Irving Rouse

The Classification of Artifacts in Archaeology

Analytic classification consists of forming successive series of classes, referring to different features of artifacts. Each class is characterized by one or more attributes which indicate a custom to which the artisan conformed, for example, a technique of manufacture, or a concept which he expressed in the artifacts, such as a design. These customs and concepts constitute modes. They are “procedural modes” when they refer to behavior of artisans and “conceptual modes” when they consist of ideas which artisans have expressed in artifacts.

Peopling of the Americas

Abstract Study of the prehistory of an Americas has proceeded through successive cycles, in which archaeologists have assumed or postulated hypotheses of migration and development, have searched for evidence with which to test these hypotheses, and have abandoned them when the evidence proved to be contradictory. We are completing the current cycle and must seek new hypotheses that better fit our present evidence. The available data are reviewed to show the inaccuracy of the current hypotheses and to develop new ones. It is suggested that the first Indians arrived during a Lower Lithic age, marked by the manufacture of irregular flakes, trimmed only on their edges. This age may have started as early as 30,000 BP. South of the Laurentide ice sheet, the Lower Lithic age began to give way about 14,000 BP to a Middle Lithic Age. This was marked by a variety of types of bifacially chipped projectile points which seem to have developed locally: Folsomoid points in Anglo-America, Joboid points in the Circum-Caribbean region, and Magelloid points in western and southern South America. North of the ice sheet, the place of the Middle Lithic age was taken by an Upper Lithic age, marked by microblades of Asiatic origin. These appear to have reached the Bering Strait region about 14,000 BP. The dichotomy between the Middle and Upper Lithic ages lasted until the retreat of the ice ca. 8000 BP.

Pattern and process in West Indian archaeology

Abstract The dichotomy between normative and processual archaeology is seen as false, both being essential and interdependent approaches to understanding the past. It is argued that the recovery and interpretation of cultural remains takes place on four logically successive levels which are set out in table 1. The development of West Indian prehistory is then viewed against this model.

On the Use of the Concept of Area Co-Tradition

In 1947, at a conference on Peruvian archaeology held in Viking Fund headquarters in New York City, Wendell C. Bennett proposed a concept of area co-tradition and used it as a means of expressing certain characteristics of Peruvian culture history. He first defined the concept in abstract terms, then described the Peruvian co-tradition, and finally suggested the possibility that other area co-traditions might exist in the Southwestern United States, Middle America, and Northwest Argentina (Bennett, 1948). Acting on Bennetts suggestion, Martin and Rinaldo (1951) subsequently worked out a Southwestern area Co-tradition in some detail. In addition, Willey (1953, p. 374) has suggested the existence of an Arctic or Eskimo cotradition and of three co-traditions in the Eastern United States: Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippi. In the present paper, I shall confine myself to the use of the concept in Peru and the Southwest, since these are the only places where it has yet been applied in any detail.

The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus.

A noted archaeologist and anthropologist tells the story of the Tainos of the northern Caribbean islands, from their ancestry on the South American continent to their rapid decline after contact with the Spanish explorers.

Migrations in Prehistory: Inferring Population Movement from Cultural Remains.

In this book, Irving Rouse evaluates research on prehistoric migrations, from successfully tested hypotheses explaining the origins of the Polynesians, Eskimos, Japanese, and Tainos, to the more fanciful postulations by authors such as Thor Heyerdahl and Barry Fell. Rouses work demonstrates not only the viability of the inference of population movements from archaeological evidence but also the effectiveness of collaboration and communication between branches of archaeology and anthropology.

Philip Bagby. Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations. Pp. ix, 244. Published in Great Britain in 1958. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959.

occasionally does he enliven these quotations by reference to facts that might be present in the mind of the not too well versed reader. It is, on the other hand, a valuable trait of this book that it makes the reader travel in the path of Freud’s thoughts from the primary conceptions of the classical phase of the libido theory to the time when Freud tried to understand the socialization of the ego. Readers who will not shun the effort of plodding through many quotations will in the end find themselves rewarded, if not with a definite insight, then at least with the anticipation of how psychoanalysis can be utilized in the social sciences and of the