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.

What is archaeolinguistics?

Apparently my post ‘Paleolinguistics and archaeolinguistics’ is currently the #2 result for the keyword ‘archaeolinguistics’ (and #4 for ‘paleolinguistics’). Paleolinguistics is a fairly well-known term among linguists): it refers to the extension of historical linguistics deep into prehistory, often using methods that are not accepted by the majority of historical linguists. But while archaeolinguistics hasn’t achieved the same fame (or at least, not Wikipedia noteworthiness!), that’s the topic I want to discuss.

Archaeolinguistics lies at the interdisciplinary intersection between archaeology and linguistics – including but not limited to the interaction of linguistic and archaeological anthropology. I want to distinguish linguistic analyses of prehistory that do not use the archaeological record (paleolinguistics) from those that do. Moreover, much of archaeolinguistics has nothing to do with historical linguistics at all, but rests on different sorts of intersections between the two disciplines.

Archaeolinguistics includes several distinct topics of study:
– The study of the evolution of language and symbolic behavior through the integration of Paleolithic archaeology (lithics, art, notations, etc.) and studies in cognitive linguistics. This has virtually nothing to do with ‘paleolinguistics’ as an extended form of historical linguistics, but it requires a good foundational knowledge of both archaeology and linguistics, and also of hominin evolution.
– The study of prehistory through the comparative use of historical linguistics and archaeology, e.g., to reconstruct proto-language homelands, prehistoric migrations, subsistence patterns, the diffusion of technology, and the like. Where two independent sources of information converge on the same answer, it is more likely to be correct than when one line of evidence alone is used. This is ‘paleolinguistics plus’: the archaeological record is (dis)confirmatory and serves as a check on wild speculation.
– Archaeological decipherment: the decipherment of ancient texts recovered in archaeological contexts. This relies on quantitative analysis of texts and their signs, as well as more interpretive aspects of decipherment that rely on knowledge of social contexts that can mainly be known archaeologically. Maya script decipherment is a classic example of this ongoing process; without the archaeological record, our understanding of the hieroglyphic texts would be substantially hindered.
– The use of written texts to complement the archaeological record of literate societies to discuss topics of interest to linguistic anthropologists: literacy, cognitive categories, language contact, dialectal variation, and so on. In contrast to decipherment, here the script is well-known, and the questions that are being asked are using textual material holistically with archaeological material to talk about linguistic aspects of ancient life.
– The use of the characteristics of written texts to date archaeological material, and vice versa. Paleographic changes in scripts can be highly suggestive if not definitive of the age of texts, and of associated archaeological material. Conversely, archaeological materials that are datable radiometrically can put associated texts in their temporal context.

If this seems big and vague, maybe it is. All that these things have in common is that they require some knowledge of archaeology, and some knowledge of linguistics. But I guess what I’m trying to do here is to make the case that when there are so many areas that require knowledge of both fields, that it is valuable, from a scholarly perspective, to train students who are knowledgeable in both fields, and to publish work that reflects that intersection.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be meandering through a series of posts on some of the specific topics mentioned above, and more generally on methodological, conceptual, and evidentiary similarities between the two fields that make archaeolinguistics ‘hang together’ better than one might think. I don’t know what will become of these thoughts ultimately – maybe even a short book.

Southwest Script

A slate tablet bearing the longest inscription yet found in the enigmatic Southwest Script has been found in southern Portugal, as reported by the Associated Press today. Although it’s only 86 characters long, it represents a major expansion in the corpus of Southwest Script inscriptions, which all come from southwestern Iberia (hence the name) and date from the 7th-5th centuries BCE. Southwest Script is one of the world’s more obscure semi-deciphered scripts; one can get a sense of this by the fact that about half of the top 20 hits on Google are to today’s news article (although the label ‘Tartessian’ is somewhat more common).

The Southwest Script is typologically complex. As discussed in the article, some of the signs are alphabetic (roughly, one sign = one phoneme, either a consonant or vowel), others are syllabic (one sign = one consonant + vowel combination), and others are of unknown signification – possibly representing whole words (logograms) or something else entirely. The sound-symbol correspondences can be established because the signs are related to several other Iberian scripts and ultimately to a Phoenician ancestor – so it is possible to read some parts of some of the inscriptions phonetically. But this is far outweighed by what we don’t know (yet).

An awful lot of scripts have some such typological complexities; Egyptian and Japanese are well-known examples, but even the modern Latin alphabet has logographic components like @, &, $, and % which would make a script-decipherer’s job much harder. But with the Southwest Script, where there are so few inscriptions (and the ones we have are so short), the problem becomes nearly unsurmountable. The fact that we can’t even reliably associate the script with a language, even though Phoenician has been fully deciphered for centuries, says quite a lot about the state of the decipherment.

