Truth, webcomic style

Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is more or less true. This is how I behave when faced with more or less any unusual behaviour, or, you know, anything. Ask me about all the stop signs I’ve run while driving over the past year, due to paying too close attention to the wear or vandalism. Or ask my extremely patient wife. I’m going to ignore all the various ethnocentrisms (though the skin tone of the characters is noteworthy), and instead wonder whether the reason the anthropologist is writing with his left hand is that he’s actually left-handed or because of the spear through his right shoulder.


Hyperdiffusionist Civil War history

Over the past week, the New York Times has been running a five-part essay by filmmaker Errol Morris, entitled ‘Whose Father Was He?’. For the most part, this is a fascinating account of the history of a single Civil War photograph of three children found on the dead body of a then-anonymous Union soldier at the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg. The photo was widely distributed through the press, and thereby became the means by which the soldier, Amos Humiston, was identified.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

For the most part, the essay is a detail-oriented historical and biographical piece focusing on the way in which the print media was involved in shaping life histories relating to the Civil War, and the way in which family histories become entwined in the semi-mythical aspects of military history. You should read it for that reason.

The article takes a turn for the truly bizarre in part four, however, because Amos Humiston’s great-grandson is the Canadian-American archaeologist David Humiston Kelley, who is best-known for his work in the 1970s helping to decipher the Maya script as a phonetic (rather than ideographic/semantic) writing system (Kelley 1976) and more recently for his work in New World calendrics and archaeoastronomy (Kelley and Milone 2005). He is also infamous in archaeological circles for his advocacy of long-range cultural diffusion, from Southeast Asia to Mesoamerica and also from Egypt to Mesoamerica. He is also a genealogist who claims to have traced his own lineage back to the Biblical King David (!!!). In other words, despite his erudition, in parts of his scholarship he is really no different from any number of other hyperdiffusionist pseudoarchaeologists postulating multiple events of long-range cultural contact on the basis of minimal or no evidence. And much of that evidence is linguistic rather than archaeological, bringing this news article well into the scope of this blog.

Morris’s article gives considerable space and attention to Kelley’s work on transoceanic contact. In one sense this is very surprising given that the article is on a very different subject, but since Kelley is one of his major informants about the Amos Humiston story, and since he makes such sensational claims, it’s perhaps not so surprising that this would end up being part of his story. But because this is not an article about transoceanic contact, but rather an interview with Kelley in which the journalistic obligation to be critical of one’s sources applies, Kelley’s theories take on an authority that they clearly lack.

The first sign that something is wrong is in part two of the essay, where Morris writes:

And I’ve got a copy of his most recent book here. It’s called “Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy.” [4] I open this book to any page at random, and it’s virtually unintelligible to me. But I’m sure that it’s the definitive word on the subject.

When someone tells you that they can’t understand something at all, but are convinced of its absolute truth, this should be a warning sign. In part four, Morris conducts an extended interview with Kelley, in which Kelley says:

I’ve found out, recently, that there were Egyptians in Meso-America. I had thought there were connections, but I had thought they were secondhand through an intermediate, perhaps through Phoenicians or Greeks or somebody. But I didn’t think they were directly Egyptian. But I now have massive evidence that they were.

When queried about this evidence, Kelley responds:

Three different calendric types of continuity. That’s one sort. Then I’ve got over 30 deities and mythical place names, starting with Egypt itself. The Aztecs say that they came from Tlapallan, which is the ancient red land. And the Egyptians called their land red land/black land. The Aztecs actually called it Tlillan Tlapallan, which is black land/red land. And they were under the leadership of the inventor of the calendar, who was called Cipactonal. And Cipactli means “crocodile,” and Tona is “day” and is related to the word Tonatiuh, which is “sun god.” And Tona relates to Aton in Egypt. And Cipactli relates to Sebek or Sobek in Egypt. So you’ve got linguistic evidence for a very complex name.

Right now you may be tempted to say ‘Ooh, Aton … Tona!’ And that is exactly how the ‘method’ works: a parallel is presented as obvious, without any further explication deemed as necessary. And if archaeologists and linguists haven’t spotted it, this just confirms that they are either ignorant or part of a dark conspiracy. But the claim falls apart fairly quickly.

