archaeological theory - the big picture (bruce trigger).pdf

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Rival Approaches: Old and New For two decades processual and postprocessual archaeologists have monopolized theoretical debate in anthropological archaeology. Their two positions seemed such perfect opposites of one another that most archaeologists came to believe that, if either side did not exist, the other would have had to invent it as a foil. Now, however, this battle appears to be winding down, with the protagonists intellectually exhausted and neither side close to being a winner. Key issues remain unresolved, while those involved try to ignore new theoretical approaches that challenge their monopoly of ideas. Concepts that both of these positions silently excluded now appear to be as important as those that each of them embraced. It is now time for a postmortem and for examining alternatives. Processual and postprocessual archaeology are not each sharply defined approaches: instead both are clusters of related positions. The two clusters are, however, largely non-overlapping and occupy the materialist and idealist ends of the theoretical spectrum. Processual archaeologists attempt to explain human behavior in terms of ecological adaptation, emphasize cross-cultural regularities, and embrace a cultural evolutionary view of social change. They tend to epiphenomenalize culture and dismiss idiosyncratic cultural variability, such as is found in art styles, as being of little interest. Postprocessualists seek to account for human behavior in cultural terms. They adopt an idealist epistemology, emphasize crosscultural variability, and, rejecting metanarratives, embrace a contingent, historical view of cultural change (Hodder 2001a; Preucel 1991; Preucel and Hodder 1996). These positions have gained authority as the result of being grounded in antithetical Western philosophical traditions that were defined as early as ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY: THE BIG PICTURE by Dr. Bruce G. Trigger James McGill Professor McGill University, Montreal, Canada

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Page 1: ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY - THE BIG PICTURE (Bruce Trigger).pdf

Rival Approaches: Old and New

For two decades processual and postprocessual archaeologists have monopolized theoretical debate in anthropological archaeology. Their two positions seemed such perfect opposites of one another that most archaeologists came to believe that, if either side did not exist, the other would have had to invent it as a foil. Now, however, this battle appears to be winding down, with the protagonists intellectually exhausted and neither side close to being a winner. Key issues remain unresolved, while those involved try to ignore new theoretical approaches that challenge their monopoly of ideas. Concepts that both of these positions silently excluded now appear to be as important as those that each of them embraced. It is now time for a postmortem and for examining alternatives. Processual and postprocessual archaeology are not each sharply defined approaches: instead both are clusters of related positions. The two clusters are, however, largely non-overlapping and occupy the materialist and idealist ends of the theoretical spectrum. Processual archaeologists attempt to explain human behavior in terms of ecological adaptation, emphasize cross-cultural regularities, and embrace a cultural evolutionary view of social change. They tend to epiphenomenalize culture and dismiss idiosyncratic cultural variability, such as is found in art styles, as being of little interest. Postprocessualists seek to account for human behavior in cultural terms. They adopt an idealist epistemology, emphasize crosscultural variability, and, rejecting metanarratives, embrace a contingent, historical view of cultural change (Hodder 2001a; Preucel 1991; Preucel and Hodder 1996). These positions have gained authority as the result of being grounded in antithetical Western philosophical traditions that were defined as early as

ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY: THE BIG PICTURE

by Dr. Bruce G. Trigger

James McGill ProfessorMcGill University, Montreal, Canada

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archaeology tends to justify the American view that these approaches are complementary rather than antithetical. Both processual and postprocessual archaeology are being challenged by other approaches. One of the most assertive of these is Darwinian or evolutionary archaeology (Barton and Clark 1997; Dunnell 1980; O’Brien 1996; O’Brien and Lyman 2000; Teltser 1995). This approach seeks to explain both human behavior and the material culture observable in the archaeological record using the concepts of biological evolution. Its principal contributions so far have been its freeing of evolutionary concepts in anthropology from the assumptions of unilinearity and teleological development that were associated with neoevolutionism. Yet Darwinian archaeology, no less than processual and postprocessual archaeology, has become a cluster of related positions. Purists argue that natural selection acting on individual humans is the main factor bringing about adaptive change (Dunnell 1978, 1980). More liberal Darwinian archaeologists see selection as acting mainly on ideas or artifacts and allow that cognitive factors and decisions by individual humans play a significant role in this form of selection (Leonard 2001; Leonard and Jones 1987: 214; O’Brien and Holland 1990). The latter position presupposes that innovation and selection are not wholly separate processes, as mutation and selection are construed to be in biological evolution (Boone and Smith 1998: S148-S149; Cowgill 2000: 52). Convincing evidence has been presented that both natural and conscious selection affect human behavior, although human cognitive abilities appear to play a major role in making conscious selection by human agents a far more efficient, less wasteful, and more unilinear process than is natural selection. Many species of animals can learn to avoid life-threatening incidents as a result of personal experience, but only human beings are capable of learning such behavior solely by admonition and instruction (Boone and Smith 1998; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Roscoe 2002: 111-113; Shennan 2002; Snow 2002; Trigger 1998). Long ago Kroeber (1952) argued this point eloquently and in great detail, although his work is now generally forgotten. Another rapidly developing approach is cognitive archaeology. It reflects an increasing interest in the findings of cognitive and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience concerning how innate factors influence human behavior. Basic to this development is the belief that human thought is not simply rational but has various built-in goals that shape human behavior. For example, arguments are advanced that human beings are naturally predisposed to be hierarchical as well as sociable; that they are naturally inclined to try to maximize their reproductive

