Robert C. Dunnell

Style and Function: A Fundamental Dichotomy

Our understanding of the archaeological record has been developed under the culture history paradigm. Its fundamental structure is shown to be stylistic; this characteristic, coupled with historical factors, is seen as the major reason why evolutionary processes have not been extensively employed in explaining cultural change. Consideration of an evolutionary approach suggests that such processes as natural selection have considerable explanatory potential, but it is also suggested that a substantial segment of the archaeological record is not best understood in terms of adaptation. The potential of an evolutionary approach cannot be realized without making a fundamental distinction between functions, accountable in terms of evolutionary processes, and style, accountable in terms of stochastic processes.

Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of evolutionary theory and archaeology. If evolution is taken to mean what it does in the sciences, it has yet to be systematically applied in either sociocultural anthropology or archaeology. There are reasons to believe that scientific evolution can be expanded to provide an explanatory framework for cultural phenomena. The applicability of evolutionary theory to archaeology is not established by a demonstration of its explanatory power for sociocultural phenomena. If it is to be used in archaeology, it must be rewritten in terms that have empirical representation in the archaeological record. Archaeological evolutionary theory will have to be constructed by deducing the consequences of evolutionary theory as employed in biology and as applicable to ethnographic data for artifacts, and their frequencies and distributions. Even so, a few aspects of the archaeological record, those not directly subject to selection, will require explanation in strictly cultural terms. It is clear that archaeologists want to obtain the kinds of explanations that only scientific evolution is able to provide.

Seriation Method and Its Evaluation

Seriation as a scaling technique produces a formal arrangement of units, the significance of which must be inferred. Arrangement per se is a statistical matter, while the inference of significance is archaeological method. Here seriation as an archaeological method for inferring relative chronology is reviewed in terms of its assumptions and the conditions under which it is applicable. From this examination it is concluded that seriations may be inferred to be chronologies when and only when: (1) the comparisons are conducted using historical classes; (2) the units ordered are of comparable duration; (3) the units ordered are from the same cultural tradition; and (4) when the order is repeated through several independent seriations. The means of assessing whether or not a given seriation meets these conditions is considered in detail. Within specifiable limits seriations can be inferred to be chronologies, but these limits are more restricted than generally appreciated. DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

The Notion Site

In spite of critiques that date to the early 1970s (Dancey 1971; Thomas 1975) the notion site is as ubiquitous as any archaeological concept in the current literature. Archaeologists look for, and find sites (e. g., site surveys); they record sites (e. g., state surveys, the National Register of Historic Places); they collect and/or excavate sites, they interpret sites; and incredibly, they even date sites. Site usually provides the framework for recording artifact provenience; it usually serves as a sampling frame at some level in most fieldwork (e. g., Binford 1964; McManomon 1981; Redman 1973); and, largely by default, it, or some partitioning of it (e. g., Dewar 1986), serves as the unit of artifact association. Site is, as usually depicted in introductory texts, a basic, if not the basic, unit of archaeology.

Artifact size and plowzone processes

Abstract Theoretical consideration of the formation of plowzone archaeological deposits implicates artifact size as an important and heretofore under-used source of information. Modality in size distributions of degradable artifacts, such as low-fired pottery and bone, indicates the addition of stratigraphically deeper materials to a plowzone assemblage. This means that different ages and/or depositional contexts are mixed in such assemblages. With sufficiently large and well-controlled samples, the location and characterization of subplowzone deposits may be possible from the analysis of size distributions of surface materials alone. Application to a “worst case” surface assemblage from SE Missouri demonstrates the general feasibility of the approach.

