Christopher Carr

Mortuary practices: Their social, philosophical-religious, circumstantial, and physical determinants

Recent, mainstream, American mortuary archaeology, in its paradigmatic outlook, middle-range theory, analytic methodology, and case studies, has emphasized social organization as the primary factor that determines mortuary practices. Broader anthropological and social science traditions have recognized philosophical-religious beliefs as additional, important determinants. The historical roots of mortuary archaeologys focus on the social, and the consequence of this on theory development, is reviewed. Then, through a Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) cross-cultural survey, the kinds of philosophical-religious, social organizational, circumstantial, and physical factors that affect specific kinds of mortuary practices, and the relative importance of these factors, are documented. The data are also used to test basic premises that mortuary archaeologists routinely use today to reconstruct social organization. A balanced, more holistic, and multidisciplinary approach, which considers many kinds of causes beyond social ones, is found necessary to interpret mortuary remains and to reconstruct the past from them.

A Unified Middle-Range Theory of Artifact Design

In this chapter, a middle-range theory is built that links specific aspects of the form of material culture to specific factors that can determine form. The tactics presented in Chapter 6 for building such a middle-range theory are used. The general nature of material style defined there, including its hierarchical and technological aspects, serves as a guiding perspective for building the theory.

Advances in ceramic radiography and analysis: Applications and potentials

Abstract X-radiography can be used to study a variety of features of archaeological ceramics in order to solve a broad range of archaeological and anthropological problems. Many of these have only recently become possible with improvements in ceramic radiographic methods. Hidden features that can be detected radiographically include coils, slabs, and their size, morphology, and methods of joining; the material type, approximate mineralogy, size, density, and orientation of aplastic inclusions or voids; fracture systems; paste texture; and hidden vessel parts. Under certain conditions, these features can be used to sort sherds by their vessels of origin, to identify the primary and secondary methods of vessel manufacture, to assess vessel function, to complement petrography when identifying and sourcing trade vessels; and to identify post-depositional alterations. Both the basic data and inferred identities can be useful when reconstructing learning pools, vessel trade networks, and settlement functions; when estimating site occupation spans, population levels, frequencies of vessel trade, and stylistic-based measures of social interaction; and when building chronometric models of ceramic technological change. Bridging arguments that integrate X-radiographic methods, data, and some theoretical agendas of archaeology are made explicit.

Advances in ceramic radiography and analysis: Laboratory methods

Abstract The major variants of industrial and medical radiographic procedures are reviewed and evaluated for their usefulness in ceramic archaeological studies, with attention to documenting temper characteristics and paste-to-paste joins. Essential concepts and relationships between technique and image quality are summarized. Means for optimizing image sharpness, distortion, and contrast are outlined, including selection of focal spot size, focal spot to film distance, object to film distance, film type, object orientation, kilovoltage, milliamperage, tube source, window, filtration, film cassette material, and diaphragms, and the differing integration of these in medical versus industrial laboratory settings. Low radiographic contrast between temper and paste or paste-to-paste joins can be overcome by using industrial, slow, high-detail, high-contrast films or certain mammography films without intensifying screens, along with a low kilovoltage. The relative advantages of xeroradiography and X-radiography are evaluated. Charts for estimating proper X-radiographic exposure for sherds of differing thickness and temper density and other suggestions for operation and efficiency are given.

Left in the Dust

Many of the chapters in this volume explore models for identifying and interpreting archaeological intrasite spatial patterns. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss models, per se. Rather, it is to stress the complementary roles of models and contextual data in the scientific process. In the excitement of building, testing, and applying models, there can be a tendency to focus too quickly and unduely on a narrow range of data specified by some model, to the exclusion of a broader arena of relevant contextual information. I will discuss some general problems with this model-focused approach and some advantages of using contextual data.

Building a Unified Middle-Range Theory of Artifact Design

In a benchmark article on artifact style, Polly Wiessner (1983:273) lamented over the inability of archaeologists to predict, a priori, the particular formal attributes of an artifact that reflect specific behavioral processes, such as social interaction or the communication of identity. She concluded from her rigorous analysis of Kalahari San projectile points that relationships between process and form appear to result from historical events rather than to follow coherent principles.

Basketry of Northern California Indians

Archaeologists have defined style in a variety of narrow manners. Each definition has focused on a different, limited set of determining processes, some more active (e.g. Wobst 1977; Hodder 1982; Wiessner 1983), others more passive (e.g. Longacre 1964; Hill 1970; Sackett 1977; Hill and Gunn 1977). In contrast, the goal of this chapter is to help develop a more unified understanding of style that encompasses all determining processes and that integrates the various past views of it.

Social and Ritual Organization

Hopewell residential groups, spread over the forested terraces and bottomlands of the Scioto and Paint Creek valleys, were nonetheless integrated with one another in many ways. Two important kinds of ties were their mutual participation in a larger, local symbolic community and a yet broader, sustainable community. Within the context of these communities, members of different residential groups, separated by varying geographic and social distances, established and renewed essential relationships with one another by building earthworks together, performing rites together within the earthworks, negotiating marriages and marrying, forming ritual exchange partnerships with one another, and exchanging foods and other material resources.

Ohio Hopewell Depictions of Composite Creatures

Abstract Hopewellian peoples in southwestern, south-central, and north-central Ohio sculpted, engraved, and cut out six depictions of creatures that combine the bodily elements of different ordinary animals. Detailed zoological identification of the component animals documents that all were associated with the underwater-underground realms of historic Woodland and Plains Indian cosmoses, in contrast to some later Mississippian and Historic period composite creatures with both sky and water-earth associations. However, strong continuities are found in the kinds of underwater-underground creatures known to historic Woodland-Plains and prehistoric Ohio Hopewellian Indians. A survey of historic Woodland and Plains knowledge about underwater-underground creatures sheds light on both their helpful and harmful roles and the very wide spectrum of domains of life they affected, in contrast to some current Woodland ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological lines of interpretation that caricature the creatures as harmful and gloss over purposes of Ohio and Illinois ceremonialism other than world renewal.

World View and the Dynamics of Change: The Beginning and the End of Scioto Hopewell Culture and Lifeways

The origin and end of Scioto Hopewell culture and lifeways have puzzled archaeologists for decades. This uncertainty exists in part because, until very recently, the details of organization and operation of Scioto Hopewellian social and ceremonial life and the outlines of Scioto Hopewellian spiritual thought have not been known. How Scioto Hopewellian social and ceremonial life emerged and disappeared could not be adequately addressed when it was unclear what they were specifically and what factors might thus have caused them. Uncertainly also exists because, in this lacuna in knowledge about the inner workings of Hopewellian life, archaeologists have been forced to look for possible causes of it that were external rather than internal to it; and no reasonably convincing external causes have been found.