2

e Beginnings of Scientific
Araeology
SIXTH CENTURY B.C. TO THE 1950S
CHAPTER OUTLINE

Beginnings
Scriptures and Fossils
e Antiquity of Humankind
e ree-Age System
Human Progress
Historical Particularism
Culture History
Old World Araeology
American Araeology
Cultural Ecology
 Winged Assyrian deity from the Palace of King Assurbanipal, Nineveh, Iraq, excavated
by Austen Henry Layard, 1851.

Source: Courtesy of Peter Horree/Alamy Sto Photo.

Araeologists have come a long way from the pith-helmeted professors

and adventurers of cartoon and movie fame, though su aracters do have
their place in the history of araeology. e great nineteenth-century
araeologists destroyed ancient cities with their reless digging in sear
of the spectacular. Englishman Austen Henry Layard (1849) dug tunnels
through Assyrian Nineveh. Heinri Sliemann (1875) employed engineers
who had worked on the Suez Canal to advise him on earth moving at Troy.
Until the 1920s, araeological training was highly informal, at best a short
apprenticeship working alongside experienced diggers. Excavators like
Leonard Woolley (1929) at Ur in Iraq or Alfred Kidder (1924) at Pecos, New
Mexico, moved more earth in a week than their modern counterparts would
do in over a month.
As are all solarly disciplines, today’s araeology is a product of its own
history and of the intellectual climate in whi it emerged (Trigger, 2006).
is apter examines the early development of araeology from its
beginnings in the philosophical speculations of the Greeks to the advent of
radiocarbon dating and theories of cultural ecology in the 1950s. We see how
araeology began as lile more than treasure hunting and how successive
innovations led araeologists in new directions, away from simple
description toward multilinear cultural evolutionary frameworks for ancient
times.

Beginnings
Undoubtedly, people have always speculated about human origins and the
remote past for thousands of years. As early as the eighth century .. , the
Greek philosopher Hesiod wrote about a glorious, heroic past of kings and
warriors. He described five great ages of history; the earliest one of Gold
was a time when people “dwelt in ease.” e last was an Age of War, when
everyone worked hard and suffered great sorrow (Fagan and Durrani, 2017).
Speculations of this type were widespread in classical and early Chinese
writings. New Kingdom officials in ancient Egypt restored and conserved
Old Kingdom monuments from 1,000 years earlier. But perhaps the world’s
first “araeologist” was the sixth century .. King Nabonidus of Babylon;
su was his passion for digging into the temples of his predecessors in
sear of antiquities that he then displayed them in his palace.
During the Renaissance, people of wealth and leisure began to travel in
Greece and Italy, studying antiquities and collecting examples of classical art.
ese antiquarians, although interested in the past, conducted their activities
in a haphazard, unscientific manner. eir real concern was the objects they
recovered to add to their collections, not the context in whi the artifacts
were found or what the finds might tell them about the past. ereaer, the
first crude araeological excavations were made into the depths of the
Roman city of Herculaneum in 1783, one of several Roman selements
buried by mud and ash from the eruption of Vesuvius in .. 79. At Pompeii,
another Roman town destroyed in the eruption, the oking ash preserved
the bodies of people fleeing the eruption in panic (see Figure 2.1). ese
early excavations—really lile more than treasure hunts—recovered a wealth
of classical Roman statuary and also revealed incredible details of life in
ancient Rome.
 FIGURE 2.1 A victim smothered by volcanic ash at Pompeii, Italy, in .. 79.

Source: Courtesy of Melvyn Longhurst/Alamy Sto Photo.

Wealthy collectors toured the Mediterranean, visiting the ruins of ancient

Greece and Rome and bringing ba classical sculptures for their country
estates. ese finds—and the people that made them—were, at least in part,
known through the writings of classical solars. ere were some
discoveries, however, that hinted at a more remote past. In Britain and
Europe the less wealthy antiquaries stayed at home and speculated about
ancient European history and about the builders of burial mounds,
fortifications, and occasionally more spectacular monuments su as
Stonehenge in southern England. When were su structures built? Had the
builders resembled the American Indians, South Sea islanders, and other
living nonliterate peoples?
ere was only one way to find out—excavate ancient sites. ese aotic
excavations yielded a mass of stone and bronze axes, strange clay pots, gold
ornaments, and skeletons buried with elaborate grave goods. is jumble
was confusing. Some graves contained gold and bronze, others held only
stone implements, and still others housed cremated remains in large urns
(Figure 2.4). Many questions were unanswered: Whi burials were earliest?
Who had deposited the bodies, and how long ago? Su finds were
aributed to historically documented peoples or the work of elves, trolls, or
wites. No one yet had a way of puing in order the thousands of years of
prehistoric times that preceded the Greeks, Romans, and ancient Egyptians
of biblical fame (Fagan and Durrani, 2017; Trigger, 2006).

Scriptures and Fossils

One reason early araeologists were confused was that they had no idea
how long people had been living on the earth. ere were no dating
teniques, su as dendroronology (tree-ring ronology) or carbon-14
that are used today (see Chapter 7). In Western cultures, most people
believed that Genesis (see Chapter 1) provided a literal account of the
Creation. God had created the world and its inhabitants in six days. e
story of Adam and Eve provided an explanation for the origin of humankind
and the peopling of the world. In the seventeenth century, various
clergymen used the genealogies in the Old Testament to calculate when the
world had been created. However, the date reaed by Arbishop James
Ussher of Ireland (1581–1656) became the most pervasive, and it eventually
appeared in the margin of the King James version of the Bible (Grayson,
1983). According to Ussher the world had been created on the night
preceding October 23, 4004 .. , whi allowed approximately 6,000 years
for all of human history.
Doing Araeology William Stukeley: e Man Who
Believed in Druids

William Stukeley (1687–1765), antiquarian, physician, and priest, was

one of the earliest araeological fieldworkers (Figure 2.2). He
tempered his researes with eccentric preoccupations with an ancient
British priesthood, that of the Druids, observed by Julius Caesar.
Stukeley studied botany and human anatomy at Cambridge University
and then went on to become a doctor. He was an enthusiastic student,
who stole dog cadavers and the corpses of the homeless to satisfy his
curiosity. Soon elected a fellow of the Royal Society, he became a
typical scientist of the day with wide interests. He wrote learned
articles on earthquakes and flute music, the origin of card games, water
turbines, and royal genealogy. However, his abiding passion was British
antiquities and the ancient Britons, a subject of intense interest at the
Royal Society. Ea year aer 1710, he traveled across England on
horseba, studying aritecture, visiting gardens, and examining
araeological sites, the raw material for his scientific investigations.
 FIGURE 2.2 William Stukeley, antiquarian, eccentric, and Druid obsessed.

Source: Courtesy of Chronicle/Alamy Sto Photo.