the eighteenth century. Processualism is closely aligned with modernism and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought, with its emphasis on rationalism and cultural progress, was preoccupied with the uniformities shared by peoples at the same level of development. Postprocessualism is deeply influenced by the postmodernist movement. Postmodernism in turn is derived from romanticism, which developed as a reaction against Enlightenment thought and stressed the emotional aspects of human behavior and an idiosyncratic cultural diversity rooted in attachments to home, family, community, region, country, ethnic group, and religion. In the nineteenth century, evolutionists studied regularities in human behavior, while romantics, inspired by the German philosopher Johann Herder, celebrated the cultural diversity of human groups by emphasizing the idiosyncratic variations among cultures (Trigger 1998; Zammito 2002). Yet, as Hegmon (2003: 232) has pointed out, postprocessualists have embraced modernist as well as postmodernist ideas. Among the modernist approaches she includes Marxism, structuralism, critical theory, and Gidden’s theory of agency and structuration. Nevertheless, postprocessual archaeologists have given each of these positions a postmodern spin. Processual and postprocessual archaeology have been construed very differently in the United Kingdom and the United States. In Britain, the two approaches are generally viewed as mutually exclusive and their differences as grounded in the nature of things; hence it is assumed that eventually the triumph of one will result in the annihilation of the other. Most American archaeologists view these approaches as complementing one another. They assume, for example, that a processual approach is well suited for studying subsistence patterns, but that a postprocessual one might be better adapted for investigating religious beliefs. Until recently, however, this eclecticism remained pragmatic and naive, and little effort was made to specify the conditions under which the two approaches might be synthesized to produce an articulated whole. The more relaxed American approach seems to reflect the systematic training that most American archaeologists have received in general anthropology. This training has made them aware of the longstanding tensions between ecological and cultural approaches in the social sciences and, in particular, of the failure either of the neoevolutionism of the 1960s or of earlier and later cultural approaches to dominate sociocultural anthropology. By contrast, the disciplinary separation between archaeology and anthropology in Britain has meant that British archaeologists tend to select and utilize particular anthropological theories, often with great sophistication, but with less general background knowledge. The growing impasse between processual and postprocessual

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and postprocessual archaeology are complementary rather than contradictory analytical approaches (Cunningham 2003; Preucel 1991; VanPool and VanPool 1999, 2003; Wylie 1993, 2000). Behavioral archaeologists are actively seeking to ‘build bridges’ with other approaches (Schiffer 1996, 2000; Skibo and Feinman 1999; Skibo, Walker, and Nielsen 1995). Hegmon (2003) documents the various ideas that are being combined to constitute what she has designated as ‘processual-plus’ archaeology. Pauketat (2003) expounds a theoretical amalgam that he calls historical-processual archaeology. The chief opposition to such outreach comes from Darwinian archaeologists, who are intent on establishing a hegemonic position for their own approach (Lyman and O’Brien 1998; O’Brien, Lyman, and Leonard 1998). Even they, however, seek to incorporate what they regard as the most enduring concepts of culture-historical archaeology into their own theoretical structure (Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell 1997; O’Brien and Lyman 2000). It is clear that sometimes what are alleged to be outreaches that seek to reconcile very different approaches are undertaken in the hope that by this means one theoretical orientation may absorb another (VanPool and VanPool 2003:1). In Britain, many postprocessual archaeologists, while formally acknowledging the constraints of data, relentlessly seek to relativise the arguments of archaeologists who are not postprocessualists and continue to pursue interpretive programs that do little to rigorously test the claims they make about beliefs in prehistoric cultures (Gosden 1999; Hodder 2001a; Johnson 1999; A. Jones 2002; S. Jones 1997: 139-144). Other archaeologists sincerely seek to derive mutual benefits by subjecting existing perspectives to critical analysis and trying to harmonize them (Preucel 1991; VanPool and VanPool 1999, 2003; Schiffer 2000). Both predatory and altruistic dialogues, by enhancing a detailed understanding of different points of view, increase the possibility of developing more comprehensive and useful theoretical formulations. That existing bodies of theory are not only mutually comprehensible but capable to some degree of selective integration is evidence that they should not be regarded as paradigms. A crucial feature of Kuhn’s (1962, 1970, 1977, 1992; Bird 2000) delineation of paradigms was their incommensurability; Kuhn maintained that no paradigm could be clearly understood by a scientist who worked within the context of an alternative one. Treating theoretical orientations as paradigms therefore encourages exclusion and polemic rather than the systematic comparison, testing, and synthesis of ideas (Schiffer 1996:

capacity; and that they can more readily solve problems relating to social and practical matters than they can problems framed in terms of abstract principles. It has also been proposed that different types of intelligence developed at various stages of biological evolution and that the relatively recent interlinking of these intelligences explains unique features of human behavior, such as the development of art and religious beliefs (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Boyer 1994, 1996; Carrithers 1992; Donald 1991; Mithen 1996; Shennan 2002; Steele 2002). Topics such as these represent the revival of the investigation of what nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists called ‘psychic unity’ and to which, instead of to technological and ecological factors, they attributed most of the parallels in human behavior that they believed had occurred at specific stages in cultural development. In recent years, archaeologists also have been studying the effects on human behavior of writing and other forms of material culture that can serve as means of external symbolic storage (Renfrew and Scarre 1998; Schiffer 1999). Social archaeology continues to offer new perspectives that are intended to explain prehistoric human behavior. The most active tendency is behavioral archaeology, which diverged from processual archaeology in the 1970s, and in the course of doing so shed processual archaeology’s preoccupation with ecological factors as prime movers. The goals of behavioral archaeology are to relate human behavior to material culture and explain how human beings created the archaeological record (Schiffer 1976, 1995, 1999). In Spain, a new generation of Marxist archaeologists seeks to use classical Marxist concepts relating to relations of production, consumption, and power to understand the archaeological record (Chapman 2003). Once it is accepted that the concept of function does not inevitably preclude an interest in change (Evans-Pritchard 1949, 1962), it becomes possible to perceive considerable overlap between what social archaeologists study as function and what moderate Darwinian archaeologists investigate as selection. Finally, Kehoe (1998) has attempted to rehabilitate culture-historical archaeology.

Dialogue and Contestation

In the United States, an increasing number of attempts are currently being made to promote dialogue between various theoretical approaches in archaeology in order to determine to what extent they are complementary and might become the basis of more comprehensive and useful hybrid formulations. For over a decade, many American archaeologists have argued that processual