The classical Nahuatl language is attested from a set of texts, primarily 16th century, written in the early colonial period just after the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico. Our phonetic reconstruction of Nahuatl is excellent not only because the Spanish and colonial Nahua wrote it down in the Latin alphabet, but because it’s still spoken today. Prior to the 16th century we have basically no direct evidence for the structure of Nahuatl because the Aztec writing system is only minimally phonetic.

The Egyptian languages are a set of interrelated languages spoken and written from at least the fourth millennium BCE through to the Roman period, with one language, Coptic, used primarily as a liturgical language for the past millennium. All phonetic transcriptions of Egyptian are made more complex by the fact that the Egyptian writing system can be highly opaque in its phoneticism, and because in particular, vowel sounds are underspecified. Egyptian seafaring was at its height in the New Kingdom (1570-1070 BCE).

So if there was contact between Egypt and Mesoamerica that left linguistic traces, it was well before the sixteenth century – and ‘realistically’ (and I use that word advisably) was probably in the second millennium BCE, thousands of years before we have an attested Nahuatl language. What did Nahuatl look like at that point? Well, gee, we don’t know. In fact, there probably was nothing even remotely resembling Nahuatl. Now Nahuatl is a Uto-Aztecan language, and we could ask a historical linguist what the word for ‘sun’ looks like in the various languages of the family. Okay, let’s do that, using the work of Karen Dakin, a top linguist interested in Proto-Uto-Aztecan (the source I’ve used is one of the few that won’t require you to have a subscription). We find out (Dakin 1996: 13) that the reconstructed proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) word ‘sun, day’ is *ta-pi, and that its modern descendant – however improbable it may seem – in Nahuatl is ilwi-tl (see footnote on p. 13 for an explanation)!

Indeed (from a less scholarly source) in the vast majority of modern descendants, the words begin with /ta/, and almost none of them contain /n/ – only the Aztecan languages. In fact, ‘tona’ meaning ‘sun’ is simply a semantic extension of the Aztecan verb ‘to shine; to shimmer; to radiate heat’ (Hosler 1995: 106). And the Aztecan languages probably only branched off from the other Uto-Aztecan languages in the middle of the first millennium CE (6th-8th centuries) (Luckenbach and Levy 1980). And of course, by the 6th century (not to mention the 16th century), there simply were no Egyptians to make the trip, so to compare 16th century Nahuatl and ancient Middle Egyptian on these grounds is utterly pointless.

But for completeness, let me just point out that another word for ‘disk of the sun’ in Egyptian is ra (Aten is an aspect of the god Ra), the verb ‘to give off light, to shine’ is wbn (phonetically perhaps /uben/), and the sun’s rays are stwt /setut/). When you can pick any of these as a possible source of similarity, and can arbitrarily change them (Aton –> tona), virtually anything can be a parallel. We also have the problem that all we really have is tn in Egyptian writing, which underspecifies vowels. We think that the inital vowel was /a/ but the interior vowel could be almost anything. So we don’t have /ton/; we have /ton/ or /tun/ or /ten/. Now, can we imagine linguistic changes that would turn aton to tona? Sure we can. But are these attested changes? No, definitely not. Even if the chronology were right (which it isn’t), the resemblance is at best a superficial one – and Kelley, who is no stranger to historical linguistics, surely knows this.

Now let’s look at a parallel example from Kelley’s use of iconography, to give a sense of the archaeological side of the argument:

One, rarity of occurrence and two, specificity of unusual arbitrary characteristics. Arbitrary characteristics, particularly ones that are unusual, are good evidence. Things like a lion’s head with pink and white whiskers on a snake’s body. I’ve got the lion’s head in Egypt, and I’ve got jaguar heads in Meso-America, with the pink and white whiskers. I have jaguars with snake bodies, but they aren’t specifically identified with the jaguar with the whiskers. But still, when you put the two together, it makes a reasonable similarity with this Egyptian one. And it’s a very arbitrary similarity.