In 1716, he saw a print of the stone circles at Stonehenge and decided

to make an “Exact Model” of both of the ruins and of the site’s original
appearance. Between 1720 and 1724, he visited both Stonehenge
(Figure 2.3) and the great prehistoric earthworks at Avebury in the
same region. With his friend Lord Pembroke, he mapped the
Stonehenge uprights and observed their close association with nearby
burial mounds. e two friends compiled “nice plans and perspectives”
and took the time to dine seated atop one of the ar-like trilithons,
where they found space enough “for a steady head and nimble heels to
dance a minuet” (Piggo, 1985: 124). ey also dug into several burial
mounds where they found stone ips from uprights. At Avebury he
rode over the surrounding countryside and identified the celebrated
avenue, whi links the great monument to an outlying sanctuary.
Stukeley was not only the first person to produce reasonably accurate
plans of both sites but also realized that they had close relationships to
the surrounding landscape. His Stonehenge survey oriented the stone
circles to the cardinal directions of the compass. Being a skilled
astronomer, he also eed with his compass to see if they were
aligned with any heavenly bodies, especially the rising and seing of
the sun. He wrote: “What would be more probable … than that
unfeered man in his first worship and reverence would direct his
aention to that glorious luminary the Sun” (Piggo, 1985: 222). On the
longest day of the year, June 21, he observed how the rising sun shone
into the center of the circles, whi had been carefully aligned by the
builders to commemorate this important moment in the annual round.
Every modern solar accepts this astrological interpretation of the
monument. Modern-day Druids flo to Stonehenge every summer
solstice to perform elaborate rituals.

FIGURE 2.3 Stonehenge and its ancient stone circles fascinated early
antiquarians. Stukeley and two companions dined atop one of the lintels in 1724.
 Source: Courtesy of Cat Edwardes/Alamy Sto Photo.

e Druid rituals of today go ba to both William Stukeley and an

earlier antiquarian, John Aubrey (1626–1697), who both believed that
Druids constructed Stonehenge. Stukeley called Druids ancient
philosophers who were the founders of ancestor worship. Carried away
by his Druidical enthusiasm, Stukeley shaped his landscape maps of
both Stonehenge and Avebury to accommodate his fantasies. He gave
serpent’s tales to stone alignments at Avebury, and even anged the
shape of a nearby stone circle to resemble a snake head. As he grew
older, Stukeley became more and more obsessed with the Druids.
Living at a time when Romanticism flourished, Romantic views of
earlier societies were in fashion. He even built a Druid-like temple in
his garden and considered himself an “ar-Druid” named Chyndonax.
In later life, he took Holy Orders, giving lengthy sermons on obscure
topics of astronomy and natural history. His life became a collage of
oddities and infatuations, so mu so that a contemporary remarked
that he was “a mixture of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, superstitions,
and antiquarianism … a compound never meant to go together”
(Piggo, 1985: 117).
 FIGURE 2.4 A nineteenth-century British burial mound excavation as
depicted in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1840. “Eight barrows were examined … Most
of them contained skeletons, more or less entire, with the remains of weapons in
iron, bosses of shields, urns, beads, brooes, armlets, bones, amulets, and
occasionally more vessels.”

William Stukeley may have been eccentric, but his observations are
of immense value today. He traversed the countryside around Avebury
and Stonehenge long before modern industrial agriculture anged the
countryside profoundly. He wated local villagers quarrying the stone
for buildings. e stone alignments and other features were mu more
complete than they are nearly three centuries later, making his records
 of the vanished stones of priceless value to modern investigators. He
was one of the founders of a tradition of landscape araeology and the
study of anging ancient selement paerns on the land that is
fundamental to araeology today.

Yet new geological, anthropological, and araeological discoveries began

to cast doubt on biblical ronologies. e geological record presented
evidence of gradual ange over long periods of time through natural
processes. e bones of extinct species of animals, su as the ancestors of
the elephant and the hippopotamus, came from the gravels of European
rivers, some in the same strata as carefully ipped stone axes that were
obviously of human manufacture (see Figure 2.6). But until the 1860s, the
shales of theological dogma confined human existence within a few
millennia, and the idea of a prehistoric past streting ba thousands of
years went unrecognized.
While antiquarians were digging into European burial mounds, Captain
James Cook and other Western navigators were exploring the Americas and
the Pacific, bringing ba new information about all manner of societies very
different from contemporary European society. Some, su as Native
Americans, still used stone tools similar to those found in European
araeological sites. Solars began to put prehistory in a new perspective in
terms of human progress over time, from the simple to the more complex.
But could all of this progress have occurred within a mere 6,000 years?

e Antiquity of Humankind
e eighteenth century saw an awakening of interest in araeology,
geology, and the natural sciences. A knowledge explosion in science
coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Geologists were in the forefront,
their field studies stimulated by deep cuts into the earth resulting from vast
engineering projects su as railroad and canal building. William “Strata”
Smith (1769–1839) was one of many field observers who studied these
exposures. He observed that the fossils of different types of animals occurred
in the same relative position in different geological outcrops and, in fact, the
strata could be placed in the correct order on the basis of the fossils they
contained. Notably, he made this observation a half-century before Charles
Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, whi explained why animal
species anged through time.
Based on their examinations of the geological record, many geologists felt
that the ros of the earth had been formed by continuous, natural
geological processes. Every gale that baered the coast, every flash flood or
sandstorm, and every earthquake were among the natural phenomena that
had gradually shaped the earth into its modern form. James Huon’s Theory
of the Earth (1784) was among the first works to convincingly argue that the
earth was formed entirely by natural processes, not by divine floods of
global proportion that earlier scientists had considered the nemesis of long-
extinct animals. His work was later refined by Charles Lyell, whose book
Principles of Geology (1833) was very influential.
Huon’s and Lyell’s theories of what became known as uniformitarianism
caused a furor, for their arguments that the earth had been formed by long-
term natural processes and not by divine intervention contradicted a literal
reading of biblical ronology. If one accepted these new theories, one also
accepted the notion that humankind had lived on the earth for many
thousands of years before wrien history. e debate over the antiquity of
humankind culminated in 1859 with two major scientific developments: the
publication of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection,
and the verification of the contemporaneity of humans and extinct animals.
Charles Darwin began to formulate his theories as a result of a five-year
scientific voyage around the world aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831–1836, on
whi he witnessed firsthand the remarkable biological diversity of the
world. Ba in England, Darwin delved more deeply into what he called the
“species question.” He was influenced by the work of omas Malthus, a
nineteenth-century clergyman and economist who observed that a basic
principle of nature was that most living creatures produced far more
offspring than could be expected to survive and reproduce. Darwin realized
that the aracteristics of some individuals within a population would give
them increased reproductive success, whi, in turn, would lead to ange in
the aracteristics of the population as a whole. is selective force is the
basis of natural selection and a principal meanism through whi new
species emerge.
Darwin realized that his theory would imply that accumulated favorable
variations in living organisms over long periods must result in the
emergence of new species and the extinction of old ones. Darwin was a
meticulous researer and a retiring man, and he delayed publishing his
results. Evolution, even more than uniformitarianism, flew in the face of the
sacrosanct interpretation of the account of the Creation in Genesis. He sat on
his ideas for 20 years until another naturalist (a term used at the time for
biologists), Alfred Wallace, sent him an essay that reaed the same
conclusions. Reluctantly, Darwin penned a “preliminary sket,” as he called
it, in 1859: On the Origin of Species.
is scientific classic described evolution and natural selection, providing a
theoretical explanation for the diversity of both living and fossil species.
Evolution by natural selection does not entirely explain biological
phenomena, but it does provide a meanism for biological ange through
time. Darwin’s theories horrified many people by assuming that human
beings were descended from apelike ancestors (Figure 2.5). But the basis for
his conclusions and the evidence for evolution steadily accumulated, and
Darwin’s theories were soon widely accepted by the scientific community.
ey formed a theoretical baground for some important contemporary
araeological discoveries that documented the contemporaneity of ancient
humans and long-extinct animals (Van Riper, 1993).
 FIGURE 2.5 A Punch cartoon showing Charles Darwin with the body of a monkey
pered on a tree.

