FOR THE PURPOSES of this chapter, processualism is taken to be more or less synonymous with processual archaeology, and with what came to be called New Archaeology in the United States. Processualism dominated North American and west European archaeology from the 1960s to the 1980s and is still central to Americanist archaeology, but more peripheral in Europe. In this chapter, I discuss processualism and what came after it in North America. A somewhat parallel development took place in post–World War II England, especially prominent at Cambridge University under the leadership of Grahame Clark, Eric Higgs, David Clarke (whose productive and influential career was abruptly and tragically cut short in 1976), and Colin Renfrew. I do not address that Old World development here because of space constraints, and because I am not qualified to do so, but see the other chapters by Gill (chapter 5), Bintliff (chapter 10), and Koerner and Price (chapter 21) for alternative or complementary geographical and topical accounts.
Archaeological Theory and Meta-Archaeology
When archaeologists say “archaeological theory,” they are usually referring to some aspect or level of archaeological interpretation, such as the plausibility of or justification for knowledge claims about a discrete piece of the archaeological record, or about a part of a broader explanatory formulation concerning the human past. They may be referring to the nature and status of a particular research problem, or of the research design selected for solving such a problem. Finally, under the rubric of “archaeological theory” they may dispute the ultimate goals or purposes of archaeological endeavor.
In a technical, philosophy of science sense, none of the above is properly theory because a theory is a formal, axiomatized system, the likes of which are present only in formal logic, abstract mathematics, and the theoretical realms of some other sciences. According to one philosopher of science who has taken an interest in archaeology, what archaeologists call theory might be more precisely termed “metaarchaeology” (Embree 1992).
Process, Culture Process, and Processualism
In 1967, Kent Flannery reviewed Gordon Willey’s major synthesis of North American archaeology, Introduction to American archaeology, vol. 1, North America (Willey 1966). The review is entitled “Culture History vs. Culture Process: A Debate in American Archaeology” (Flannery 1967). The phrase “culture process” in Flannery’s title was popular in anthropological jargon of the time as an abbreviated reference to the search for regularities and generalizable developments in cultural dynamics across space and through time. Flannery’s title conveys the notion of opposition between an overt emphasis on cultural processes (generalizing research) and one on cultural history (particularizing research). Although both generalizing and particularizing (nomothetic and idiographic) foci are always intertwined in any kind of investigative scholarship, processualist archaeologists insisted on the primacy of generalizing approaches to the human past. Particulars about specific times, places, artifacts, sites, and so on, were to be sought only in the service of delineating broad generalizations about how culture (past or present) works (Binford 1965, 1968a).
In Americanist archaeology during the 1960s and 1970s, “culture” had a meaning different from the connotations conveyed by that word in the 2000s. Culture meant all the characteristics of human behavior—technological, sociological, ideological—that distinguished humankind from other primates and other animals. During the 1970s, anthropological concerns with and about culture shifted to the now prevalent view in which “culture” refers only to the cognitive universes constructed and maintained by human groups. Human ideational systems in general and symbolic systems characterizing specific human groups are emphasized, with techno-economic systems and functions being of less interest.
During the 1960s, however, and through the 1970s, the goal of anthropological archaeologists was to advance knowledge, not just about past lifeways at specific times and places, but also, and more importantly, to aid social scientific understanding of culture, broadly construed: to delineate specific cultural processes, as well as cultural process in general. Ideational matters were not a central concern for most processualists (among the very few exceptions are Fritz 1978; Hall 1976, 1977), and was explicitly disavowed by at least one leading protagonist (Binford 1967).
Concern for something akin to what was called “culture process” in the 1960s had been advocated by several Americanist archaeologists during the 1930s and 1940s (Bennett 1943; Steward and Setzler 1938; Taylor 1943, 1948), and by an influential sociocultural anthropologist (Kluckhohn 1940). But it was not until the advent of New Archaeology that processualism became a central focus for the entire discipline. The movement was officially kicked off by Lewis Binford in a paper published in 1962, “Archaeology as Anthropology.” That article, plus two others he published subsequently (Binford 1964, 1965), Fritz and Plog’s “The Nature of Archaeological Explanation” (1970), and an edited volume, New Perspectives in Archeology (Binford and Binford 1968), presented the New Archaeology party platform in a persuasive and enthusiastic manner (Leone 1972; Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971).