Here we have an iconographic resemblance, but the argument is essentially of the same structure: ‘Hey, look at these two things; aren’t they similar?’ But Egypt is not a unified entity, but a millennia-old civilization with numerous phases and iconographic styles, and ‘Meso-America’ is incredibly underspecified both geographically and temporally: is it Olmec (ca. 500 BCE), Maya (ca. 500 CE) or Aztec (ca. 1500 CE)? All three groups spoke completely unrelated languages to the other two, and lived in very different parts of Mesoamerica (without denying that there was interregional cultural contact). Is the pink-whiskered jaguar contemporaneous with the snake-jaguar (or, as Kelley admits, even the same jaguar)? Who can say?

Kelley’s argument is that hybrid cat-snakes are an arbitrary combination of forms that are unlikely to occur in multiple regions by chance, because (of course) there is no such thing as an actual hybrid cat-snake. But when Kelley asserts that “Felines, of any sort, do not have snakes’ bodies. And neither do they have red and white whiskers.”, and that this proves diffusion, he is just recycling Fraser’s (1965) argument that the lack of a real percept demonstrates diffusion wherever there are similar hybrid animals. But in fact, as Wittkower (1938-9) showed decades ago, some hybrids (e.g., bird-serpent) are extraordinarily common cross-culturally, so Kelley’s claim that “It isn’t due to the common workings of the human mind” is at best premature.

The thing is, we actually don’t have a very good idea of how the human mind comes up with these things, but there’s pretty substantial evidence that we don’t do so in a way that is arbitrary. The nature of the argument that Kelley is raising (and in fact has been raising for the past several decades) is that these similarities are too numerous and too arbitrary to have occurred by chance. But it’s very easy to assert that, but much harder to demonstrate (what does ‘by chance’ mean? how would we evaluate it? what statistical universe are we talking about anyway?) Human beings, as members of a pattern-seeking species, tend to attribute a lot of meaning to these, but anthropologists and archaeologists have come up with no reliable set of criteria to allow us to distinguish independent inventions from cultural borrowings. We’re pretty sure that if we find a Coke can in Zambia that Coke wasn’t independently developed twice; we’re unsurprised if the bow and arrow is developed in many different places. But in the intermediate ground, we still don’t know too much. The linguists are far better equipped to deal with this sort of thing than anthropologists and archaeologists, and this is a serious problem.

In my (now-in-production-and-hopefully-out-later-this-year-knock-on-wood) book, I outline six criteria used to identify that one numerical notation system is descended from another (rather than being independently developed), roughly in order of importance:

1) Use of two systems at the same point in time
2) Similarity in forms and values of numeral-signs
3) Similarity in structural features
4) Known cultural contact between the regions where the two systems are used
5) Use of the two systems for similar purposes and/or on similar media
6) Geographic proximity

My goal was not to produce a general theory of independent invention – I don’t think that numerical notation systems are borrowed in the same way as iconographic features, for instance. But many of the same principles are going to apply. Kelley has failed to demonstrate contemporaneity, and his linguistic and iconographic similarities are only superficially so. I don’t think we even need to get to the issue of geographical distance (which is obviously immense) between Egypt and Mesoamerica to put this to rest.

I won’t even begin to address the fact that for decades, Kelley has emphasized his belief that the calendric, linguistic, and archaeological evidence demonstrate diffusion from South/Southeast Asia to Mesoamerica (transpacific rather than transatlantic). You can be a diffusionist, sure, but when your data allow you to derive two radically different routes, you really need to pick. And I’ll only mention in passing that even if there were a real, provable analogy, it’s just as likely that it went from Mesoamerica eastward across the Atlantic (a theory the hyperdiffusionists never seem to like for some reason).

What really upsets me is that even though his theories are extreme and contradictory, Kelley’s words are permitted to stand unchallenged in a major news outlet. The parallel that Morris is trying to draw throughout the article is that the reconstruction of the ancient past is analogous to his own task (and Kelley’s) of reconstructing Civil War history out of scraps, or identifying a dead soldier from a single photograph of his children. And sure, there are some similarities. But just as Aton and Tona share a resemblance but no historical connection, the parallel is ultimately a hollow one. I can’t fault him for being interested in Kelley’s work – after all, it is compelling, audacious, and controversial. But the New York Times, very sensibly, does not publish stories arguing that there were numerous Egyptian visits to the New World that left lasting linguistic and material traces. Hyperdiffusionism gets in the back door, because it’s not in the Science section of the paper. It’s bad enough that this stuff gets through into the popular literature, and even past peer review, because of the disjunct between archaeological and linguistic expertise. For it to stand without even a journalistic ‘But this is not a widely accepted theory’ is unforgivable.

