Reynolds and Riede (Reference Reynolds and Riede2019) argue that European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy has become unworkably complex and that it impedes progress towards the integration of archaeology with new findings from other scientific fields. While I agree with the first part of this argument (Shea Reference Shea2017), I have reservations about the second.
Considering how little mid to late nineteenth-century archaeologists knew about prehistoric stone tools, they did rather well. European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy is not a complete ‘train wreck’. Early archaeologists proposed the Aurignacian, Gravettian and other named stone tool industries, or ‘NASTIES’ (Shea Reference Shea2014), as aids to organising chronostratigraphy and facilitating communication—and they work reasonably well for those purposes. Today, European Upper Palaeolithic archaeologists can, with impressive accuracy, infer the ages of an archaeological deposit from the stone tools that they found within. When they use the term ‘Solutrean’, for example, most other prehistorians know what this means. The European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy train, however, derailed when early twentieth-century archaeologists succumbed to ‘cultural anthropology envy’ and began treating stone tool industries as the functional equivalents of ethnographic cultures (Sackett Reference Sackett and Clark1991; Clark Reference Clark, Camps and Chauhan2009). This failed for the simple reason that stone tools are not people. So-called European Upper Palaeolithic ‘cultures’ exceed the duration and geographic range of any known pre-industrial culture. Whatever these NASTIES are, they are not cultures as anthropologists understand them, even though that understanding casts a fairly wide net (Kroeber & Kluckholn Reference Kroeber and Kluckholn1952).
Problems with culture taxonomy and related stone-tool systematics afflict prehistoric archaeology everywhere (Shea Reference Shea2011, Reference Shea2013, Reference Sheain press). Some of this “lithics systematics anarchy” results from exporting analytical methods and conceptual frameworks developed in Europe to other regions, where they are inappropriate (Shea Reference Shea2014). European Upper Palaeolithic lithics systematics anarchy is home-grown. Trying to define cultural and evolutionary relationships among prehistoric humans using stone-tool industries is akin to using a nineteenth-century blacksmith's tools to fix an iPhone: not just a difficult challenge but impossible.
Reynolds and Riede (Reference Reynolds and Riede2019) want to reform European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy so that we can correlate our findings with new evidence from palaeogenetics, palaeoanthropology and palaeoclimatology. This is a good idea, but only up to a point. Archaeologists need to articulate their own research goals and devise systematics that help us achieve them. Why undertake the almost unimaginably difficult task of reorganising European Upper Palaeolithic archaeological systematics to test hypotheses arising from these other disciplines, unless we have a firm theoretical basis for predicting what we should find in the archaeological record if a given hypothesis is wrong, and unless proving that hypothesis wrong helps us answer a major anthropological question? Anthropological archaeology's most interesting research questions concern behavioural variability. These are questions about ‘how’ and ‘why’: how people solved a particular problem, and why they solved it in particular ways. For ‘when’ questions, we have geochronology. For ‘who’ questions, we have palaeogenetics and palaeontology.
Reynolds and Riede (Reference Reynolds and Riede2019) call for wider data-sharing among researchers investigating the European Upper Palaeolithic. For this good idea to work successfully, European Upper Palaeolithic stone-tool systematics need a complete top-to-bottom overhaul. Currently, European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy appears very similar to Eastern African prehistory (Shea Reference Sheain press). Everyone has their own preferred way of describing the stone-tool evidence, from attributes to artefact types to assemblage groups, and nothing impels them to change this approach. Archaeologists use so many different stone-tool systematics concurrently that the more assemblages one tries to compare, the more one has to adjust one's comparisons to ever lower common denominators (Will et al. Reference Will2019). To initiate change, we need a source of selective pressures. I recommend that reform-minded archaeologists working on the European Upper Palaeolithic identify a few major anthropological research questions, develop systematics to help answer those questions, do the research, publish their findings, and then wait for colleagues to imitate the successes.
My proposal is for a long-term strategy. For the short term, I close with a Swiftian ‘modest proposal’ about European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxa: stop using them. Geneticists, palaeoanthropologists and palaeoclimatologists use European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxa because archaeologists use them. If archaeologists stop using them, then our colleagues in other disciplines will also stop using them. Habitual use convinces us that we cannot live without them, but this is simply not true (e.g. Shea Reference Shea2017). I predict that archaeologists will quickly realise that we do not need any of the European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxa currently in use—and that prehistoric archaeology will be better off without them.