Old Archaeology was characterized as particularistic culture history obsessed with chronology and comparative typology (time-space systematics); it was to be replaced by New Archaeology with emphasis on culture process, to be approached via systems theory and/or by an explicit search for general laws (Flannery 1973). The archaeological record was viewed by processualists as a vast laboratory for the eliciting and establishing of generalizations, functional regularities, and general laws about human cultural behavior. Advocates of New Archaeology sought not only to describe and explain the human past but also to predict the human future.
Although the whole of past human cultures was the avowed subject matter of New Archaeology (Binford 1962, 1965), in practice processual archaeology became a materialist, functionalist pursuit of paleoeconomy, paleoenvironment, and paleoecology with subsistence systems occupying center stage. Relations between cultures or societies and their physical environments were of paramount interest, resulting in the necessity for interdisciplinary teams of archaeologists and natural scientists to undertake archaeological fieldwork. In addition, research design was supremely important, with the processual questions or problems to be attacked stated clearly, together with the methods chosen for obtaining data to answer the questions and solve the problems (Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971; and 1984: chapter 4).
The Americanist archaeological scene in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s was a lively affair with big, interdisciplinary projects funded by the National Science Foundation pursuing culture processual issues, not just in the Americas but also in various portions of the Old World. Machine-aided multivariate statistics—electronic calculators, then microcomputers (personal computers) used in tandem with “canned” programs such as SAS, SPSS, and BIOMED (O’Neil 1984; Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1984:chap. 5)—were freely deployed, as were physico-chemical analyses and procedures. Processualist archaeology was highly influential in the United States and around the world. Yet the scope of 1960s–1970s processualism was still narrowly construed, remaining within the boundaries noted in the previous paragraph and being largely what Hall (1977) concisely described as “econothink.”
A major debate internal to processual archaeology—but not about the appropriateness of econothink—and emerging in the 1970s focused squarely on processualist assumptions concerning the nature and integrity of the archaeological record. Lewis Binford (1976, 1978, 1981a, 1983:98–106) and Michael Schiffer (1972, 1976, 1985) problematized archaeological interpretation by drawing attention to the fact that archaeological remains are never (with the exception of extremely rare Pompeii-like situations) delivered intact and unaltered from a specific past time and place to the archaeologist’s shovel, pick, or trowel.
Because of his unsuccessful struggles to interpret Mousterian lithic data from sites in southern France, Binford succumbed to a skeptical crisis concerning the nature of the archaeological record as a source of present knowledge about the real past (Binford 1983:98–106). He resolved that crisis by undertaking ethnological research in a society whose subsistence system he judged to be relevant to some aspects of Middle Paleolithic life during the Late Pleistocene period in southern France: the Alaskan Nunamiut. The influence of Binford’s ethnoarchaeological work resulted in the emergence of actualistic studies and what he called “middle-range theory” as central concerns for processualist archaeologists (Binford 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981a,b, 1983).
Prior to his own ethnographic research, Binford’s position with regard to the use of ethnographic data by archaeologists had been negative (Binford 1968b), but he conceived of his work among the Nunamiut as being quite different from the older practice of naively applying specific ethnographic parallels or analogs to specific bits and pieces of the archaeological record. Rather, he thought observations made by archaeologists within living societies, carefully chosen to be relevant to past societies preserved only archaeologically, could be designed to produce middle-range theory: a body of knowledge about the relations between material culture and human activities within various behavioral settings, warranting translation of static archaeological data to cultural and cultural processual dynamics.