The Ecological Genetics of Domestication and the Origins of Agriculture [and Comments and Reply]

We review models of the evolutionary process by which wild plants were transformed into domesticated crops, focusing on whether domestication could have preceded cultivation. We also consider two related issues: the expected pace of genetic change and the extent to which the process was intentionally driven. The orthodox view that domesticated traits (such as fruit indehiscence and lack of dormancy) can evolve only within the agricultural field is overstated, although it is difficult to develop plausible scenarios that allow domestication before cultivation. We outline one possibility, whereby harvesting of small wild cereal stands with seed beaters leads to an increase in the frequency of plants with indehiscent rachises. In addition, dump-heap models (in which partial evolution of domesticates occurs around campsites, followed by intentional preservation of the protodomesticates through cultivation) may apply to some species, such as maize. Cultivation sets up selection pressures that favor the evolution of domesticates even if humans do not consciously choose to plant individuals with the domesticated phenotype. Selection can be weak, however, and time to fixation unpredictable. There is no reason to rule out the possibility that people accelerated the pace of evolutionary change by intentionally selecting domesticated phenotypes.

The Evolution of the Capacity for Culture: Sociobiology, Structuralism, and Cultural Selectionism [and Comments and Replies]

Cultural selectionism is a Darwinian approach to the understanding of human culture which, in constrast to sociobiology, holds that cultural evolution proceeds solely on the phenotypic level. Unlike structuralism, cultural selectionism predicts that the form taken by any culture will reflect historical processes rather than underlying, genetically induced biases of the human mind. Genetic selection, however, must be invoked to explain both the origin of the human capacity for culture and the maintenance of this genetic capacity in modern humans. Both the origin and the maintenance of the genetic capacity for culture in humans are most realistically modeled if we assume that culture is fundamentally an adaptation to the social, as opposed to the natural, environment.

Temporal Models in Prehistory: An Example From Eastern North America [and Comments and Reply]

This paper deals with the topic of defining a sequence of time units for any specified archaeological area, that is, the topic of constructing temporal models in prehistory. Despite the fundamental necessity for temporal models in modern prehistoric archaeology, no generally agreed-upon, coherent set of principles is currently available to assist archaeologists in the task of temporal model formulation. Accordingly, after a brief historical review of the development of temporal models in prehistory, this paper offers a set of four basic principles to be followed in formulating such models. To illustrate the applicability of these principles, they are applied to a specific archaeological area, the Eastern Woodlands of North America, for which a new temporal model is thus presented. Additional purposes for presenting a new temporal model for Eastern North America prehistory are to stimulate a critical reevaluation of the current status of a number of basic concepts, such as Archaic and Mississippian, and to provide an up-to-date synthesis of Eastern prehistory.

BEVELED PROJECTILE POINTS AND BALLISTICS TECHNOLOGY

Abstract Explanations for beveled blade edges on projectile points have been debated in North America archaeology since the first systematic description oflithic assemblages in the nineteenth century. Debate has centered around two opposing perspectives. One views beveled edges as features of projectile points that cause them to spin during flight. The other views beveling as a product of edge resharpening that is done unifacially to conserve scarce resources. Here we use a fluid-dynamics model to simulate the effect beveling has on projectiles. Expectations derived from this modeling are evaluated using windtunnel experiments. Our findings indicate that beveling produces in-flight rotation that serves as a means of increasing accuracy in relatively low-velocity flight paths.

Temporal Data Requirements, Luminescence Dates, and the Resolution of Chronological Structure of Late Prehistoric Deposits in the Central Mississippi River Valley

Our ability to order chronologically the archaeological record has long been linked to our capacity to generate explanations. Evolutionary explanations make even greater demands on chronological data requirements than most other approaches. Single date characterizations of deposits are wholly inadequate. Rather, we require distributions of dates that can be used to estimate duration and rates of assemblage formation. In addition, the events dated must have direct archaeological relevance such as artifact manufacture or deposition. In a study of the evolution of social complexity in the late prehistoric record of the central Mississippi River valley, luminescence dates of sherds that have been assigned to a single culture historical type provide a means of determining the chronological character of assemblages derived from large village deposits. In this way, the temporal data requirements for evolutionary accounts can be met reliably.