Dakin, Karen. 1996. Long vowels and morpheme boundaries in Nahuatl and Uto-Aztecan. Amerindia, vol. 21.
Fraser, Douglas. 1965. Theoretical Issues in the Transpacific Diffusion Controversy. Social Research 32: 452-477.
Hosler, D. 1995. Sound, color and meaning in the metallurgy of Ancient West Mexico. World Archaeology: 100-115.
Kelley, D. H. 1976. Deciphering the Maya script. University of Texas Press.
Kelley, D. H., and E. F. Milone. 2005. Exploring ancient skies: an encyclopedic survey of archaeoastronomy. Springer.
Luckenbach, A. H., and R. S. Levy. 1980. The Implications of Nahua (Aztecan) Lexical Diversity for Mesoamerican Culture-History. American Antiquity: 455-461.
Wittkower, Rudolf. 1938-9. Eagle and Serpent. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2: 293-325.

To stop or not to stop

I spent much of the past week in Montreal, Quebec, my erstwhile home, with six junior colleagues (thanks again everyone!), conducting field survey for the Stop: Toutes Directions project. This research project involves field survey of around 40 km2 of the city, including part or all of nine distinct boroughs or municipalities, examining linguistic and other aspects of variability in the city’s stop signs. With the completion of last week’s field survey, we have now identified, classified and photographed 3522 stop signs.

Our central research questions relate to the fact that there are three valid stop sign texts in Montreal – STOP, ARRET, and ARRET/STOP. Each variant is distributed differently across the survey area; moreover, each variant displays different patterns of wear/fading that seem to correlate well with age. These three text languages, all abundantly attested in our survey area, coupled with Quebec’s strict language laws and language ideologies prohibiting English in most contexts, make Montreal a unique laboratory for investigating the ways in which bilingualism are reflected in visual and material culture.

A major goal of our most recent survey period was to identify areas where stop signs are stamped with dates of manufacture, thus allowing us to correlate chronological age with the ordinal index we had developed to measure wear. This allows us to treat the linguistic landscape not only as a synchronic snapshot of a particular point in time, but as a diachronic palimpsest of episodes of stop sign erection and replacement. Because there are nine distinct municipalities in our compact survey area, we are able to readily identify differences not only in linguistic practice, but also in attitudes towards replacement and repair of stop signs.

Of further importance is the fact that 27% of the stop signs we have surveyed have vandalism either on the front or back. This means we not only have a corpus of official stop sign texts, but also a corpus of unofficial writings. While stop signs are designed to be read by drivers, the practice of stickering on stop signs is clearly intended for a pedestrian audience. We are then using this data to explore relations between vandalism and all sorts of social data derived from Statistics Canada. We are also able to identify many instances where stop signs are vandalized in ways that reflect dissatisfaction with, or playfulness towards, the existing ‘official’ linguistic landscape.

Conceptually and methodologically, I think the importance of this work is that it shows how methods that are essentially archaeological or epigraphic can be employed to investigate topics in contemporary linguistic anthropology. What’s more, we are confident that our data are producing answers to questions that would be answered very differently – or in some cases couldn’t even be asked – using ethnographic methods. Not that I don’t think ethnography would tell us anything, but it wouldn’t be well-suited to the questions we are asking, and the answers that even experts (i.e. the officials responsible for managing the erection and replacement of stop signs) could give us would be very different (and in many ways more subjective) than what the material culture of signs actually tells us.

At present the Stop: Toutes Directions website linked above contains a large number of excellent but preliminary research reports produced last year. Now that we are (nearly) done our data collection, I and my co-authors are moving into the next stage of the project, including seeking peer-reviewed venues for publishing our work.