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modern society as well as how archaeologists have been recruited and treated one another (Conkey and Spector 1984; Leone and Potter 1988; Silverberg 1968). It is far better to try to deal with presuppositions at a conscious level than to become their unwitting victims. Although it can never guarantee objectivity, explicit high-level theory is essential for a mature and self-critical discipline. The more accurately high-level theory can model human behavior and facilitate an understanding of how material culture and human behavior relate to each other, the more it can encourage objectivity in the analysis of archaeological data (Trigger 1989a, 1989b, 2003b; Wylie 2002). A separate issue is whether the processual-postprocessual debate has been necessary? Processual archaeology developed within the context of widespread dissatisfaction with the limitations of culture-historical archaeology. Yet it was already well-known in the 1960s that ecological adaptation did not account for many aspects of cultural variation, including numerous features of subsistence patterns. Adaptations are rarely based on a perfect knowledge of the environment and, in all but the most extreme circumstances, various adaptive strategies can sustain a group in a satisfactory fashion (Sahlins 1976a). Optimal foraging theory and deductive site catchment analysis rarely can predict the precise subsistence pattern that was followed in a specific location in prehistoric times. What I had learned as an undergraduate in the late 1950s about geographical possibilism --the belief that, while the natural environment imposes limitations on what human beings and their technology can do, it does not determine specific human responses -- made it impossible for me to take seriously all-embracing claims made by early processual archaeologists that were based on the concept of ecological determinism (compare Meggers 1960; Sanders and Price 1968; Struever 1968a,b and Trigger 1971). Childe (1928) had applied the possibilist approach to archaeology long before, when he argued that postglacial desiccation in the Middle East had probably resulted in some hunter-gatherer peoples dying out, while other groups relocated to wetter environments and still others invented agriculture. He also maintained that the city-state system that developed in Mesopotamia and the divine monarchy that had united ancient Egypt were merely alternative political strategies for controlling larger and more productive societies. Likewise, what anthropologists knew about the ethnography of Africa and the indigenous societies of the Americas should have suggested that the models of tribes and chiefdoms that were being constructed by Sahlins (1958, 1968) and Service (1962, 1975) reflected primarily the Melanesian and Polynesian societies with which they were most familiar. These models did not take into

659; VanPool and VanPool 2003). Its discouraging of dialogue also encourages much reinventing of the wheel by the adherents of rival paradigms. Theory can be defined as the guiding principles that help us to make sense of specific cases and of the world around us (Hegmon 2003: 213). Scientific theory consists of such principles as are testable or at least supportable using sensory evidence. More specifically, guiding principles propose lawful mechanisms that claim to account in a generalizing manner for how things operate and how they have come to be as we find them (Bunge 1997). Such an approach requires a realist epistemology, which admits that not only what can be perceived but also phenomena that are currently unobservable as well as hypothesized processes are appropriate objects for scientific study (Bhaskar 1978). Anyone who accepts a biological evolutionary origin for the human species must also embrace a materialist explanation of human behavior. That does not, however, entail a reductionist approach that denies the emergence of qualitatively unique forms of human behavior requiring their own forms of explanation (Trigger 2003b: 133-134). Good theories lead us to look for evidence we might otherwise overlook or underrate (Terrell 2003: 74). High-level theory consists of the abstract rules which interrelate the theoretical principles that are required to understand a major category of phenomena (Bhaskar 1978; Clarke 1979: 25-30; Harris 1979: 26-27). In archaeology, high-level theory invariably deals with propositions concerning human behavior. Yet, as a result of recent advances in the study of material culture, high-level archaeological theory can now be defined more specifically as all social science theory that assists archaeologists to understand artifacts in terms of human behavior and human behavior in relation to artifacts. Do archaeologists really need high-level theory or would it be preferable to try to get along without it? Relatively few archaeologists are primarily interested in archaeological theory either in the United States or in Britain; instead they seek to learn more about specific sites, peoples, cultures, and forms of behavior. Traditional Baconian induction construes theoretical understanding as being the end point of archaeological research and general theories as something that should grow out of research. The problem with this position is that every aspect of archaeological research is influenced by presuppositions which constitute implicit theory. The main difference between a deductive and an inductive approach is the extent to which archaeologists are aware of these presuppositions. The history of archaeology provides numerous examples of how in the past unconscious beliefs influenced practice and interpretation in ways that reinforced racial, class, and gender stereotypes in

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intellectually indefensible in a multicultural, postcolonial world (S. Diamond 1974; Giddens 1984; Rowlands 1989). Cultures, if they are to be compared at all, must be compared as wholes (Geertz 1973; Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Rose 1991; Sahlins 1976a; Shepherd 1993). Within such an intellectual environment, there is no place for cross-cultural generalizations. Is this return to the relativistic ideas of Boasian anthropology justified and is it true that ecologists and neoevolutionists have nothing to teach archaeologists? Donald Brown’s (1991) study of human universals suggests that this is not the case. The wholesale replacement of one theoretical position by another, without a careful, systematic consideration of their respective strengths and weaknesses, encourages reinventing the wheel. In terms of general theory, the dichotomy between processual and postprocessual archaeology was never justified. Most anthropologists have long agreed that all human behavior is conceptually, and hence culturally, mediated, although they have disagreed concerning to what extent it is culturally determined. In his later writings, Childe (1949: 6-8; 1956) embraced what has become the key tenet of postprocessual archaeology: that the world humans adapt to is not the world as it really is but the world as people believe it to be. Childe argued that the landscape of central Australia, as perceived by Aboriginal hunter-gatherers, was not the same as that perceived by Europeans interested in mineral extraction. Nevertheless, Childe remained a materialist; he viewed cultural understandings as providing the extrasomatic means by which human beings adapt, in a very flexible manner, to their natural environment. Human beings can know only through their minds and brains, but minds and brains exist within organisms that must survive in the natural world. Hence every view of the world must accord to a significant degree with the world as it really is in order to endure (Childe 1956: 58-60). Childe argued that both the beliefs of hunter-gatherers and those of modern industrial nations must be judged effective according to the degree to which they achieved this goal in their particular settings. Yet effective subsistence practices do not signify that a hunter-gatherer society’s understanding of the environment must be based on the same concepts as those used by Western cultural ecologists. Hunter-gatherers do not calculate their subsistence behavior in terms of energy expenditures measured in calories. In many traditional societies, knowledge of the environment and of the impact that human beings have on it is encoded in religious beliefs (Tanner 1979). Yet such beliefs record a hunter-gatherer’s understanding of how the environment works and how a living may be derived from it that is probably

