In 1948, a young scholar named Walter W. Taylor published A Study of Archeology, a scathing rebuke of the state of the art in archaeological practice. This work sought to replace the then-dominant culture history paradigm with a new focus on reconstructing cultural contexts, which Taylor termed “the conjunctive approach.” Despite the fact that his book was not welcomed, and was largely ignored by the archaeological establishment of that time, Taylor effectively forecasted many theoretical and methodological developments that would become prominent in later decades. Seventy years later, another young scholar, Charles Perreault, attempts to tread much the same ground with his book The Quality of the Archaeological Record.
Perreault uses eight chapters to make the case that archaeology suffers from an “underdetermination” problem when our goal is to understand the past on time scales of less than 1,000 years. His solution is to replace an archaeology that is dependent on inferences and explanations designed to work on ethnographic time scales with a return to culture history and an explanatory “macroarchaeology” that is analogous to the macroevolutionary pursuits of paleobiology. This, he argues, will root our discipline in a stronger scientific model and gain us greater respect among scholars outside of archaeology. Let us take a closer look at his argument.
In Chapter 1, Perreault introduces the search for the smoking gun, an approach to historical science that he argues is necessary for the establishment of knowledge but rarely achieved in archaeology. To Perreault, archaeological knowledge is difficult to achieve because the archaeological record accumulates on scales that are at odds with our ethnography-based explanatory models. This forces us into “test of consistency”-style arguments, in which we pose a favored model and seek consistencies in the archaeological record for verification. Perreault argues that the test-of-consistency approach makes hypotheses too easy to confirm, thereby favoring pet theories and incorrect conclusions. In contrast, he posits that the smoking-gun approach (think the iridium layer and evidence for the bolide model of terminal Cretaceous extinctions) will lead to more rigorous consideration of alternative hypotheses, more convincing tests, and over time, more defensible understandings of cultural history and evolution.
Chapters 2 through 6 focus on the underdetermination problem. Chapter 2 defines underdetermination by focusing on four aspects of data quality: scope, sampling interval, resolution, and dimensionality. Chapter 3 examines processes by which archaeological materials become mixed. The chapter begins with a review of the basics of archaeological formation processes and geoarchaeology. It proceeds to mathematical simulations designed to show how mixing can skew item frequencies, affecting quantitative measures such as richness, and thereby influencing our conclusions regarding change. Chapter 4 is directed at the loss of archaeological data, beginning with further consideration of formation processes and leading toward a number of implications for the quality of the record. Chapter 5 addresses the resolution of the archaeological record and concludes that spatial and temporal sampling intervals and temporal resolution degrade with time. Chapter 6 makes the case that most of what we think we know is likely wrong, most of our research is unnecessary, and archaeological theory is balkanized.
Chapter 7 offers a pathway from the darkness of archaeological underdetermination. To Perreault, the solution is evident in the history of paleontology, in which scholars resolved their underdetermination problem between genetic explanation versus the coarseness of the paleontological record by seeking patterns and processes operating on scales congruent with the fossil record. Perreault suggests that archaeologists could focus their research on the macroevolutionary scale to both avoid problems of underdetermination caused by the myriad microscale noisemakers and contribute insights that we archaeologists alone can develop. He terms this “macroarchaeology,” and he provides a list of potential research problems that could be addressed, including the pace and direction of change and the range and duration of archaeological types, all to be explored on temporal scales above 1,000 years.
Archaeology is a much more diverse field now than it was in 1948. We are capable of gaining insights by drawing data from archaeological materials using methods that would have seemed entirely in the realm of science fiction to scholars of that era. Modern archaeologists also have a much wider array of interests than did the culture historians prior to the coming of the processualist theorists. Consequently, I suspect that Perreault's book will not be so completely ignored, as was A Study of Archeology—at least I hope it will not be. Everyone should read this book and think seriously about its implications. Should we cast aside an archaeology that seeks understandings at temporal scales below 1,000 years? I suspect most will not agree. Nevertheless, perhaps we can learn to be better archaeologists by considering the challenges raised by Perreault.
My final thoughts on this work concern cultural macroevolution. This topic is not new to Perreault's book. Archaeologists have explored cultural macroevolutionary topics for some time now (see, for example, works by Loukas Barton, Robert Bettinger, James Chatters, Mark Collard, Enrico Crema, Peter Jordan, Ruth Mace, Larissa Mendoza Straffon, Michael O'Brien, Anna Prentiss, Michael Rosenberg, Stephen Shennan, Charles Spencer, and Melinda Zeder), though Perreault avoids consideration of the majority of this literature. Regardless, his book outlines an ambitious agenda for future studies that should be influential, particularly among evolutionary archaeologists.