To grad or not to grad

There’s been a lot of handwringing lately among academics interested in the academic job market over the question of whether one should advise anyone to go to grad school in humanistic disciplines (presumably including the humanistic social sciences like anthropology). To be sure, the job market has been terrible for the past 40 years and this year’s offerings have been mediocre at best, as the financial crunch has (at minimum) decimated endowments and produced an extremely wary attitude among state legislators responsible for public funding. There have been a couple of rather mediocre, although not entirely wrong, articles in the New York Times of late, bemoaning the academic job market and the prospects for graduate students.

But I want to talk about a couple of articles entitled ‘Just Don’t Go’ by Thomas Benton, a regular columnist in the fantastic Chronicle of Higher Education Careers section, which are of interest to me because they are written by a working, tenured academic in the humanities (links here and here). Benton argues that the only honest thing for faculty to tell prospective graduate students in the humanities is not to go to grad school; the prospects are simply too dim, and the waste of effort and of human productivity so immense, that the best thing to do is to give blanket advice not to go. He knows, of course, that many (most?) students who receive this advice will still apply to grad school, because they are drawn to intellectual life.

It’s unsurprising that such advice would become more pertinent in a down job market, where grad school might seem like a safe haven to ride out the economic maelstrom. Benton nevertheless notes that this is not just about this year, but about a general trend in academic employment over many decades. He’s absolutely right: academic employment is sparse and not about to improve dramatically anytime soon, possibly ever. Many people who complete a PhD will never work full-time as tenure-track faculty. And so he is also quite right that discouragement is a rational strategy for faculty confronted with multiple students interested in pursuing the doctorate.

Nevertheless, I find it intellectually dishonest and generally unwise to advise interested students, ‘Don’t go to grad school’. First, because to do so would be the height of hypocrisy, and would be perceived by many as a statement that I (as someone who ‘made it’) don’t think that my students have what it takes to make it. Second, because I think that if you gave every student that advice, some students would take it who shouldn’t, and others wouldn’t who should, with the potential result that the next generation of scholars would consist of those too foolish not to listen to their professor’s good advice. Third, because telling someone anything is less desirable than giving them good information and allowing them to make their own decision.

I do think that there are far too many PhDs in anthropology, and indeed in most of the humanities and social sciences. At the very least, there are too many degree-holders on the job market in comparison to the number of jobs available. While the number of jobs available in academia fluctuates, in most disciplines it has increased modestly over the past 20 years, while the number of candidates has increased dramatically. This Malthusian logic dictates that one’s chances of getting a job are not that great.

The reality is that approximately 50% of PhD graduates in anthropology will eventually end up on the tenure track somewhere (most often within five years of obtaining the degree, after which your chances decrease as you are perceived rightly or wrongly as ‘damaged goods’). Another 25% will end up in professionally-appropriate positions in the public or private sector (this is particularly relevant for anthropologists, for which there are well-defined non-academic yet professional jobs), while the rest end up somewhere else – but very few end up unemployed altogether. Are these chances good enough for you?

They might be. Of course, up to 50% of people who start the degree do not finish, and so saying that 50% of PhDs will hold a tenure-track job eventually is incomplete, because it does not account for the many students who never finish the degree. Now, virtually no one admitted to a doctoral program ‘fails out’ in the sense that they lack the intellect to complete the degree. By far the most common reasons, in my experience, for people not finishing the PhD are a lack of money or a lack of motivation.

Motivation is not just about ‘having the will to persist’, although that’s important. It’s about developing a network of social relationships, especially with mentors but also with peers, that allow you to feel good about continuing in the program, to be intellectually rewarded and validated, and to remain on track. I was particularly blessed, as a student, to have some top-notch mentorship, but I regret to this day that my peer group was neither as large nor as close as I would have liked it to be. And I know plenty of people who had or have situations less congenial than mine, and who found themselves stranded without any meaningful support. This problem only gets worse if you are underfunded. The reality is that while persistence is the key, persistence can only be realistic when you have a lot of support. So I think it’s worth telling students to research programs as thoroughly as possible, and to find schools where they can plausibly work with multiple people.