Source: Courtesy of World History Arive/Alamy Sto Photo.

Discoveries of human artifacts in association with extinct animals were

nothing new by 1859, for many su finds had been reported over the years,
mostly at the hands of enthusiastic amateur diggers. One of the most
persistent was Fren customs officer Jacques Bouer de Perthes, who
collected stone tools and animal bones from sealed gravels of the Somme
River near Abbeville, in northern France, between 1837 and the 1860s. De
Perthes was ridiculed by the scientific establishment when he claimed that
the makers of the axes had lived before the biblical flood. Rumors of his
finds reaed the ears of British antiquarian John Evans and geologist Joseph
Prestwi. ey visited de Perthes and examined his collections and sites.
e two scientists were convinced that de Perthes had the proof they were
looking for. Acceptance of the great antiquity of humankind followed an
established antiquity that is one of the intellectual and practical foundations
of all scientific araeology (Grayson, 1983). (See the Discovery box, page
33.) If the Somme hand axes and other su finds were of great antiquity,
then who were the people that manufactured and used them? Were they
modern-looking humans or ape-like beings that were closer to apes than
people? A piece of what became an increasingly complex picture of human
origins came to light in a cave near Düsseldorf in Germany’s Neanderthal
(“Neander Valley”) region in 1856, when quarry workers unearthed a
primitive-looking human skull. It had a huge beetling brow ridge and a
squat skullcap that were quite unlike the smooth, rounded cranium of
modern Homo sapiens. Many scientists dismissed the Neanderthal skull as
that of a modern pathological idiot. But a minority, among them the
celebrated English biologist omas Huxley (1863), believed that the skull
was from a primitive human being, perhaps one of those who had made
early stone tools. Scientists were finally realizing that humanity had evolved
both biologically and culturally over a very long period.

e ree-Age System
e spectacular social and economic anges during the nineteenth century
generated mu interest in human progress. As early as the late sixteenth
century, some antiquarians were writing about prehistoric ages of stone,
bronze, and iron (Daniel, 1962). Two centuries later, these general concepts
were refined by Danish araeologist Christian Jürgensen omsen (1788–
1865), curator of the National Museum in Copenhagen, into the famous
ree-Age System in the early nineteenth century. He ordered the
confusing collection of artifacts from bogs, burial ambers, and shell
middens by classifying them into three groups, representing ages of stone,
bronze, and iron, and using finds in previously undisturbed graves as a basis
for his classification.
omsen’s classification was taken up by another Dane, J. J. A. Worsaae,
who proved the system’s basic stratigraphic integrity. By studying
araeological finds from all over Europe, Worsaae demonstrated the
widespread validity of the ree-Age System (Worsaae, 1843). A
tenological subdividing of the prehistoric past, this system gave
araeologists a broad context within whi their own finds could be placed,
a framework for dividing a prehistoric past. e ree-Age System for Old
World prehistory, in modified form, survives today (see Figure 7.4 on page
106).
e ree-Age System of the Scandinavians was not adopted in North
America, where almost no ancient metals and no very early sites were
found. Subtle anges in stone tool tenology were more difficult to discern
and, consequently, the past was more difficult to divide into periods. e
foundations of accurate stratigraphic and ronological studies in American
araeology were laid by omas Jefferson and Harvard araeologist
Frederic W. Putnam in Ohio, and in the classic araeological laboratory of
the Southwest (Willey and Sabloff, 1993).

Human Progress
By the time Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the ree-Age
System had been well established throughout Europe. It was but a short step
from the three ages to doctrines of human progress. In 1850, the sociologist
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was already declaring, “progress is not an
accident, but a necessity. It is a fact of nature” (Spencer, 1855). Darwin’s
theories of evolution seemed to many people a logical extension of the
doctrines of social progress. e new theories opened up enormous tracts of
prehistoric time for Victorian araeologists to fill. e oldest finds were de
Perthes’s crude axes from the Somme Valley. Later in prehistory, apparently,
other people started to live in the great caves of southwestern France, at a
time when reindeers, not hippopotamuses, were living in western Europe.
And the famous “lake dwellings,” abandoned prehistoric villages found
below the water’s edge in the Swiss lakes during the dry years of 1853 and
1854, were obviously even more recent than the cave sites of France (Bahn,
1996).

DISCOVERY THE SOMME HAND AXES, FRANCE,

1859

British antiquarian Sir John Evans (1823–1908) was a remarkable

individual by any standard. A successful papermaker, he was the
epitome of the Victorian businessman and believed in “Peace,
Prosperity, and Papermaking” (Evans, 1943). He was also a highly
respected member of the scientific establishment with an impressive
expertise in geology, coins, and prehistoric artifacts of all kinds. Evans
and his geologist friend Joseph Prestwi were prominent members of
a Royal Society commiee that had supervised excavations at Brixham
cave in southwestern England in 1858, where the bones of Ice Age
animals lay alongside ancient stone tools. e society heard reports of
de Perthes’s finds and organized a party to visit him; however, Evans
and Prestwi were the only commiee members who went.
Aer a rough sea crossing, they arrived in Abbeville in the Somme
Valley and inspected the voluble de Perthes’s extensive collection of
stone tools and fossil animal bones. Aer a sumptuous lun, de
Perthes took his visitors on a tour of the nearby gravel quarries. Evans
and Prestwi collected axes and bones, but it was not until Evans
actually removed an ancient hand ax from the same sealed level as a
hippopotamus bone that they realized that de Perthes was correct
(Figure 2.6). ey returned to London convinced that the Somme
gravels held proof of a great antiquity for humankind, something that
the new theories of uniformitarianism and evolution made
intellectually possible.
 With aracteristic Victorian industry, Evans and Prestwi prepared
an immediate report for the Royal Society, in whi they proclaimed
their support for the antiquity of humankind. All resear into early
human prehistory has stemmed from Evans and Prestwi’s day in
France a century and a half ago.