account the distinctive features of societies at equivalent levels of complexity elsewhere. Such extra data would have indicated that regional cultural traditions, as well as ecological and evolutionary factors, were sigificantly associated with cultural variation. I find it puzzling that in the 1960s Boasian and social anthropologists did not challenge neoevolutionists more directly on this point. Archaeologists were thereby deprived of critical guidance by their anthropological colleagues. Processual archaeology’s preoccupation with cross-cultural regularities was justified by appealing to Julian Steward’s (1955: 209) concept of a core culture. Steward maintained that only cross-cultural similarities were of scientific, and hence anthropological, interest. From this point of view, all early civilizations having kings would have been a phenomenon worthy of anthropological study, but the culturally variable ways in which kingship was symbolized in various cultures – by crowns, stools, scepters, or parasols – were not. Steward argued that anthropologists should investigate only cross-cultural regularities, which he maintained were adaptively significant, while abandoning idiosyncratic traits to an inferior breed of culture historians. His ecological approach, although taking account of environmental variation, tended to dismiss whatever was culturally specific as epiphenomenal and hence of no scientific interest. In this manner, Steward sought to discredit Boasian cultural anthropology. In his earliest theoretical writing, Binford (1962: 220; 1965: 206-207) drew a similar distinction between style and function. The rejection of the significance of cultural idiosyncracies was an exclusionary act of theory-building that archaeologists in the 1960s should have recognized for what it was. Kroeber’s (1952) studies had already made it clear that in anthropology, as in biology, the investigation of the processes of evolution must be grounded on a detailed understanding of the specificities of change. History and archaeology were to anthropology what palaeontology was to biology. It also should not have come as a surprise to anyone when cross-cultural regularities almost invariably fell short of neoevolutionist expectations. Binford (2001) soldiers on, but increasingly restricts his research to those aspects of human behavior that exhibit strong cross-cultural regularities. On the other hand, cultural anthropologists, influenced by postmodernism, have gone to the other extreme. Cultural variation is assumed to be even more idiosyncratic than Boas (1963: 154) thought it to be. Geertz (1965: 101) declared all cross-cultural regularities to be meaningless intellectual constructions and stressed the need to understand each culture individually and contextually. Studies of cultural evolution have likewise been rejected as ethnocentric and

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wrest agenda setting by producing the next ‘heresy-aspiring-to-dogma.’ Given the ‘nature of the game,’ we have all been pushed into stronger stances of critique and argumentation than we might feel stylistically comfortable with.” Kelly (2000: 78) has observed more trenchantly that archaeologists “reward polemic, bombast, and showmanship rather than the serious testing of ideas.” Sometimes specific theoretical debates encourage fruitful inductive research that conclusively resolves contentious issues. All too often, however, arguments tend to focus on one or a few inconclusive case studies. The primary goal of the participants is to score points rather than to ascertain the truth. In particular, this approach tempts analysts to select facts and otherwise to gloss over or disguise weaknesses in their arguments. Rhetoric and polemic are greatly admired. It is widely assumed that, as with legal trials, truth will emerge from such partisan behavior. Yet, the track record of modern legal systems does not make this analogy a particularly encouraging one. Most debates of this sort, rather than producing broad new agreements, sputter out inconclusively, with the exhausted combatants still at loggerheads, as appears to be happening with processual and postprocessual archaeologists. There is, however, a reason why debates are essential: even if they do not produce conclusive answers, they result in a more detailed understanding of the issues involved than could be achieved by a less adversarial approach (Kuhn 1977). Despite the extraordinary lucidity of Childe’s later theoretical writings, many aspects of his ideas remained undeveloped. This made his basic concepts difficult for most archaeologists to understand. There was also much about them that we can recognize in retrospect Childe himself did not understand. Seemingly endless debates between processual and postprocessual archaeologists have been needed to clarify the sorts of issues that Childe dealt with and make them widely understood. The more recent theoretical approaches in archaeology have their own problems that require discussion and clarification. Despite the claim that Darwinian archaeology provides a self-contained replacement for existing high-level theories, the distinction that Darwinian archaeologists draw between traits that are subject to selection and those which are not perpetuates the differentiation between adaptive and non-adaptive features that limited the explanatory power of processual archaeology and encouraged the development of postprocessualism. Nor is it universally accepted that culture-historical archaeology has adequately accounted for the behavior of ‘non-selective’ traits, as Darwinian archaeologists maintain (compare S. Jones 1997: 130-131 and Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell 1997). Some studies call into question the

even more detailed and precise than is that of a cultural ecologist. Much wrangling between processual and postprocessual archaeologists might have been avoided had processual archaeologists, in conformity with their claim to be behaviorists, accepted that what they were discussing using archaeological evidence was whether prehistoric societies had behaved rationally in terms of their subsistence activities and not what specific concepts were guiding their behavior. The diachronic expression of Childe’s position, and its origin, can be found in Karl Marx’s assertion that “human beings make their own history... not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but [under ones] directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1852 in Marx and Engels 1962, I:247). Thus Marx took cultural traditions seriously, although he believed that they could be altered relatively easily by the pursuit of cross-culturally meaningful economic interests. Over the years, this seminal formulation has played an increasingly important role in stimulating debates about social science theory. Much discussion has focused on the degree of ease or difficulty with which people can transcend and transform their cultural heritage as a result of goal-seeking. Bourdieu (1977), by drawing attention to the role of non-verbalized and often unconscious behavior (habitus), has emphasized the intractable nature of our cultural heritage. There is also debate concerning the units in terms of which such changes are best studied. While Marx preferred to consider interest groups, which may in some cases correspond with social classes, Giddens (1984) has stressed the role of the individual. It is tempting to conclude from this that the development of archaeological theory would have occurred faster and more straightforwardly had more attention been paid to Childe’s later theoretical writings. In particular, a large number of tedious and unproductive debates between processual and postprocessual archaeologists might have been avoided. Yet I do not believe that in reality such fast-track development would have been possible. Closely argued, passionate, and dramatic debates are a vital part of the adversarial approach that characterizes discourse in the social sciences. Young scholars often initiate controversies in hopes of promoting their careers, while protracted quarrels between established academics fascinate their colleagues. The debate between Lewis and Sally Binford (1966) and François Bordes (1972) as to whether different Mousterian industries represented tribal groups or specialized tool-kits epitomized the rival claims of the culture-historical and processual approaches of the 1960s and 1970s. There is, however, a down side. Kus (2000: 169) has observed that “Too often the way to attention in our discipline... is to

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of hominid evolution? Do individuals possess a variety of different forms of intelligence and, if so, how do these forms of intelligence relate to one other? Many adaptive forms of behavior can be explained more economically in terms of the generic rationality invoked by processual archaeologists than by the special forms of human reason postulated by some Darwinian archaeologists (Shennan 2002). Experimental research on conditions that promote optimal problem solving by humans has led to different conclusions (Steele 2002: 32-37). Most archaeologists and anthropologists rightly fear that countenancing any biological interpretations will result in reseachers trying to embed biologically whatever they wish to believe about human behavior (S. Jones 1997: 65-72). As a result, archaeologists have generally avoided contact with these fields (Sahlins 1976b). Yet the failure by archaeologists to develop closer relations with evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists exposes their own discipline no less than these other fields to the threats of quackery and racism. This is a theoretical approach that is in need of much interdisciplinary development before its promise for archaeological interpretation is realized.