Ethnoarchaeology and middle-range theory became hot topics; ethnographic research was enthusiastically undertaken by many archaeologists (David and Kramer 2001; Gould 1978, 1980; Kramer 1979; Longacre 1991), but also engendered debates about the correct and proper use of ethnographic analogy, discussions that continue intermittently to the present day (Binford 1967; Chang 1967; Gould 1980; Gould and Watson 1982; Stahl 1993; Watson 1979, 1982, 1999; Wylie 1982, 1985). Much of the impetus for these debates came from (in my own opinion, quite unjustified) equating the phrase “ethnographic analogy” solely with particularistic and naive transferrals of specific ethnographic observations to portions of the archaeological record, whereby the selected ethnographic bits functioned as ready-made explanations for the archaeology. If carefully, thoughtfully, and explicitly carried out, however, this procedure is very helpful in the actual practice of archaeological excavation, and in fact is unavoidable when interpreting specific archaeological data. Moreover, it is not so far removed, as has sometimes been claimed, from the building of middle-range theory (Watson 1986, 1999).
At about the same time that Binford was plunging into Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology, Michael Schiffer was focusing on the physical nature of the archaeological record itself and urging archaeologists to give careful thought to the myriad noncultural (e.g., wind, weather, colluvial and alluvial action, burrowing rodents and insects) as well as cultural (e.g., trampling, trash removal, digging of burial pits and storage pits) factors that arrange and rearrange older cultural deposits and their sedimentary matrices to create sites, as encountered and defined by archaeologists (Schiffer 1972, 1976). Schiffer’s commentaries, as well as similar observations by Binford (Binford 1981b), spurred a great deal of very useful work on the processes of site formation and deformation that is still a strong theme in contemporary Americanist archaeology (Goldberg et al. 1993; Stein 1983; Stein and Ferrand 1985; Wood and Johnson 1978).
While these debates internal to Americanist archaeology were taking place, political vectors external to the discipline began to have powerful effects on it.
As the result of hard work by a few dedicated archaeologists (King 1971; Lipe 1974; McGimsey 1972), the Archaeological Conservation Act was signed into law in May 1974 (McGimsey 1985; see Green, chapter 22). The act extended to prehistoric and historic cultural resources the same protection previous legislation afforded biological, geological, and other environmental resources. As implemented, the act meant that archaeological survey and “mitigation” of threatened cultural resources were required by federal law anywhere that federal funds were used to alter the landscape: for strip-mining coal; drilling for oil; building dams, bridges, highways, soil terraces, and so on. Up to 1 percent of the total cost for such projects was to be made available in support of the archaeological work. “Mitigation” could mean documentation of archaeological remains on the surface by various means short of excavation (e.g., coring or augering; use of remote sensing such as ground penetrating radar, resistivity, or magnetometry); mitigation could also mean digging test pits and/or undertaking full-scale excavations.
Among the problems raised by that legislative action were the following:
1. An immediate need to define who was and who was not an archaeologist certified to carry out the survey and mitigation mandated by law.
2. An immediate need for rules and regulations defining standard archaeological procedures in considerable detail, yet sufficiently generalized that such procedures could be applied to very different parts of the archaeological record throughout the United States.
3. The potential for a major break within Americanist archaeology between traditional research-oriented archaeologists, usually based in academia or museums, and increasing numbers of archaeologists who abandoned or never entered research positions but were employed by public agencies or private construction firms, or who were freelance contractors.
Problem 1 was solved by creating two new organizations for contract/conservation/cultural resource management archaeologists: the Society of Professional Archaeologists (SOPA) and the American Society for Conservation Archaeology (ASCA). SOPA was conceived as a certifying and regulating entity, whereas ASCA was a mutual-interest organization promoting knowledge about and support for conservation and contract archaeology. SOPA functioned until 1998 when it was transformed into a broader entity called the Register of Professional Archaeologists (www.rpanet.org). ASCA dissolved as SOPA and the Society for American Archaeology gradually took over its functions, such as keeping track of congressional actions relevant to archaeology and informing and lobbying legislators about cultural resources.
Problem 2 is being addressed at both federal and state levels (King 1998; McGimsey and Davis 1977; Schiffer and Gumerman 1977), and will require continuous attention into the foreseeable future.
Problem 3, similarly, will not be completely resolved, but necessitates persistent hard work by both CRM and non-CRM archaeologists to remain in contact with each other. The latter, now a very small and dwindling numerical minority (Zeder 1999), retain considerable influence in the realm of archaeological theory (meta-archaeology) and discussion of major methodological concerns.
Which brings us to the issue most relevant to this essay: How have the past twenty-five years of CRM ascendancy affected meta-archaeological debates in Americanist archaeology?