Similarly, money really is central, and is one of the reasons why, even though I don’t advise students, “Don’t go to grad school” outright, I do advise them not to go to grad school if it means taking on substantial debt, and realistically, only to go where they have funding. For some students who can achieve admission to a top PhD program right out of a BA, or for others who can find a funded MA program, they are in good shape to move forward. For others, though, an MA means taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt only to go into a PhD that may only be poorly or partially funded. To finish the PhD you may need to take on a lot of extra non-professional work or go even deeper in debt, possibly taking longer than your peers because of demands on your time. If you have sources of income to allow you to do an unfunded MA, more power to you.

And what happens when you’re done? For an indeterminate period, you will likely be underpaid and underemployed, while paying back student loans and trying to find a job. If I had had any substantial student debt at all, I simply could not have afforded to work in academia for the four years following the completion of my degree. I could not have supported my family, and I would have left the discipline, not out of a lack of ability, but simply out of a lack of funds to continue the search in a tight job market. And the market is ALWAYS tight.

Another factor influencing post-degree success on the market is institutional prestige. It is a sad fact that academic disciplines are, and always have been, hierarchical in a way that is rarely recognized by most undergraduates. To demonstrate this, you need only go to a faculty list from a department and see where the faculty got their PhDs. You will find that the vast majority of tenured and tenure-track faculty got their degrees from the top 50 or so institutions in the world (for that discipline), with the top 10-20 schools being very well represented indeed. Not coincidentally, these institutions have the highest degree of student financial support for PhDs (although not always the highest degree of emotional, psychological, and other forms of support). It may be true that only 50% of PhDs in humanistic disciplines ever hold TT jobs, but nevertheless, if you attended a high-ranked institution, your individual odds may be much better.

So, if you have the good fortune and ability to attend one of those programs, then you will find that your chances of employment after completion are very great. If not, well, your chances will be less. What’s more, you should prepare for the fact that even if you do get a PhD, you will probably work at a less prestigious institution than the one you graduated from. Everyone can think of exceptions, but that’s just what they are – exceptions to an overwhelming statistical probability. And because many smaller and less prestigious institutions don’t even have anthropology departments (as opposed to, say, biology or psychology), attending a less well-known institution can harm your opportunities for finding academic employment at all. Unfortunately, few departments provide detailed information about where their graduates end up after completion, and those with poor records have the least incentive to do so.

Now Benton wants to argue that the solution to this is to develop/train/find/invent/construct graduate students who do a PhD with no expectation of an academic career. And I think at some level it’s good advice to students that they need to prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career, not only psychologically but also in terms of the skills they obtain. This is particularly true in disciplines like anthropology which do have significant (although not always obvious) professional outlets where PhDs earn a decent living outside of academia.

But more to the point, I think that the sorts of people who should be considering graduate school are those for whom the actual process of going to grad school is enjoyable and rewarding for its own sake (despite its struggles). One thing I do tell my students is to ask themselves, “If I spend six years in grad school, even if I never get a job, will it still have been worth it?” If they can honestly answer yes, that the process of learning and intellectual exploration is worth it for its own sake, then they should do it; if not, then they shouldn’t. And again the money comes into play – if one has to go into massive debt to do it, then it’s certainly less likely to be worth it.

And even further, I worry that while Benton is right about the job market, and right about the need to inform students of the realities of the market, he’s asking more of academics than anyone would ask of other professionals. We don’t tell artists not to do art, and the chances of financial success as an artist are far, far dimmer than the prospects for an academic. We don’t tell baseball players not to try out for the minor leagues just because the chances of them ever playing major league ball are minuscule. (The baseball analogy is one that a friend of mine mentioned to me some years ago and that I have been using ever since to talk to non-academics about the model under which academic employment works.)

And finally, I despair that Benton, while laudably promoting the vision of the grad student who doesn’t have the least expectation of a tenure-track job and expects to work outside academia, unrealistically imagines a world where anybody cares about the PhD outside of academia. It is a sad reality that PhDs who work outside of their fields completely (not just outside academia, but outside any profession where their disciplinary training is relevant) often have to conceal the fact that they hold an advanced degree in order to find work – the PhD actually serves as a deterrent to employers. Without denying that there can be a role for a ‘public intellectual’, I do deny that there is room for public intellectuals who are divorced entirely from the academic world and its own peculiar economy. Benton is imagining a world that simply does not exist, never has existed, and for which no plausible means exists by which we might bring it into existence.

My feeling is that of course we should apprise our undergraduates that their chances of success are not 100% or perhaps not even 50%, and then we should take every possible step necessary to ensure that the best and brightest students who are going to go to grad school anyway, regardless of what we say, have the maximum chance possible to have the sort of productive career that we ourselves enjoy.

Why is archaeology anthropology?

A recent post over at The Blogaeological Record, a new archaeology blog run by my former student Lars Anderson, has got me thinking about this crazy discipline of which I am a part. Lars has strong opinions, and is not afraid to state them, and is in the process of formulating his thoughts on anthropological archaeology in a public forum. So you should all head over there and welcome him to the community of anthropology bloggers.

In a recent set of posts, Lars has been talking about Kent Flannery’s now classic allegorical article, “The Golden Marshalltown” (Flannery 1982). Rereading this remarkable article for the first time in over a decade has got me thinking about some general issues in anthropology, in terms of the interaction of methods and theory, and the ‘proper’ relationship between archaeology and anthropology. In ‘Marshalltown’, Flannery, a renowned Mesoamerican archaeologist, invokes both empiricism and disciplinary holism as central to the survival of anthropology as a discipline, and of archaeological anthropology as a part of it.

The collection of more data (regardless of the source) is always a fundamental part of what we do as scholars. Flannery was writing against the tendency, always present in social science and sporadically in archaeology, to give pride of place to theoretical formulations ahead of basic day-to-day science. It’s not that he is anti-theory, but rather that he recognizes that theory without data is empty twaddle. For the archaeologist the gold-plating of his Marshalltown trowel in Flannery’s allegory is equivalent to the athlete hanging up his sneakers. While for the rest of us, there is nothing quite so symbolic, the idea that what we are doing as scholars is constantly asking new questions and finding data to help us answer them is persuasive. The notion that there can be such a thing as ‘just a theorist’ is abhorrent to me and should be to any social scientist, regardless of field.

The second criterion, disciplinary holism, is trickier to negotiate. Archaeology is a set of methods as well as an academic discipline, and those methods (survey and excavation foremost among them) can be employed in the service of many disciplines other than anthropology: medieval history, or classics, or Egyptology, etc. A well-known proverb among North American archaeologists, is that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing”. But in fact the original quotation from Philip Phillips was that “New World archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” (1955: 246-7), later revised to “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” (Willey and Phillips: 1958: 2).

In either form, this is an odd statement to make that just gets odder the more you think about it. It’s arguing that there is something fundamentally different about the New World that makes its study anthropological, whereas presumably some aspects of Old World archaeology can be anthropological, or not. But the criteria on which this is to be decided seem to me entirely arbitrary. In the latter form, it is giving a nod to different disciplinary practices in Europe, where cultural anthropology stands apart from archaeology. But to define a regional tradition of archaeological practice in this way is hopelessly parochial and essentialistic. It also raises all sorts of problems when anthropological concepts and units are used uncritically to analyze phenomena where the temporal or spatial scale does not permit such facile analogues. In a now-famous article, Martin Wobst (1978) notes that the ‘tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has led some archaeologists to mis-interpret aspects of the record of hunter-forager prehistory precisely because the units defined by ethnography have no direct relationship with material recovered archaeologically.

In ‘Marshalltown’, Flannery is, I think, not really concerned with this division – rather, he is concerned with the alternative perspective that ‘archaeology is archaeology is archaeology’ (Clarke 1968): that archaeological theories should not be dependent on insights from other disciplines. Flannery instead wants to insist on the robustness and utility of the anthropologically-derived culture concept for a vigorous anthropological archaeology. And I certainly have no beef with that (although if you talk to 100 anthropologists you will get at least 110 definitions of culture). But Flannery’s formulation is that of a New World and American archaeologist, and I think it is far too narrow.
I do not want to deny that the link between archaeology and anthropology is fundamental, and that the link must go both ways: social (and linguistic, and any other sort of) anthropology must learn from archaeology, and vice versa. The problem as I see it is that anthropology is not ambitious enough, and that both archaeology and cultural anthropology must conceptualize themselves as part of a broader human science if they are to remain useful. And in place of pronouncements about where archaeology fits within the Great Chain of Disciplinary Being, we ought to ask why certain formulations might (or might not be useful).