One of the real challenges in Southwest Script studies is that the texts found are all extremely short, making computational decipherments effectively impossible. This new find will not eliminate this methodological difficulty, but it will at least make it more plausible to find repeated sequences of signs that occur in other Southwest Script tablets, one of the key aspects of archaeological decipherment. This might allow us eventually to say more about the linguistic context of the tablets and ultimately work, over the next several decades, towards what might be reasonably called a new archaeological decipherment.

Steve #1032

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I have been officially inducted into the roster of Steves at Project Steve, maintained by the National Center for Science Education. As Steve #1032, I join at least 1031 of my peers who, in addition to holding doctorates in fields related to evolution, are named Steve, Stephen, Steven, Esteban, Stephanie, etc. My sole duty as a member of this illustrious society is to promote, through undogmatic scientific inquiry, teaching and research about the origin and evolution of life. To which end, I can do no better than to quote from the NCSE itself:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools. (NCSE, 2008)

Sciencing up the place

I got back late Saturday from the SaSci/SCCR conference in Las Vegas, to be greeted in Detroit by several inches of new-fallen snow … oh joy! Although I hardly had the time or inclination to do any serious gambling while away, I did win modestly at the airport slots due to my flight being delayed for half an hour. My talk was sparsely attended but nonetheless well-received, and it looks like as a result of these discussions, I’ll be presenting next year at the same conference as part of a session on anthropology and numerical cognition (in other words, exactly my field). In general, discussions about methodology in cognitive anthropology have led me to think quite a bit about my upcoming work this summer working with Detroit middle school students and learning about mathematical concept formation. A real challenge in the anthropology of mathematics is that there aren’t very many anthropologists working on mathematics, and because mathematics is a weird sort of domain where referents are often abstract, our methodologies aren’t extremely well developed, as opposed to, say, the study of kinship terms or ethnobotanical knowledge. So I have been spending the past few days thinking a lot more seriously about elicitation tasks and what exactly a mathematics-oriented ethnographic interview ought to look like and how on earth I can/should apply any of the highly theoretical knowledge I have acquired to this very grounded situation. Of course, I won’t really have the slightest clue what I’m doing until I actually start doing it, and possibly not even then.

But more generally, and despite receiving other, unrelated good news while away, it’s hard to be back from this particular conference feeling unmitigatedly positive about my discipline and my particular orientation within it. I’ve always been an oddball (and usually proud of it) in that I refuse to define myself within the usual four-field subdisciplinary taxonomy (physical, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology) common for the past century. I just don’t see any point, insofar as most of what ought to distinguish archaeologists from cultural anthropologists (e.g.) is methodological rather than conceptual. But then inevitably we get caught up in what is versus what ought to be, and the ways in which methodologies affect all other aspects of our work, and then we end up yellling at one another instead of being productive.

On top of that, you add the division between anthropology-as-humanism and anthropology-as-science, where I lean rather heavily towards the latter perspective even though as a ‘labelled’ linguistic anthropologist most of my attributed subfield leans the other way. The Science Wars had enormous fissioning effects on anthropology, such that some departments actually split administratively between humanistic and scientific wings, but some of that fissioning exists at a subdisciplinary level as well: you would be hard-pressed to find a physical anthropologist who rejects the label ‘scientist’, for instance. The Society for Anthropological Sciences is both a symptom of and a potential solution to these issues: it reflects a profound dissatisfaction with the humanistic bent of most cultural and linguistic anthropology, but at the same time by organizing itself in opposition to those trends, does little to convince any non-scientific anthropologists of the merits of the perspective.

For my part, I’m quite happy to use humanistic approaches when relevant, which is often. A lot of the empirical work underlying my forthcoming book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, examines the social, cultural, and political contexts under which particular numerical systems arose, spread, and declined. Lots of the work is essentially epigraphy as applied to numbers, and the scholars I relate to are linguists, historians, classicists, etc. In terms of much of my analysis, historians would surely recognize it as akin to what they do, even if, by the nature of the subject, it tends to underemphasize the individual personalities involved.

But I can’t escape the feeling that all this humanistic analysis acquires greater relevance when embedded in the broader search for patterns, and within anthropology the analysis of social processes and the comparison of social systems. I am thrilled that the structure of the book retains the basic structure of my dissertation, which has two separate analytical chapters, one cognitive, the other social, neither of which stands alone. But ultimately it is a comparative history, one which seeks to transcend the particular and get at something pan-human underlying it all. For an anthropologist today to admit to being a comparativist, outside of a very small number of venues, is like admitting you’re a cannibal, it seems sometimes. I do think I see some glimmers of hope that the field is becoming methodologically and theoretically more inclusive than when I was a grad student. I guess we’ll see, when the book is out, whether the reviewers agree.