Comparative Evaluation

Human behavior is clearly complex and influenced by biological predispositions, cultural programming, and a variety of ecological factors that express themselves in varied forms of selection and functional constraints. No theoretical formulation invoking a narrow range of causal factors, such as ecological or cultural determinism, is likely to account for the totality of human behavior or its material expression. While each major approach currently used by archaeologists provides useful explanatory insights, none of them excludes other theories. So what are archaeologists to do? Hodder (2001b) has noted that it is increasingly necessary for archaeologists to combine different bodies of theory to answer specific problems. Yet he questions the wisdom of efforts to create a unifying framework for archaeological theory and suggests that instead archaeologists should view specific combinations of theoretical propositions as collections of discourses that are often, like paradigms, mutually incomprehensible. This proposal accords with a relativist, cultural perspective of the Boasian sort, which seeks to deny that there are other than contingent explanations of human behavior or sociocultural processes. Hodder’s intervention is the equivalent of asking whether there really was an elephant for the proverbial blind folk to examine, or whether they were feeling

belief that stylistic aspects of material culture are merely passive reflections of rule-governed behavior. They maintain that on the contrary all material culture is actively involved in processes of social production, reproduction, and transformation (Hodder 1982; Miller 1985; Shennan 2002: 75-77). Such findings suggest that all traits are subject to selection, although some may be selected to enhance cognitive coherence within a culture while others are selected in terms of ecological adaptation. Boyd and Richerson (1985) have demonstrated that repeated transmissions of knowledge result in selection in favor of more useful variants of ideas as well as of ideas that better serve collective as well as individual interests. Cultural traditions also accumulate alternative behavioral strategies that provide individuals with ready-made guidance for coping with variable conditions, such as good and bad crop years or weak and strong leaders (Salzman 2000). Contrary to the belief that new is better, most forms of knowledge that endure over long periods may have enhanced selective value, especially from a societal point of view. It is also questionable whether Darwinian archaeology’s idea of material culture as an extrasomatic phenotype (Leonard 2001; Leonard and Jones 1987; O’Brien and Holland 1995) has more to recommend it than has the conventional view of material culture as a humanly constructed environment. In general, the reductionist tendencies of Darwinian archaeology seem to ignore the complexity and emergent novelty of human behavior as well as the conscious and constructive role played by individual humans in the selection process. Finally, there is considerable overlap between Darwinian archaeology’s concept of selection and the concepts of function and adapation used by processual archaeologists. Darwinian archaeology certainly has much to offer that is of value; yet it probably provides no more in the way of a complete theoretical perspective than do processual and postprocessual archaeology (Schiffer 1996). Cognitive archaeology remains in an embryonic state. Archaeologists generally believe that behavioral patterns are likely to become biologically embedded only if they have been selected for over very long periods; hence, like other anthropologists, they reject the more extreme claims of sociobiologists (Wilson 1975). For their part, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists know little for certain about the biological basis of human behavior, although progess has been made in determining the genetic basis of some features of grammar (Gopnik 1997). Are human beings naturally driven to try to maximize the number of their biological descendants or has such behavior, if it ever existed among other primates, been overridden in the course

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civilization was sufficiently well-documented, archaeologically or textually, to be included (Trigger 2003a: 15-39). To minimize biasing my data and construing them ethnocentrically, as postmodernists regularly accuse comparativists of doing, I spent considerable time trying to understand each early civilization from an internalist (emic) perspective. For example, each early civilization I studied had a head of state who was normally male and whose office was hereditary in theory, practice, or both. Most comparative anthropologists would refer to such an individual as a ‘king’ and treat these office-holders as equivalent. Yet, it becomes clear as a result of my textual research that the powers and responsibilities of these rulers varied considerably from one early civilization to another and that their office was never conceptualized in precisely the same way in any two early civilizations. The Egyptian nswt was terminologically marked as a universal ruler: only one person in the world could legitimately bear this title and he had to be an Egyptian. By contrast, each city state in the Valley of Mexico was headed by a tlatoani, or ‘great speaker,’ one of whose main duties was to be a military leader. The Yoruba term oba was restricted to rulers who claimed descent from the earth-creating god Oduduwa, and hence could be applied only to kings who were Yoruba or could claim Yoruba ancestry. Obas were ritually secluded, which meant that, while they were held ritually responsible for the outcomes of wars, they normally did not lead armies (Smith 1969: 120). Any valid comparison of kingship in early civilizations must take account of these and other cultural differences (Trigger 2003a: 71-91). Only by using textual data to determine the meaning of offices, institutions, and religious and legal concepts was it possible to accord something approaching equivalent importance to cultural and behavioral data. And only by doing this was it possible to critique in a realistic and relatively unbiased manner the materialist and idealist theories that have prioritized behavioral and cultural explanations respectively. My attempts to achieve a rounded understanding of each early civilization tangentially produced some interesting insights into the history of behaviorist and cultural approaches in archaeology and anthropology. Works published in the 1960s, when behaviorism and neoevolutionism were dominant, yielded detailed and very useful information about ecological, economic, social, and political behavior in early civilizations, but few insights into how people living in these societies had viewed these activities, themselves, or the cosmos. Only beginning in the 1980s did archaeologists and anthropologists attempt to understand the religious beliefs, values, and worldviews of people living in

