anthropologists and archaeologists of the early twentieth century tended to subscribe to a notion of evolution that was in many respects materialistic, but they replaced that notion with an essentialist one in the 1950s. What, then, are these two ontologies?

Continues...

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Nebraska Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0803229666
• ISBN 13: 9780803229662
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 346
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile