The contributors to this collection would really like archaeology and cultural anthropology to be integrated more closely. Yet two major deficiencies surrounding the authors’ arguments stand in the way of this goal. First, the contributors do not sufficiently distinguish the intellectual question “Would greater integration make sense intellectually?” from the logistical question of whether the two subdisciplines could survive as separate academic departments in today's university. The second deficiency is a failure to consider that archaeologists might want to integrate intellectually with disciplines beyond anthropology. These deficiencies in the chapters lead to a series of sincere “coulda, woulda, shoulda” arguments, very much like those in a previous edited collection on this topic (Archaeology Is Anthropology, ed. Gillespie and Nichols, 2003). I am not convinced.
The book consists of an introduction, 10 chapters, and two conclusions. Most of the bibliographies are current to 2011 or 2012. In their introduction, Englehardt and Rieger pin the blame for the split between archaeology and cultural anthropology on postmodernism and the science debates in anthropology. LaMotta and Monaghan outline the history of subdisciplinary cooperation and separation in Mesoamerican and Southwestern anthropology. Their analysis pushes the split much further back in time and leads me to wonder how anyone could think that the two fields might ever integrate themselves again. Shankman provides another historical account, focusing on cultural evolutionism. Fahlander argues that the fields could be joined through a posthumanist ontology concerning the socialness of things. Rieger documents a case where “archaeological and ethnological settings collide” in Oaxaca, and Englehardt claims that archaeologists go around worrying whether they are still part of anthropology or not (I don't). He uses an outdated and discredited definition of science—logical positivism—to argue that archaeology is not a science; by this definition, however, none of the social sciences and few of the natural sciences would be sciences.
Hellweg doesn't like the way two archaeologists use Evans-Pritchard's ethnography to talk about tribes. Fernandez Souza suggests that a focus on Maya culinary practices can integrate archaeology and cultural anthropology in Yucatán, and Kistler wonders whether adding an archaeological perspective might somehow help her research on Mayan ethnographic biography. Classicist Small uses archaeological models (calling them anthropological models) to argue that classics and anthropology can and should interact more. Fowler and Johnson try to show how an ethnologist and archaeologist can each approach issues of choice and well-being but only convinced me that they both lack the conceptual tools to do so.
In the first of two conclusions, cultural anthropologist Goldstein is the only author to be truly critical of other authors and approaches. She also is the only author to attack head-on the two problems mentioned above. In the second conclusion, archaeologist Parkinson insists that archaeology and cultural anthropology have the same basic goal—“describing and explaining human cultural and biological variation”—and that their work should be seen as complementary rather than overlapping.
With the exception of Goldstein's, these chapters are rather bland. Authors avoid criticizing specific writers, and few take any stands that have not been taken many times before. The two deficiencies rear their heads in every chapter, although few authors seem to notice. To my mind, the intellectual and logistical arguments are radically different beasts and need to be examined separately. The inability of the authors to do so leads to some tortured prose and a few errors. They claim, for example, that I have advocated separate departments, whereas in fact I have argued for intellectual independence but never for logistical separation.
Most of the authors seem to think that there is but a single intellectual choice for archaeologists: either to integrate with cultural anthropology or to form a separate discipline. Parkinson even cites approvingly Kent Flannery's odd claim that archaeology has no theory of its own, that all we have is theory from cultural anthropology. With the exception of Goldstein, the authors seem oblivious to the possibility that archaeologists might want to affiliate intellectually with disciplines beyond anthropology. The intellectual potential of such affiliations seems obvious to me, but I now inhabit the apparently foreign territory of interdisciplinary social science research. As I explain elsewhere (http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2011/05/why-anthropology-is-too-narrow.html), if one starts with the idea that four-field anthropology is a good thing, then it may make sense to affiliate with the other subdisciplines. But if one starts by asking, What is the best intellectual context for archaeology?—a question not considered in this volume—one may end up with a radically different answer. Alas, however, this will not solve the problem of convincing clueless deans and administrators of the value of the anthropology department.