something else – perhaps each other. His viewpoint constitutes a transparent and uncompromising attempt to establish the supremacy of postprocessualism. The alternative possibility is that different types of explanations can be integrated within a larger theoretical framework and that, by working together, archaeologists (and sociocultural anthropologists) who hold varied theoretical positions can begin to determine the nature of this framework (Kelly 2000: 78). This option supposes that the proverbial elephant exists and that the blind people studying it can eventually determine what it looks like. To investigate this possibility, I decided in the late 1980s to undertake a detailed study of similarities and differences in culture and behavior in early civilizations in order to determine whether patterns could be discovered that would shed light on this problem (Trigger 1993, 2003a). This decision was premised on my belief that a thorough comparison required the examination of idiosyncracies as well as of what is cross-culturally similar, keeping in mind that the latter can be the result either of historical connections or of convergent development. I chose to study early civilizations because it is currently impossible to distinguish whether many shared features among hunter-gatherer societies are homologies resulting from historical connections going far back into human history or analogies that result from independent convergent development. While early civilizations share various historical connections, especially among the geographically more remote ones these connections are tenuous and can be distinguished from convergent development by examining closely the archaeological record of the rise of each civilization. To make the detailed comparisons my study required, I needed early civilizations that were thoroughly documented both archaeologically and textually. Detailed information about sociopolitical organization, economy, beliefs, and values is available for only a few of these societies. I therefore decided to compare the seven best documented early civilizations around the world: Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt, early Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Valley of Mexico in the early seventeenth century AD, the Classic Maya, Inka Peru, and the Yoruba-Benin culture of West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD. Overall, these civilizations were sufficiently widely distributed to minimize historical connections and provide sound evidence concerning convergent development. In addition, the early civilizations that were in close geographical proximity and for which there was considerable evidence of historical connections displayed unexpectedly high degrees of structural variation. A major area where early civilizations had developed that could not be included was South Asia: neither the Indus nor the early Gangetic

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these factors increased the need for privileged groups to ensure protection of their property, which in turn made effective, long-term coercion by rulers possible (Trigger 2003a: 279-337). By contrast, only two basic types of political organization were evident among the well-documented early civilizations I examined: city states and territorial states. City-state civilizations consisted of clusters of small states, each of which had a relatively compact urban center inhabited by a considerable portion of the total population, including many farmers. The rulers of these states exerted varying degrees of power over their neighbors and sometimes forced rulers of weaker nearby states to pay them tribute; yet little effort was made to micromanage the governing of subordinate polities. Territorial states were much larger and were governed by state officials who were located in a nested hierarchy of relatively small and often less compactly arranged administrative centers inhabited only by rulers, civil servants, elite artisans, and their servants (Maisels 1990; Trigger 2003a: 92-141). Those who seek to privilege idiosyncratic variation suggest that many more types of political organization existed in early civilizations (Cowgill 1997; Kenoyer 1997; Maisels 1999: 186-259; Possehl 1998). Yet the documentation supporting these alternatives is invariably weak and delineations based on it highly speculative; hence some or all of these variations may prove as illusory as did Eric Thompson’s (1954) Classic Maya theocracies. Some of the variation in the economic organization of early civilizations correlates with the distinction between territorial and city states. In city-state systems, public markets generally flourished, foreign trade was often carried on by merchants who were relatively free of government control, and full-time craft workers produced goods for a broad clientele. In territorial states, elite artisans worked for the government and the upper classes, while farmers generally manufactured and exchanged goods made from inexpensive, local raw materials for their own use. Foreign trade was a government monopoly in territorial states (Trigger 2003a: 338-374). Despite claims to the contrary (Claessen and Skalnik 1978; Feinman 1998; Marcus 1998; Renfrew 1997), these two types of early civilizations did not form a developmental sequence nor do they correlate with different environmental settings. Contrary to Michael Mann’s (1986) argument that small states were the norm, city-state systems and territorial states appear to represent alternative patterns that were functionally viable at the level of organizational complexity and productivity achieved by early civilizations.

specific early civilizations. Prior to the 1990s, studies of Inka religion were little more than recitals of superficial, ethnocentric observations made by Spanish writers in the sixteenth century. Only recently have scholars begun to examine more detailed colonial records and to carry out ethnographic research in order to gain deeper insights into Andean religious beliefs (Gose 1995; MacCormack 1991; Salomon 1991). Likewise, while in the 1960s social scientists of both Yoruba and Western origin produced excellent studies of traditional Yoruba agriculture, economic and political organization, and warfare, detailed studies of Yoruba beliefs, values, and worldview did not appear before the 1990s (Apter 1992; Barber 1991). Thus a rounded understanding of each early civilization could be achieved only by combining the findings of materialists and new cultural anthropologists. These observations supported my initial impression that, although processual and postprocessual archaeology are based on antithetical theoretical positions, they are fundamentally complementary. The environmental settings, subsistence patterns, and production and exchange systems of the seven early civilizations I examined displayed far more variation than neoevolutionists, such as Julian Steward (1949), had imagined. General ecological constraints are obviously important: for example, no hunter-gatherer society has ever developed a monarchical form of government and anthropologists seem agreed that no society combining these two features will ever be found. The different agricultural systems of the seven early civilizations represented the intensification of distinctive, separately-evolved, and locally-adapted practices that had been in place in particular regions long before the earliest state or civilization developed there (J. Diamond 1997). Farmers had long possessed detailed ecological knowledge that allowed them to adjust their production techniques as population density increased and ecological conditions changed. Much of the variation in subsistence patterns among early civilizations therefore can be explained as adaptations to different environmental settings. Early civilizations developed in many different kinds of environments: river valleys in arid climates (Egypt, Mesopotamia), tropical forests and savannas (Maya, Yoruba), highland valleys (Mexico, Peru), and temperate rainfall zones (Shang China). The radically different natural configurations of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates floodplains meant that very different hydraulic regimes had to be developed in these two regions (Adams 1981; Butzer 1976). The main factors facilitating the development of the state were not the development of particular agricultural regimes or forms of craft production but sedentary life, investment in land to maintain and increase its productivity, and growing numbers of possessions. Ralph Linton (1933, 1939) recognized long ago that

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Darwinian archaeologists maintain that elite art styles are selectively neutral (Dunnell 1978). The alternative formal possibilities are sufficiently numerous that no two styles ever independently duplicate one another. Yet the social functions of such art were so important that no early civilization failed to develop its own elite style. Elite art therefore has stylistic features that are quintessentially culturally idiosyncratic, but also social and psychological features that must be understood cross-culturally. The stylistic unity of the elite art produced within each early civilization also exemplifies Gellner’s (1982) proposition that, in those aspects of cultures where the chief constraints on what people do are not imposed by limited natural resources, it is necessary to impose a symbolic order in order to render culture meaningful. With elite art, this symbolic ordering takes the form of elaborate stylistic patterning. One of my most surprising and potentially most controversial discoveries was that three basic concepts underlay the highly varied religious beliefs of all seven early civilizations. It was believed in each early civilization not only that gods, who were, or who animated, the universe, nourished and sustained humans, but also that, if humans did not in turn nourish deities with sacrifices, the gods would weaken or die and the universe fall into chaos. Thirdly, while farmers produced most of the food that fed the gods, the upper classes, and especially kings, claimed an essential role in ritually channelling this nourishment back into the supernatural realm. These views seem to have represented a metaphorical projection of tributary relations that existed on the human plane into the cosmic realm. By grounding the survival of the cosmic order on both the productivity of farmers and the administrative and ritual skills of the upper classes, this view also appears to have enlisted supernatural concepts to help maintain a political balance between rulers and ruled that was necessary for early civilizations, with their relatively rudimentary mechanisms of political control, to survive (Trigger 2003a: 472-494; also Houston et al. 2003). These religious beliefs constitute evidence of cross-cultural regularity that can only tendentiously be construed as being ecologically-grounded. Neoevolutionists generally have maintained that religious beliefs are less determined by ecological constraints than is economic or political behavior, and therefore that religious beliefs are more likely to take the form of selectively-neutral cultural traditions and be cross-culturally idiosyncratic (Friedman and Rowlands 1978: 203-205). My findings demonstrate that significant cross-cultural regularities underlie the more specific religious beliefs of early civilizations. These particular general regularities, which are not present in less

The significant economic variation that correlates with these two political types demonstrates the utility of functionalist approaches and also reinforces the integrity of these two varieties of early civilizations. Whatever factors shaped the development of early civilizations, only a few basic patterns of political and economic organization appear to have had sufficient coherence to survive over long periods (Flannery 1972). These findings suggest the utility of social anthropological and materialist Marxist approaches, which both view society as a point of departure for explaining many aspects of human behavior. Contrariwise, elite styles of art in early civilizations provide striking examples of cross-cultural idiosyncracy. One does not have to be a specialist to be able to distinguish ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Shang Chinese, and Aztec art in modern collections. This accords with the generally-held belief that specific art styles are purely cultural phenomena, unlike the capacity to produce art, which is a ubiquitous, species-specific feature of human behavior that can be documented as having evolved at least as early as the Upper Palaeolithic period and is related to the human ability to symbolize (Mithen 1996). Elite art styles tended to emerge quickly in the early stages of the development of each civilization. Thereafter, while these styles slowly changed, their basic patterns remained intact for long periods (Kemp 1989: 19-63; Townsend 1979). While each civilization evolved a distinctive art style, there is no way to account for its specific features, except by tracing its historical origins and development. These styles were employed to symbolize and reinforce the political coherence of states and state systems, while at the same time they affirmed the political and economic dominance of the upper classes, who directly or indirectly controlled the production and use of high-status goods. Carrying out these functions required elite art styles to be internally homogeneous and recognizably different from those of any neighboring culture. Within city-state systems, individual states sometimes developed local variants of the elite art style of the civilization of which they were a part in order to signal their own identity within a broader context of shared values and upper-class alliances. Elite styles tended to be more unified and refined in territorial states than in city-state civilizations, because the single rulers of territorial states controlled much more wealth and monopolized the services of the most skilled artisans, as well as the procurement of the exotic materials that these artisans utilized. In city-state civilizations, where full-time craft workers produced goods for a broader social spectrum, the best quality works of art were manufactured for hegemonic rulers, who controlled more wealth than did tributary kings (Trigger 2003a: 541-583).

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politican sustained armed retainers who intimated rivals and commoners alike, enabling him to pursue a political career. The alternative was to become a sage-priest of the Ifa cult. These priests were noted for their learning and ability to resolve disputes. Both warrior-politicians and sage-priests competed among themselves for influence and public recognition (R. Thompson 1976). The nobility of Shang China regarded military prowess, and closely related hunting skills, as important factors defining their social status. Such activities also provided wild game and human victims that as sacrifices empowered the spirits of noblemen’s ancestors and ensured their supernatural support (Lewis 1990). Each of these ideals was elaborated until it became a design for living that substantially influenced the lives of everyone in a particular early civilization. Those who lived in the Valley of Mexico equated women who died in childbirth with men who perished in battle, thereby symbolically identifying childbirth with military combat (Soustelle 1961: 190). The preoccupation with warfare also created a cosmovision in which armed conflict was represented as an altruistic activity that sustained the universe. Honor, social mobility, and public office all depended on a man’s ability to serve the gods as a warrior (Carrasco 1999). The Mesopotamian preoccupation with property led in that civilization to an unparalleled elaboration of techniques for accounting, payment, and extending credit (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993). These ideals also imposed limitations on cultures. The Mexican desire to capture prisoners for sacrifice did not equip them to defeat Spanish invaders intent on military conquest. The Egyptian bureaucratic ideal may have created good quartermasters, but it did not make for outstanding military commanders. The bureaucratic ideal developed at a time when the relatively isolated Egyptian state had no rivals. Yet it did not vanish when Egypt later had to contend with aggressive military powers based in the Sudan, Southwest Asia, and Europe. Despite Egypt’s wealth and substantial population, it came to be controlled by a succession of foreign rulers. We thus find an important aspect of Egyptian culture that, in spite of its seemingly negative selective implications, persisted under changed conditions. It is clear that values and ideals sometimes have the power to shape human behavior, even if that power is negative in the sense that it sustains, rather than transforms in seemingly desirable ways, existing behavior patterns. There is also no reason why the distinctive personal values held in the Valley of Mexico, among the Yoruba, and in Mesopotamia should have been specific to each of those cultures, all of which evolved in the context of rivalrous city