One striking result of the Archaeological Conservation Act was to direct large sums of money—far exceeding even the biggest NSF grants—into the support of archaeological fieldwork, laboratory analyses (including radiocarbon and other chronometric assays), and reporting. Not only were more archaeologists employed than ever before, but also relatively generous funding was available for collaborators in the natural sciences. In addition, promising methods and techniques (e.g., various kinds of shovel-testing programs and sampling procedures of all sorts) could be applied on a much broader scale than was formerly feasible. It was also possible to use nontraditional approaches to site discovery, such as large-scale surface stripping with heavy equipment to reveal shallowly buried arrays of prehistoric features (Bareis and Porter 1984), and backhoe trenching of alluvial terraces to locate deeply buried sites (Chapman 1994:chap. 1). Some directors of CRM projects were able to include such methods and techniques within the scope of required survey and mitigation procedures, and to contribute results with implications and value well beyond those stipulated in their contracts (in addition to the references already cited, see Schiffer and House 1975).
On the other hand, however, some major disadvantages are inherent to routine CRM archaeology, the most obvious being contractual limitations regarding the scope and nature of field and analytical work, and the often highly restricted distribution of resultant reports. The latter situation gave rise to a major information retrieval problem with respect to the “gray literature” of contract reports that are not readily accessible to non-CRM scholarship.
In spite of the fact that well over 90 percent of archaeology in the United States is CRM archaeology, it is difficult for CRM archaeologists to maintain a presence in the non-CRM scholarly community while simultaneously fulfilling the demanding responsibilities of their field, lab, and administrative positions (Watson 1991). Hence, meta-archaeological debates and discussions in Americanist archaeology are likely to be bereft of contributions from those who actually carry out the overwhelming majority of archaeological field and laboratory work in the United States. Thanks to unremitting efforts by many CRM and non-CRM archaeologists, however, the worst-case scenario of a major, irrevocable split between the two communities has not manifested itself. The Society for American Archaeology has managed to secure and retain a respectable component of CRM archaeologists, not only within its membership but also within its governance structure. Like other issues pertaining to CRM archaeology, however, this one of communication and scholarly collaboration among the CRM majority and the non-CRM minority requires constant attention.
Robert Dunnell raised another question with respect to CRM archaeology in the United States (Dunnell 1986:40–42). He suggests that the rapid onset of the CRM program during the 1970s standardized archaeological procedures at a particularly unsettled phase in the development of theory and method in Americanist archaeology, arresting that developmental process at an immature stage. Dunnell’s own vision for Americanist archaeology is an overtly selectionist, evolutionary one (Dunnell 1980; see Bentley et al., chapter 8), and it is understandable how he might have come to such a conclusion. It does not appear, however, that the dominance of CRM archaeology has blighted the trajectory of Americanist archaeology in the way he feared. Rather, CRM archaeology in practice is just one of several powerful forces shaping archaeology in the Americas and everywhere, as indicated in the preceding and following sections.
While processual archaeologists in the United States were grappling with theoretical and methodological issues surrounding ethnographic analogy and site formation processes, as well as multiple questions and problems arising from the growth of CRM, major challenges to the entire processual enterprise were being formulated in England and western Europe. As already noted, 1960s–1970s processual archaeology was focused on materialist, functionalist, technological, and economic processes, pursued within an explicitly deductivist, social scientific framework. Not a great deal of attention was paid to individuals, individual agency, ideology, and ancient value systems, or to the modern value systems influencing and variously impinging on the practice of archaeology. The sociopolitics of contemporary archaeology and the ideational aspects of past human societies were virtually ignored, leaving processualists vulnerable to components of the post-processualist (postmodernist) critique (Hall 1976, 1977; Hodder 1982, 1985, 1986; Preucel 1991; see Shanks, chapter 9). Post-processualists urged close attention to specific cultural histories, rather than to disembodied cultural processes, to individual agency in past societies (especially issues of domination and resistance), and to evidence for ancient cognitive systems; as well as explicit recognition of the multiple societal forces profoundly affecting individual archaeologists and shaping the entire discipline. They denied that unbiased, unproblematic, objective access to “the real past” is possible.
During the 1980s and 1990s, some Americanist processualists rejected the entire post-processualist critique; many assessed it more or less thoughtfully, and adopted relevant parts of it as presented, or with modifications appropriate to their own interests; a few embraced the whole program.
One particular aspect of the post-processualist focus on modern sociopolitics and archaeological practice—attention to indigenous concerns—became a central facet of Americanist archaeology when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in November 1990. That law required all institutions and agencies to inventory collections of Native American physical remains and grave goods. The inventories had to be distributed to the six hundred or so federally recognized tribes within the fifty states, representatives of whom could then request repatriation of any ancestral remains that might be included in those lists. Implementation of NAGPRA is ramifying in many different directions, ranging from hostile adversarial proceedings to carefully negotiated compromises. Whether studying prehistoric or historic sites, Americanist archaeologists must now give careful attention to the legal rights of descendant populations, as well as to their beliefs and wishes concerning the remains of ancestral communities.
The implications of NAGPRA are still being vigorously tested, negotiated, and worked through (Deloria 1995; Thomas 2000), processes that will continue for many years. Apart from this important issue, what can be said about the general nature and status of processualist concerns at the present time?
The majority of Americanist archaeologists are still thoroughly processualist in their basic orientation. Processualist approaches are also robustly present in British and European archaeology, as indicated by many of the chapters in this set of handbooks. Archaeologists everywhere, however, must also address a host of pressing issues in the real world of twenty-first-century archaeological practice: extensive site destruction, proliferating and frequently shifting arrays of antiquities legislation at international, national, and local levels; interactions among many corporate and noncorporate groups (archaeologists and indigenous peoples being only two such groups) with vested interests in all aspects of the past, how they are treated, how they are managed or interpreted, and by whom. Non-CRM archaeologists, who are not officially in full-time managerial positions with respect to the archaeological record, will continue to be in a small minority, but they may have disproportionate influence in meta-archaeological discussions and the development of archaeological theory. If this indeed turns out to be the case, then these archaeologists must be careful to take full account of factors influencing practice by the majority of archaeologists. Otherwise their formulations will, at best, be ignored, or will, at worst, have a deleterious effect on the tiny fraction of the archaeological record that survives into the twenty-first century.
Processualist archaeology emerged in the optimistic era following World War II, rapidly rising to a dominant position in North America, England, and western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. Much of its initial appeal and strength came from the fact that several case studies of New Archaeology in action were produced early in its history, and were very well publicized. William Longacre’s work at a prehistoric pueblo in eastern Arizona, the Carter Ranch site, is one of the first and best-known examples (Longacre 1964, 1968, 1970).
In an attempt to learn something about the social organization of this ancient community, Longacre devised a research design focused on the abundant sherds of painted pottery vessels in the cultural deposits. His basic working hypothesis, drawn from ethnographic information on contemporary western pueblos such as Hopi and Zuni, attributed pottery manufacture and decoration to the women in each household, who would have learned ceramic skills from their mothers, maternal aunts, and grandmothers. He further suggested (again on the basis of ethnographic information) that the Carter Ranch community had probably been matrilocal and matrilinear. Hence, pottery designs transmitted from generation to generation of women potters should cluster in empirically demonstrable patterns delineating prehistoric, intrapueblo, matrilinear residence groups.
Longacre’s quantification of design motifs, and the statistical procedures he applied to them, did indeed reveal intrasite clusters at Carter Ranch pueblo, and his study became highly influential. It also attracted many detailed and pointed critiques, however, one obvious interpretive issue being that of equifinality. Even accepting all the analytical techniques as appropriate (which by no means everyone did), how do we know that the design-element distributions actually resulted from matrilocal, matrilineal household pottery manufacturing groups, and not from some other set of sociological factors and processes? Was Longacre not assuming what he should be trying to find out: that is, just what was the social structure of this ancient pueblo? How, in fact, does pottery manufacture and design relate to household and community organization? What do alternative organizations look like archaeologically?