FIGURE 2.6 A stone axe, like those found by Evans and Prestwi in the
Somme Valley found by British antiquarian John Frere at Hoxne, England, in
1797, an earlier discovery.

Source: Courtesy of Science Source.

What was the best theoretical framework for all of these finds? Could
notions of human progress be made to agree with the araeological record?
Did prehistoric peoples’ tenology, material culture, and society develop
and progress uniformly from the crude tools of the Somme Valley to the
sophisticated iron tenology of the mu more recent La Tène culture in
Europe? Had cultures evolved naturally along with the biological evolution
that lied humanity through all the stages from savagery to civilization?

Unilinear Cultural Evolution

Early anthropological theory was influenced by several diverse intellectual
ideas, including biological evolution, nineteenth-century notions of social
progress, and the idea of cultural evolution. A most important influence in
the development of anthropology was contact between Western civilization
and other human societies with completely different social institutions. Early
anthropologists, corresponding as they did with missionaries and pioneer
selers all over the world, argued that Victorian civilization was the pinnacle
of human aievement. is unilinear cultural evolution perspective,
articulated by pioneering anthropologists Sir Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917)
and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), fied anthropological and
araeological data into set stages through whi all human societies
progressed. According to this view, all human societies had the potential to
evolve from a simple hunter-gatherer way of life to a state of literate
(European) civilization, whi nineteenth-century researers saw as the end
point of this evolutionary progression.
Tylor surveyed human development in all of its forms, from the crude
stone axes of the Somme Valley in France to Maya temples and Victorian
civilization. e origins of civilized institutions, he argued, might be found in
the simpler institutions of “ruder peoples.” Tylor (1878) used accounts of
contemporary non-Western peoples and araeological findings to
reemphasize a three-level sequence of human development popular with
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century solars, including Herbert
Spencer: from simple hunting (“savagery”), through a stage of simple
farming (“barbarism”), to “civilization,” the most complex of human
conditions.
American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan went even farther than
Tylor. He outlined no fewer than seven periods of human progress in his
famous book Ancient Society (1877). Like Tylor, Morgan began with simple
savagery and had human society reaing its highest aievements in a
“state of civilization.” His seven stages, he said, had developed quite
rationally and independently in different parts of the world. Morgan’s work,
with its strong evolutionary bias, was to influence modern North American
araeology. Even expert scientists turned to the comfortable framework of
biological and social evolution to explain the astonishing diversity of
humankind.
As araeological resear extended beyond Europe and into the
Americas, the incredible diversity in early human experience became visible
in the araeological record. e great civilizations of southwestern Asia
were uncovered by Henry Layard and others, and the great Mesoamerican
religious complexes were described (see Figure 1.8 on page 16). Stone Age
art was accepted as authentic some years aer the Altamira paintings were
discovered in northern Spain in 1875 (see the following Discovery box). Yet
many parts of North America and some areas of Africa showed no signs of
the early, complex civilizations found in other world areas. Furthermore, the
American civilizations and European cave art seemed to imply to
nineteenth-century scientists that humanity sometimes “regressed.” Scientists
became less and less certain that people had a common, consistently
progressing universal prehistory.
As more and more information accumulated from all over the world, it
became clear that a universal seme of unilinear cultural evolution was a
totally unrealistic and ethnocentric way of interpreting world history.

DISCOVERY THE ALTAMIRA CAVE PAINTINGS,

SPAIN, 1875

Spanish landowner Marcelino de Sautuola had a casual interest in

araeology. He had visited an exhibit in Paris of some of the fine
ancient stone tools from Fren caves. In 1875, he decided to dig for
some artifacts of his own in the caverns of Altamira on his estate in
northern Spain. Sautuola’s five-year-old daughter, Maria, begged for
 FIGURE 2.7 Bison in a polyrome cave painting in Altamira, Spain. e
Altamira style is the ultimate artistic aievement of the late Ice Age peoples of
western Europe, circa 12,000 years ago.

Source: Courtesy of Melba Photo Agency/Alamy Sto Photo.

Diffusion and Diffusionists

As araeological knowledge blossomed late in the nineteenth century—and
in North America, particularly in the early twentieth century—solars faced
many hard questions. What were the origins of human society? When and
where was metallurgy introduced? Who were the first farmers? If people did
not develop according to universal evolutionary rules, how, then, did culture
ange and cultural diversity come about? Araeologists began to expect
that population movements, migrations, and invasions would explain
prehistory. Diffusion is the process by whi new ideas or cultural traits
spread from one person to another or from one group to another, oen over
long distances.
e diffusion of ideas and objects from one people to another was
recognized early as a valid explanation for cultural ange in prehistory, and
it remains an important concept (see discussion in Chapter 3). It was
especially popular with late nineteenth-century araeologists, who reacted
against the unilinear models of culture ange. ey also realized that
culture ange could be explained by outside influences. Many
araeologists accepted diffusion as the reason why southwestern Asian
civilizations had been so mu rier than the apparently poor European
cultures of the same period. Furthermore, they argued, how could the
brilliant American civilizations in Mexico and Peru have arisen, if not by
long-distance migration from the civilized centers in southwestern Asia?
Unfortunately, some of these theories took the role of diffusion as an
explanation of ange too far. Early in the twentieth century, British
anatomist Graon Elliot Smith became obsessed with the teniques of
the ance to dig with him, so he good-naturedly agreed. Maria soon
tired of the muddy work and wandered off with a fliering lantern
into a low side amber. Suddenly, Sautuola heard cries of “Toros!
Toros!” (“Bulls! Bulls!”). Maria pointed excitedly at brightly colored
figures of bison and a arging boar on the low ceiling. Daughter and
father marveled at the fresh paintings, arranged so cleverly around
bulges in the ro that they seemed to move in the fliering light
(Figure 2.7).
Sautuola was convinced that the paintings had been executed by the
same people who had dropped stone tools in the cave. But the experts
laughed at him and accused the marquis of smuggling an artist into
Altamira to forge the bison. It was not until 1904 that the now-
deceased Sautuola was vindicated, when some paintings with strong
stylistic links to Altamira came to light in a Fren cave that had been
sealed since the ancient artists worked there.
Altamira was the first evidence that late Ice Age humans had been
artists. e debate over the meaning of the paintings continues to this
day.
Egyptian mummification, sun worship, and monumental stone aritecture.
e aievements of ancient Egyptian civilization were so unique, he argued
in The Ancient Egyptians (1911), that all of world civilization and mu of
modern Western culture had to have diffused from the Nile Valley. It had
been the “People of the Sun” who had produced and disseminated
civilization, people who were not afraid of voyaging widely in sear of
gold, shells, and precious stones. us, he argued, sun worship and early
civilization spread over the world.
Smith’s hyper-diffusionist views of human history grossly oversimplified
the past and they were at least as inadequate as unilinear cultural evolution.
Nevertheless, hyper-diffusionist theories have remained popular. In their
most extreme manifestations, they rea incredible heights of absurdity, as
in seeking to prove that Africans colonized America before Columbus or
that the Vikings seled in Minnesota thousands of years ago (see Chapter 1).

Historical Particularism
e first professional araeologists and other anthropologists lived at a time
when many non-Western cultures were being erased by the advance of
Western, industrialized society. Consequently, they felt an overwhelming
priority to collect basic information about these vanishing cultures. ese
data were an essential preliminary to the theoretical approaes used in
araeology today. American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) and his
students helped establish anthropology—and, by implication, araeology
along with it—as a form of science by applying more precise methods to
collecting and classifying data. ey collected an incredible amount of data
on Native American kinship systems, religion, housing, poery designs,
basketry, and thousands of other cultural details. ese were then
meticulously studied and used to plot culture areas. is theoretical approa
to cultural anthropology is referred to as historical particularism (Lyman
et al., 1996).
is careful cataloging of cultural data was important, yet historical
particularists reaed some incorrect conclusions about Native American
culture, whi were eventually disproved by araeological resear. For
instance, ethnologists of this period saw the arrival of the Europeans and
their domestic horses as an event of unparalleled importance that caused the
Great Plains to become filled with nomadic, horseba-mounted buffalo
hunters of the type made familiar to us by Hollywood films. e Plains were
thought to have been sparsely populated up to that time. e ethnologists
were partly right, for the Plains population did indeed swell rapidly as horses
came into use. But subsequent work by su araeologists as Douglas
Strong, who dug at Signal Bue, Nebraska, revealed that the Great Plains
had been inhabited by hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists for many
hundreds of years before the Europeans and horses turned the Plains into a
carnival of nomads on horseba (Strong, 1935). Araeology, then, became
a source of information against whi one eed the historical
reconstructions produced by ethnologists.

Culture History
Historical particularism influenced how researers interpreted
araeological data. Culture history—the description, ronological, and
spatial ordering of araeological data—became the sole objective of
araeological resear and it remained so until the 1950s. Researers dug
araeological sites and established ronological sequences and
distributions. Interpretation consisted primarily of description of the diet,
tenology, migrations, and lifeways of past societies; the discovery of su
features remains an important aspect of araeological resear.
e synthesis of site ronologies beyond the confines of one site or local
area involves not only repeating the same descriptive processes at other sites
but also constantly refining the cultural sequence from the original
excavations. is synthesis is cumulative, for some new excavations may
yield cultural materials that are not represented in the early digs. It is here
that the teniques of seriation and cross-dating come into play (see Chapter
7).
 e araeological units used to aid the synthesis form an arbitrary,
hierarical classification. ey represent the contents of individual sites and
their distribution in time and space. e araeological units used most
widely in the Americas are those developed by Gordon Willey and Philip
Phillips (1958); we describe some of them here. roughout the world,
however, the temporal framework of a culture historical approa to the
past has been important in providing a means of ordering araeological
data, whi can, in turn, serve as a basis for interpretation using a variety of
theoretical perspectives.

Components and Phases

Components are the lowest unit in the hierary. ey consist of a distinct
artifact assemblage that distinguishes the culture of the inhabitants of a
particular time and place. A site su as the colonial village at Martin’s
Hundred, Virginia, consists of a single component representing a brief
seventeenth-century occupation by Anglo-American selers. Other sites
may contain a number of distinct components, ea representing a separate
cultural phase. e Koster site in Illinois is an excellent example of a
multicomponent site, with its various layers representing different
components separated by sterile layers of soil extending from 7500 .. to less
than 1,000 years ago, including evidence of the first Paleo-Indian inhabitants
of the region, seasonal hunter-gatherers, and finally, a seled, year-round
village (Struever and Holton, 1979).
e definition of a component depends on stratigraphic observation, as
well as the araeologist’s observational skills. Some cave sites in
southwestern France contain many occupation levels, separated by sterile
layers, whi can be neatly isolated stratigraphically and grouped on the
basis of shared artifact types, su as antler harpoons or side scrapers that
are distinctive for a certain time period and region.
Components occur at one location. To produce a regional ronology,
araeologists must synthesize them with components from other sites using
the next analytical step, phases.
 Phases are cultural units represented by different levels of the same site
or like components on different sites, all sharing a distinctive artifact
assemblage within a well-defined ronological braet (Willey and Phillips,
1958). e aracteristic assemblage of artifacts of a phase may be found
over hundreds of miles within the area covered by a local sequence. Many
araeologists use the term culture in the same sense as phase, though it
should be emphasized that araeological cultures cannot necessarily be
equated with ethnographically delineated cultures. Phases or cultures usually
are named aer a key site where aracteristic artifacts are found. e
Magdalenian culture of 16,000 years ago, for example, is named aer the
ro shelter of La Madeleine in southwestern France, where antler harpoons
and other artifacts so aracteristic of this culture were found.
Some phases are but a few years long; others span centuries, even
millennia. e Gatecliff ro shelter in Nevada was occupied for about 8,000
years; it is divided into five components, ea defined by distinctive artifact
types associated with particular time periods (omas, 1983a). e
components can be compared with those from other sites and used to build
up a regional ronology. e components from Gatecliff and those from
other sites are combined into a phase named Yellow Blade. is period dates
from about .. 1300 to 1850, the time of European contact. e phase applies
not only to Gatecliff but also to the entire region, and is the basic unit of area
synthesis. At first, a phase may embrace, as the Yellow Blade phase does, 500
years or more. But as resear proceeds, ronologies become more refined,
and as artifact classifications become finer, the original phase may be broken
down even further into more and more ronologically precise subphases.

Culture Areas
Culture areas can be thought of as the araeological equivalent of the
broad ethnographic culture areas identified by early anthropologists. In the
early twentieth century, anthropologist Franz Boas compiled catalogs of the
social organization, customs, beliefs, and material culture of Native
American groups that were, in turn, used to define culture areas on the basis
of their shared similarities. Many areas tend to coincide with the various
physiographic divisions of the world. e southwestern United States is one
su area, as it is defined in part by its unique history of araeological
resear and in part by cultural and environmental aracteristics that lasted
more than 2,000 years.
Su large areas can be broken down into subareas, where differences
within the culture of an area are sufficiently distinctive to separate one
subarea from another. Gordon Willey (1966) divided the American
Southwest into the Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon subareas, among
others (see Figure 3.1 on page 45). But the term area implies nothing more
than a very general and widespread cultural homogeneity. Within any large
area, societies will adapt to new circumstances, anging in different ways
and developing different economies.

Traditions and Horizons

American araeologists use two units that synthesize araeological data
over wide areas: horizons and traditions. e term tradition is used to
describe artifact types, assemblages of tools, aritectural styles, economic
practices, or art styles that distinguish an area for a long period of time. A
tradition extends longer than the occupation of individual sites or phases,
and may continue for thousands of years. A good example of a tradition is
the Arctic Small Tool tradition of Alaska, whi originated at least as early
as 4000 .. (McGhee, 2001). e aracteristic tools made by these early
hunter-gatherers were so effective that they continued in use until recent
times, and aspects of this tradition can be seen in the modern Eskimo
tenologies of the Far North.
Horizons are represented by distinctive artifacts and cultural traits that
crosscut traditions in neighboring areas. For example, a religious cult may
transcend cultural boundaries and spread over an enormous area. Su cults
are oen associated with aracteristic religious artifacts or art styles that
can be identified in phases hundreds of miles apart in well-defined,
contemporaneous, ronological contexts. e Chavín art style of coastal
Peru, for example, was associated with distinctive religious beliefs and rituals
shared by many Peruvian societies in the highlands and lowlands between
900 and 200 .. (Moseley, 2000). is commonality of belief is manifested in
the araeological record by Chavín art, a style that stresses exotic, jaguar-
like motifs, found over a wide area of the Andes (see Figure 2.8).

FIGURE 2.8 A Chavín wall insert of a human figure with feline features from Chavín
de Huantar, Peru. Height 20 cm (7.8 ines).

Source: Rafal Ciawa/Alamy Sto Photo.

Culture history remained the dominant approa in araeology until the

1950s (Lyman et al., 1996). Araeologists made collecting data a primary
objective in both New and Old World araeology. But araeology itself
evolved somewhat differently on ea side of the Atlantic.

Old World Araeology

e Europeans were studying their prehistoric origins, concentrating on
constructing descriptive, historical semes that traced European society
from its hunter-gatherer origins to the threshold of recorded history. e
ages of stone, bronze, and iron, of the ree-Age System, were further
divided into shorter regional sequences. e earliest sites were the hand-ax
sites in the ames and Somme river valleys, followed by Ice Age cave
dwellings in southwestern France that showed that the Neanderthals were
succeeded by modern humans with a mu more sophisticated hunter-
gatherer culture. A similar culture history sequence was postulated for all of
Europe and southwestern Asia as well.
omsen’s ree-Age System provided a preliminary framework for Old
World prehistory, buressed by the work of J. J. A Worsaae, who confirmed
the stratigraphic validity of the framework. A Swedish araeologist, Oscar
Montelius (1843–1921), was deeply influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary
theories and traveled across Europe examining artifacts from sites of all
kinds. Montelius was a genius at artifact classification, especially bronze
brooes and swords. In 1885, he published On the Dating of the Bronze Age,
a masterly study of artifacts found with undisturbed burials from
Scandinavia to Greece, using minor features of different artifact forms to
study their evolution through time. He assumed the simplest artifacts were
the earliest, that they anged gradually through time, using as a modern
example the evolution of railroad carriages from basically stagecoaes set
on wheels to mu more efficient designs. Montelius placed European
prehistory on a new scientific footing, using artifacts of known historical age
in Greece to date similar tools and ornaments found far to the west, where
wrien records were nonexistent. All subsequent resear depended, and
still depends, on this remarkable araeologist’s work.
Another extraordinary araeologist was one of those who refined
European ronologies before the development of radiocarbon dating in the
1950s. Oxford-trained and Australian-born Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957)
was a gied linguist, who acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the
thousands of prehistoric finds in museums from Edinburgh to Cairo. Once he
had mastered the data, Childe set out to describe European prehistory, using
“cultures, instead of statesmen, as actors and migrations instead of bales”
(Childe, 1925: 7, 1958). Childe classified cultures by their surviving culture
traits—pots, implements, house forms, ornaments—known to be
aracteristic because they were constantly found together. He reconstructed
cultural successions within limited geographic areas and compared them
with those from neighboring regions, eing their culture traits—presumed
to have spread from one area to another.
But Childe went farther, for he was one of the few araeologists who
realized that cataloging artifacts was useless unless conducted within some
frame of reference. He therefore used data from hundreds of sites and
dozens of cultures to formulate a comprehensive view of Old World
prehistory that became a classic.
e origins of agriculture and domestication and of urban life were,
Childe felt, two great revolutionary turning points in world history. He
described (1942) two major stages, the Neolithic and the Urban revolutions.
Ea so-called “revolution” saw new and vital inventions that could be
identified in the araeological record by aracteristic artifacts. (Remember,
Childe lived through turbulent times and was heavily influenced by Marxist
ideology and its notions that society moves forward through revolutions.)
e idea of the Neolithic and Urban revolutions constituted a tenological
and evolutionary model, combined with an economic one in whi the way
people got their living was the criterion for comparing stages of world
history. Childe’s work influenced a generation of European solars and
remains a foundation for mu resear today.
e later prehistoric peoples of southwestern Asia and temperate Europe
were the logical ancestors of the Greeks, Romans, and other civilizations. It
was no coincidence that Arnold Toynbee and other world historians adopted
the araeologists’ universal semes when they made prehistoric times the
first apter in their great historical syntheses. Childe dominated
araeological thinking in Europe until the late 1950s. But his ideas were less
influential in the Americas because Childe himself never studied or wrote
about American araeology (Trigger, 1980).
While Childe labored in Europe and the Near East, araeologists began
working more intensively in other parts of the Old World. ey soon found
that the ree-Age System had only limited use and that the development of
human societies had proceeded differently in, say, Africa, Australia, and
China than it had in Central Europe. As this resear expanded aer World
War II, it became clear that existing ronologies, based as they were for the
most part on artifact classifications, were both inaccurate and unsatisfactory.
en, in 1949, University of Chicago scientist Willard Libby (1955) developed
radiocarbon dating (described in Chapter 7), and araeology was never the
same again. For the first time, we had access to a ronological method that
would date sites and major cultural developments in any part of the world,
using organic materials su as wood arcoal. During the 1950s,
radiocarbon dates proliferated rapidly, pushing ba the dates of the first
farming in the Near East and of European prehistory generally mu earlier
than had hitherto been assumed. e so-called “radiocarbon revolution”
revealed serious problems with previous Old World ronologies, whi are
far more precise today, thanks to far more refined radiocarbon dates. For
example, thanks to highly accurate radiocarbon dates, we now know that
ancient Polynesians used their canoes to colonize eastern Polynesia within a
mere 70 years.

American Araeology
American araeologists were in a very different position. e ree-Age
System could not be used, and araeologists initially had difficulty
establishing ronologies for the araeological record. e most logical way
to do this was to work baward in time from historically known Native
American sites into prehistoric times, a method that came to be known as
the direct historical approa (see Willey and Sabloff, 1993). e early
Southwestern araeologists adopted this approa in their 1890s resear
tracing modern Indian poery styles centuries into the past. is work
culminated in the excavations at Pecos Pueblo carried out by Harvard
araeologist Alfred V. Kidder between 1915 and 1929 (Kidder, 1924). (See
the following Site box.) ese excavations established a cultural sequence
still used in modified form today. Later researers, su as Douglas D.
Strong, applied similar methods to Plains araeology with great success
(Strong, 1935).
e direct historical approa has limitations. It works satisfactorily as
long as one is dealing with culturally related finds. Once this continuity is
lost, however, the direct historical approa can no longer be used.

e Americas: e Midwestern Taxonomic Method

Franz Boas’s influence was strong from the 1920s to the 1950s among
araeologists who concentrated on collecting and classifying enormous
numbers of prehistoric finds from hundreds of sites all over the Americas.
ey began to arrange these finds in increasingly elaborate regional
sequences of prehistoric cultures, but they ran into trouble because no two
araeologists could agree on how to handle the enormous quantities of new
data emerging from large-scale dam surveys and other Depression-era
“make-work” projects in the East and Midwest. us, no one could compare
one area with another using common terminology.
Solars in the Southwest and a group in the Midwest headed by William
C. McKern wrestled with the problem, trying to find explicit and formal
descriptive terms for groups of araeological finds. McKern’s group
prepared definitions that soon became known as the Midwestern Taxonomic
Method (Lyman et al., 2003). By correlating sequences of artifacts and
hundreds of sites through long prehistoric periods using seriation methods
(see Chapter 7), users of the method were able to compare cultural
sequences throughout the midwestern and eastern United States. e
method did provide a classificatory framework but was limited as a means
of interpreting the past, simply because it relied on artifacts, many from
museum collections with poor stratigraphic contexts, paying lile aention
to other lines of evidence about the past.
By the 1940s, James Ford, James Griffin, and Gordon Willey had begun to
look farther afield than local regions. At their disposal was a mass of
unpublished araeological data from hundreds of sites excavated during the
Great Depression (Willey and Sabloff, 1993). eir studies in the eastern
United States revealed steady development in prehistoric material culture
over many thousands of years. ey distinguished periods within whi
broad similarities in prehistoric culture could be found and designated them
as developmental stages.

S i T E > Alfred Kidder at Pecos, New Mexico, 1915–1929

<
Harvard University araeologist Alfred Kidder first visited the
Southwest in 1907 to work on a site survey. As a student, he had been
to Greece and Egypt, where he visited the complex stratigraphic
excavations being conducted by Englishman Flinders Petrie, among
others. is experience had convinced him of the value of the humble
potsherd (pot fragment), so when he started work at Pecos Pueblo in
1915, he put ceramics to good use. He worked at Pecos every year until
1929, with a three-year gap during World War I.
Pecos Pueblo, later the site of a Spanish ur, had been occupied at
the time of the Spanish arrival in 1540 (see Figure 2.9). Kidder took
advantage of this occupation with its distinctive painted poery to
work from the known present into the remote past. Graves with their
offerings of pots would give him the sealed dating units he needed to
develop a poery sequence. Kidder’s workers uncovered more than
750 skeletons in the first four seasons alone. At the same time, he sied
through deep sequences of ash and occupation debris and recovered
thousands of potsherds. Using the grave lots and these finds, as well as
poery from other pueblos, Kidder developed a broad outline of the
Southwestern past, beginning with “Basket Makers,” who were hunter-
gatherers, had no poery, and did not grow crops. Eventually, they
became farmers, to be followed by pre-Pueblo and Pueblo peoples,
who lived in more permanent selements.
Ultimately, Kidder identified at least six selements lying one on top
of the other at Pecos and established a broad framework for the
 Southwestern past that survives, albeit in mu modified form, to this
day. He also established the essentially indigenous development of
Southwestern culture.

FIGURE 2.9 Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico. e Spanish mission ur was built
over the pueblo.

Source: Courtesy of Jon Arnold Images Ltd/Alamy Sto Photo.

Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips extended earlier survey work in a

landmark monograph (1958) that applied essentially the same teniques to
araeological materials throughout the Americas. Most important, they
devised developmental stages for the entire continent. ese proposed stages
were defined by tenology, economic data, selement paerns, art
traditions, and social factors rather than by ronology, whi, to their way
of thinking, was a less important consideration.

e Americas: Chronology and Timescales

No question worried the American araeologists of the 1920s to the 1950s
more than establishing an age for their sites and finds. Once they reaed the
limits of direct historical ties, they had no way to date early American
cultures. Typologies and classification semes based on stratigraphy only
provided the relative age of the finds, not absolute dates. e first
breakthrough came in the early years of the twentieth century, when
University of Arizona astronomer Andrew E. Douglass started his now-
famous studies of annual growth rings in trees in the Southwest. By 1929,
Douglass had developed an accurate ronology for southwestern sites that
eventually extended ba from modern times into the first century ..
Unfortunately, tree-ring dating is best suited to areas su as the Southwest,
where trees have a well-defined annual growth season and the dry
conditions favor araeological preservation. (e method is now used
successfully in northern areas.)
Here, as in the Old World, radiocarbon dating revolutionized our
perceptions of the pre-Columbian Americas. For the first time, actual
numerical dates superseded the guesswork of earlier years. American
araeologists could finally compare widely separated sites and cultures with
a uniform timescale. ey could now de-emphasize ronology and
classification and concentrate instead on other questions.

Cultural Ecology
Before and aer radiocarbon dating arrived, new emphases in araeology
on the study of human selement against the anging landscape developed,
pioneered by Cyril Fox and other fieldworkers in Britain (Fox, 1932), and on
interpretation, based on carefully studied regional sequences. One conclusion
was obvious: Human material culture and social organization had developed
from the simple to the infinitely complex. From then on, many accounts of
world prehistory or broad syntheses of large culture areas allowed for the
general notion of progress in prehistory (Childe, 1942; Willey, 1966, 1971).

Multilinear Cultural Evolution

In the late 1930s, anthropologist Julian Steward asked, “Are there ways of
identifying common cultural features in dozens of societies distributed over
many cultural areas?” Unlike unilinear evolutionists, who insisted that all
societies passed through similar stages of cultural development, Steward
assumed that certain basic culture types would develop in similar ways
under similar conditions. Very few actual concrete features of culture,
though, would appear in a similar, regular order repeated again and again. In
other words, multilinear cultural evolution had proceeded on many
courses and at different rates, not just on one universal tra. Steward added
the environment as a critical variable and looked to it for causes of cultural
variation and ange. To do so, he developed a method for recognizing the
ways in whi culture ange is caused by adaptation to the environment.
Calling his study of environment and culture ange cultural ecology,
Steward laid down three principles (1955):

1. Similar adaptations may be found in different cultures in similar

environments.
2. No culture has ever aieved an adaptation to its environment that has
remained unanged over any length of time.
3. Differences and anges during periods of cultural development in any
area can either add to societal complexity or result in completely new
cultural paerns.