Throughout his career, my mentor Bruce Trigger worked tirelessly to bridge the gaps between Egyptology and anthropological archaeology, with some success, but ultimately most Egyptologists even today have little anthropological training, and when a few of them do make efforts to expose their work to anthropologists, they are received with some skepticism. Even though fundamental techniques like seriation and stratigraphy developed in Egyptological contexts, primarily through the work of scholars like Flinders Petrie, Egyptology remains distinct from archaeological anthropology, and to this day is part of ‘Near Eastern studies’, a historical/archaeological/literary discipline defined regionally, whereas Maya, Aztec, and Inka archaeology are linked to anthropology (as with the prehistoric archaeology of both the New and Old Worlds). This is methodologically unjustified, potentially ethnocentric, and theoretically timid (2).

An example: One of my favourite Egyptological papers is John Baines’ ‘Color terminology and color classification’ (Baines 1985), which is an attempt to integrate cognitive-anthropological work on colour terminology (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969) with Egyptian art history. Published in American Anthropologist, it is also an effort to expose anthropologists to Egyptological work and to demonstrate that Egyptology is capable of being theoretically highly sophisticated. Baines points out that while the ancient Egyptian language has a paucity of colour words, the colour palette used in art has a greater variety of basic colours, and one that increases over time. Baines uses this to support the Berlin/Kay theory of a patterned development of colour terms along a universal framework while pointing out that there may not be a simple correspondence between the linguistic ‘palette’ and the artistic one. Because Egyptology has access to both linguistic (textual) and archaeological (art) evidence throughout several thousand years, it is possible to directly verify (and to complicate) an evolutionary sequence that can only be inferentially reconstructed using ethnography.

I should be clear that I don’t really blame archaeologists for any of this; to be treated (as it is by many cultural anthropologists) as a ‘kid brother’ subdiscipline that can at best borrow from other fields is a gross injustice. Virtually every archaeologist is expected to be at least moderately familiar with the techniques, theories, and concepts of cultural anthropology in North America, while the converse is not even remotely true except at a very few institutions. I am one of a small minority of non-archaeologists who has read and taught widely on archaeological subjects. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should have done what I did – for instance, it clearly hurt my career to be ‘hard to define’ subdisciplinarily. But I think that having people who are trained as generalists, as polymaths, and as interdisciplinary scholars even while maintaining a core disciplinary allegiance, can only be to the benefit of the human sciences, which are (or ought to be) hard to delineate in such clear ways.

I’m a synthesist by nature; I love finding hidden connections between fields of study that otherwise don’t have any obvious connection, like evolutionary anthropology and the history of mathematics, or Assyriology and developmental psychology, or (as with Baines) Egyptology and cognitive anthropology. I worry that by defining anthropology too narrowly as ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnology’, archaeologists miss real opportunities for contributing to a broader framework of social and historical theory. No one is arguing that archaeologists should gild their Marshalltowns, but to define themselves methodologically rather than conceptually would be an even greater mistake. But even more importantly, anthropologists of all sorts are missing an opportunity to frame themselves as the holistic core of an integrated mosaic of human sciences.

Notes
(1) For those of you who may not know, Marshalltown is the largest and most prominent manufacturer of archaeological trowels, and is iconic among American archaeologists.
(2) The same is true to a greater or lesser extent of Assyriology, classics, Sinology, medieval history, and Indology, which conceptualize archaeology as part of history rather than as part of the cross-cultural enterprise currently exemplified by anthropological research.

Works Cited
Baines, J. 1985. Color terminology and color classification: Ancient Egyptian color terminology and polychromy. American Anthropologist 87: 282-297.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic color terms. University of California Press Berkeley.
Flannery, K. V. 1982. The golden Marshalltown: A parable for the archeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist 84: 265-278.
Phillips, P. 1955. American archaeology and general anthropological theory. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11: 246-250.
Willey, G.R. and P. Phillips. 1958. Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wobst, H. M. 1978. The archaeo-ethnology of hunter-gatherers or the tyranny of the ethnographic record in archaeology. American Antiquity: 303-309.