Methodological and interpretive questions raised by the Carter Ranch study generated a considerable amount of follow-up work by many archaeologists in the U.S. Southwest and elsewhere, including a complex and long-term ethnoarcheological project initiated by Longacre himself, together with a research group of his graduate students and other collaborators. Longacre’s project was based on the island of Luzon in the Philippines among contemporary pottery-producing villages of the Kalinga people (Longacre 1991; Longacre et al. 1993). During the thirty-five-year trajectory of Longacre’s research, he acted in an exemplary processualist manner. Advocates of New Archaeology insisted that data relevant to investigating cultural processes, such as the nature and dynamics of social organization in prehistoric communities, should be sought wherever they might best be found. Archaeology is not just about digging. Archaeologists must freely avail themselves of whatever sources seem most likely to provide the necessary information, including observations they themselves obtain in relevant living societies. Because appropriate information was not available in contemporary southwestern communities, Longacre—in true New Archaeology fashion—sought the necessary relevant data about ceramic production, decoration, distribution, and teaching/learning networks where he reasoned they could be secured most efficiently. That turned out to be among Kalinga potters in the Philippines, where, as always happens with successful empirically based research, the answers to initial questions did not conform entirely to expectations. New information necessitated revision of older notions, and opened new avenues of inquiry; knowledge accumulated and ramified, often in unanticipated directions.
It is unlikely that Longacre himself will ever return to Carter Ranch, but the questions about archaeological methods, techniques, and inference raised by his work there are a significant part of the processualist contribution to archaeological method and theory.
Another central aspect of processualist archaeology was and is investigation of big landmarks in the human past, especially the origins of agriculture and the origins of the state. Although by no means a topic introduced by New Archaeologists, agricultural origins research was an early and continuing success when taken up by processualists. Designing research intended to elicit not just when, where, and how, but also why agriculture happened encouraged a productive combination of interdisciplinary field and laboratory work, partaking heavily of various natural sciences. Indeed, the subdisciplines now known as archaeobotany or paleoethnobotany, geoarchaeology, and zooarchaeology were born of this interaction. Such research was also highly compatible with New Archaeology’s heavy emphasis on paleoeconomy and paleoecology. Significant advances were made in knowledge of early food-producing economies, especially in the Americas (Flannery 1986; Smith 1998; Watson 2001). It is now fairly clear that food-producing economies were created indigenously fewer than ten times. Contrary to earlier expectations, however, there does not appear to be a single, universal explanation and trajectory for agropastoral origins, but rather an array of processes—including both external environmental and internal sociopolitical factors—that is implicated in each instance. Hence, most contemporary research centers on delineating those factors and processes operating within each world region where food production was developed independently. The most lively such regions at present are those previously least known: Africa south of the Sahara, eastern North America, the American neotropics, and eastern and southeastern Asia with adjacent parts of Oceania (Bellwood 1996:chap. 14; Crawford 1992; Crawford and Shen 1998; Denham and White 2007; Fritz 1990, 1999; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002; Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Smith 1992; Spriggs 1996).
Research on origins of the state is perhaps not quite so congruent with the New Archaeology’s emphasis on economic and materialist perspectives as is agricultural origins research. There is a strong connecting link, however, in issues surrounding the transformation of relatively egalitarian societies—the norm for most of the human past—to sharply hierarchical, socioeconomically stratified ones. That transformation is sometimes referred to as the emergence of complex society, a topic persistently and intensively investigated to good effect by processualist archaeologists (Adams 1966; Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Earle 1991; Price and Brown 1985).
Processual archaeology is still present in the 2000s, although different in many ways from its 1960s configuration. Archaeology at the beginning of the twenty-first century confronts widespread destruction of its primary subject matter, and is thoroughly engaged with multiple real-world forces. A pessimistic assessment might conclude that Euro-American archaeology is currently in significant difficulty, besieged by proliferating numbers of insistent commentators presenting conflicting and confusing recommendations about the most appropriate course for this engaged and turbulent discipline to follow. A more optimistic observer, however, might find grounds to conclude that Euro-American archaeology, and world archaeology in general, will eventually incorporate the most useful portions of processualism, post-processualism, and post-post-processualism. Meanwhile, advocates of irreconcilable or incompatible approaches will continue to create multivalent tensions causing all the protagonists to work harder and more carefully than might otherwise be the case to create a more mature twenty-first-century archaeology.
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