Steward used these principles as a basis for studying cultures and culture
ange. To study different cultures, he would isolate and define
distinguishing aracteristics in ea culture, a nucleus of traits he called the
cultural core. He observed, for example, that African San, Australian
Aborigines, and Fuegian Indians in South America were all organized in
patrilineal (descent through the father) bands, forming a cultural type. Why?
Because their similar ecological adaptations led to comparable social
organization. Although their environments differed greatly, from desert to
cold and rainy plains, the practical requirements of small bands, ea with its
own territory, living a hunting and gathering lifeway was fundamentally the
same, despite many differences in detail. Steward employed his cultural-core
device to isolate and define distinguishing aracteristics of the hunter-
gatherer and of other specific culture types.
Steward studied the relationships between environment and culture that
form the context and, consequently, the reasons for cultural features. A
culture trait, be it a new type of house or a form of social organization,
might be found at one location because it had diffused there, but that did not
explain why the people had accepted the trait in the first place. Steward
applied cultural ecology to su questions and to problems su as why the
adjustment of human societies to different environments results in certain
types of behavior. To diffusion and evolution he added a new concept:
anging adaptations to the natural environment. In other words, the study
of culture ange involved studying human cultures and their anging
environmental conditions as well.
Cultural ecology studies the whole picture of the way in whi human
populations adapt to and transform their environments. Human cultures are
thought of as open systems because their institutions may be connected with
those of other cultures and with the environment. Open-system ecology
assumes a great deal of variation between individual modern and
araeological cultures. Any explanation of culture has to be able to handle
the paerns of variation found in living cultures, not just the artificial ones
erected by classifiers of araeological cultures. So many factors influence
cultural systems that order can be imposed only by understanding the
system—those processes by whi cultural similarities and differences are
generated. Many complex factors are external to the culture and cannot be
controlled by the araeologist.
ere are obvious difficulties in studying the interactions between people
and their environments, especially when preservation conditions limit the
artifacts and other data available for study. Because tenology is a primary
way in whi different cultures adapt to their environment, models of
tenological subsystems allow araeologists to obtain a relatively
comprehensive picture of the cultural system as a whole. Every aspect of the
cultural system has to be reconstructed separately, using the evidence
specifically relevant to that facet. In time, from su reconstructions, a
comprehensive picture of the whole cultural system will emerge.
Multilinear evolution recognizes that there are many evolutionary tras,
from simple to complex, the differences resulting from individual adaptive
solutions (Steward, 1955). Cultural adaptations are complex processes that
are fine-tuned to local conditions, with long-term, cumulative effects.

Walter Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, some araeologists argued that
araeologists should not simply describe the past, but rather explain why
certain paerns or developments occurred. When Steward’s work appeared,
American araeology was completely preoccupied with ronology and
artifact description. It was as if araeologists were classifying insects or
collecting postage stamps. en, in 1948, araeologist Walter W. Taylor
published his famed work, A Study of Archaeology, a devastating critique of
American araeologists’ preoccupation with description and ronology.
In this landmark book, Taylor called for shiing emphasis from
ronological sequences and distributions to detailed, multilevel studies of
individual sites and their features, su as cultural layers, floors, or hearths.
is approa brought together all possible sources of evidence on a site—
tenology, artistic styles, ecological evidence, aritecture, and information
on social life—to focus on the people who had lived at the site and on the
anges in their culture. Taylor tried to introduce into araeology a view of
culture that recognized the discipline as being integral to anthropology. He
felt that the disciplines should work together to arrive at general truths
about human culture.
e radiocarbon revolution reshaped the course of araeology from the
1950s onward. As we have seen, it redirected mu thinking from
ronology and artifacts toward broader environmental and theoretical
questions. Libby provided the ronological tools. Steward’s and Taylor’s
resear brought twentieth-century araeology to the threshold of great
theoretical ange. ey established, once and for all, the close relationship
between araeology and anthropology. A Study of Archaeology showed,
with incisive clarity, that one of araeology’s primary goals must be to
develop adequate explanations for human prehistory, an aim far more
sophisticated than mere excavation, collection, and description. More
accurate ronologies, also Steward’s view of multilinear cultural evolution
and cultural ecology greatly influenced araeologists. ey provided critical
foundations for the major araeological developments of the 1960s and
beyond, discussed in Chapter 3.

Summary

1. Araeology originated in the intellectual curiosity about the past felt

by a number of classical writers, su as Hesiod, who speculated about
human origins and stages in early human history.
2. Aer the Renaissance, this curiosity manifested itself in excavations at
Herculaneum and Pompeii, where classical Roman statues were
uncovered and used to decorate the estates of wealthy Europeans.
ere were also discoveries of far more primitive artifacts—stone tools
that hinted at a more ancient, prehistoric past. But speculations about
prehistory were shaled by a literal interpretation of the Bible.
3. With greater knowledge of human biological and cultural diversity late
in the eighteenth century, people began to speculate about the
relationships among different groups and about the notion of human
progress from simple to complex societies. From the discoveries in the
Somme Valley, France, and elsewhere, the bones of extinct animals
directly associated with tools made by human beings proved that
humanity had existed for far longer than the 6,000 years allowed by
wrien history. ese discoveries could not be placed in a scientific
context, however, until uniformitarian geology, the new science of
paleontology, and the theory of evolution by natural selection had been
developed.
4. e notion of human social evolution followed that of biological
evolution. Many araeologists thought of prehistoric cultures as
 arranged in layers of progress from the simple to the complex. A
simple form of unilinear cultural evolution was espoused by su
pioneer anthropologists as Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Morgan, who
portrayed humanity as having progressed from simple savagery to
complex, literate civilization.
5. Unilinear cultural evolution was far too simple a seme to satisfactorily
explain prehistory. Some solars turned to diffusion as a means of
explanation, and, in the extreme, some assumed that many aspects of
civilizations had emanated from Egypt or similar so-called “cradles of
civilization.” ese hyper-diffusionist explanations, oen based on
limited araeological data, proved just as unsatisfactory as unilinear
models. Influenced by Franz Boas and Vere Gordon Childe,
araeologists began to describe artifacts and sites mu more precisely
and preoccupied themselves with culture history and ronologies.
6. American araeologists used the direct historical approa to
prehistory extensively, working ba in time from known historical
cultures to prehistoric societies. Standard taxonomic systems were also
developed in the 1930s and were widely used.
7. Radiocarbon dating arrived in the late 1940s, coinciding with greater
interest in the natural environment and the study of human ecology.
Anthropologist Julian Steward formulated the principles of cultural
ecology, studying the relationships between human cultures and their
natural environments.
8. Walter W. Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology, published in 1948, was a
landmark critique of American araeology, iding araeologists for
their preoccupation with description and artifact ronologies rather
than the interpretation of past social systems and the explanation of
culture ange. is groundbreaking work, and increasingly multilinear
views of cultural evolution, helped lay the foundation for modern,
explanatory araeology.

Further Reading
Childe, Vere Gordon. 1942. What Happened in History. Baltimore: Pelican.
Fagan, Brian, and Nadia Durrani. 2017. A Brief History of Archaeology:
Classical Times to the Twenty-First Century . Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Willey, Gordon, and Philip Phillips. 1958. Method and Theory in American
Archaeology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.