complex societies, must have been invented at least several times to occur in all seven early civilizations I have studied. Such cross-cultural uniformities provide striking evidence that human beings who lived in historically-unrelated early civilizations analysed social problems in the same general fashion. Such thinking appears to have been guided by tendencies to create similar metaphors (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Tilley 1999). It was also shaped by the recognition at some level of consciousness of a need in early civilizations to curb the personal material and social self-indulgence of the upper classes in the long-term interest of maintaining a collectivity on which rulers and subjects alike depended for their survival. This sort of adaptive behavior was focused not on controlling the natural environment but on constraining proclivities of human nature that appear to be products of millions of years of biological evolution. Such cross-cultural uniformity appears to be a manifestation of what has been called ‘psychic unity.’ Understanding better this aspect of human behavior requires archaeologists to establish closer relations with evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists. The most behaviorally consequential idiosyncratic beliefs of early civilizations were about what constituted a good life. These beliefs were pre-eminently associated with upper-class males, but influenced how everyone in these societies evaluated human conduct (Trigger 2003a: 626-637). Such views, like styles of elite art, developed at an early stage in the evolution of civilizations and persisted for long periods. They made each early civilization a unique cultural experience in the Geertzian and the traditional humanistic sense. In ancient Egypt, the ideal man was an administrator who sought to please his superiors. Such men strove to appear modest, personally unacquisitive, and good team players. In this way, they climbed the administrative ladder (Morenz 1973: 117-123). The Mesopotamians’ principal ideal, like that of their gods, was to acquire land and other forms of property and derive income from them. Men who were successful at doing this did not have to work with their hands but could serve on community councils, judge legal cases, and perform other empowering community duties (Van De Mieroop 1999: 212-213). The ideal in the Valley of Mexico was to be a successful warrior, which meant capturing enemy soldiers for sacrifice. No hereditary noble could qualify for public office without performing such feats, while commoners who excelled as warriors were granted noble status (Soustelle 1961: 217-224). The Yoruba valued individual competitiveness, but such behavior took two different forms. The warrior-

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social environments but also by their own bodies and minds. For example, the hierarchical behavior that was pervasive in all the early civilizations I examined went far beyond what was functionally required to process information and for authorities to enforce the decisions that were needed to administer complex societies. This behavior may reflect competitive tendencies that are common to all higher primates (Conroy 1990). While overtly hierarchical behavior was largely suppressed by gossip, ridicule, and fear of witchcraft in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, where generalized reciprocity made ecological sense, these cultural mechanisms for controlling a natural tendency ceased to be effective as societies grew larger and more complex (Lee 1990; Trigger 1990). No substitute has ever been evolved that effectively curbs such behavior in larger societies (Trigger 2003c). Finally, individual human beings and groups rarely, if ever, act on the basis of perfect knowledge and hence cannot foresee many of the consequences of their behavior. These outcomes are influenced not only by environmental factors but by functional constraints and selective processes, including natural selection, of which human beings rarely are aware. Yet archaeologists must strive to understand such processes in order to account for the forces that have shaped the archaeological record. While parsimony is often stated to be a desirable goal when constructing scientific theories, theoretical economy is self-defeating if it distorts or ignores the complexity of what is being explained. If archaeologists are to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework, they must take account of the cross-cultural regularities and idiosyncracies that relate not only to the ecological and sociopolitical spheres but also to belief systems. A general explanatory framework that applies to the archaeological record must also address the biological proclivities of human beings, the emergent properties of cultural systems, what is needed to survive in a world that exists independently of human volition, and the complex ways in which all these factors interact. This clearly constitutes an emergentist, rather than a reductionist, view of social science explanation. Cooperating to construct a comprehensive theory of human behavior that relates to the archaeological record may result in a common theoretical framework within which archaeologists can recognize, negotiate, and attempt to resolve their theoretical disagreements. While it is highly unlikely that such an endeavor will ever result in unanimous agreement, trying to construct such a framework ought to provide stronger and more efficacious incentives to achieve a reasoned reconciliation of divergent viewpoints than does direct

states. Each of these city-state systems would have been significantly different had its people embraced social values different from the ones they adopted. The development of social values, like that of elite art styles, seems to have been influenced by historical accidents that occurred at a formative stage in the development of each early civilization. Yet values are not like art styles; they influence societies in ways that are clearly not selectively neutral, as Darwinian archaeologists understand this concept. We must therefore conclude that aspects of ideational culture that affect societies at the same level of development in functionally significant ways can display idiosyncratic cross-cultural variation and that at least some features that significantly reduce the competitive ability of specific early civilizations can persist for long periods (Hall 1986: 27-110; Hallpike 1986: 288-371). This requires rethinking the range of strategies that characterize cultural, ethnic, and political interaction.

Towards a Unified Theoretical Framework

The aspects of early civilizations examined above illustrate how systematic comparative analysis can be used to evaluate archaeological theory as a basis for trying to construct larger and more comprehensive theoretical frameworks. Comparative studies offer an empirically-based strategy for systematically assessing the appropriateness of specific types of explanations, the utility of which in the past has tended to be determined on the basis of limited case studies or ad hoc explanations supported by anecdotal evidence. My research empirically supports rejection of claims that either a purely ecological or a purely cultural approach can account for most of human behavior or the archaeological record. Human behavior is both cognitively mediated and the means by which human groups and individuals adapt to the material world. Some aspects of human behavior must be accounted for contingently, while other aspects are susceptible to more general explanations. Contingent aspects often tend to be framed by more general ones; for example, idiosyncratic art styles presuppose a pan-human capacity to produce art. Yet, even when combined, processual and postprocessual approaches do not suffice to explain all archaeological data. Over millions of years, humans have evolved capacities for complex forms of cognition and symbolically-mediated analysis, as well as hormonally-based drives and various organic needs that constitute an internal environment to which individuals must adapt both behaviorally and conceptually. Human beings must cope with constraints imposed not only by their natural and

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to test specific theoretical propositions in the belief that, as with laboratory experiments, each test contributes to establishing the validity of a particular generalization. Once archaeologists acknowledge the complexity of factors that shape specific aspects of human behavior, they must also accept that a more accurate and informed understanding of how each individual factor shapes behavior cross-culturally requires understanding how it interacts with other factors in numerous specific instances. A detailed understanding of the archaeology of a region, culture, or cultural tradition permits archaeologists to evaluate contextually the various explanations that have been proposed to account for specific aspects of the archaeological record. Absolute uniformity of burials in an archaeological site cannot be interpreted as signifying an egalitarian social order if it is accompanied by vast disparities in the size and quality of dwellings (Parker Pearson 1999). The intensive, contextualized study by archaeologists of a single people, culture, or cultural tradition using as many different sets of data as possible not only results in an enriched understanding of that group but also provides the basis for more informed comparative research and theoretical generalizations (Chapman 2003). Generalizations about major processes, such as the development of complex societies, must be based on the detailed understanding of all available specific instances of such development. In retrospect, Julian Steward’s “Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations” (1949), which examined only in a cursory fashion even the limited data that were available at the time, epitomizes not only the promise but also some of the worst pitfalls of general theory construction. Instead of being antithetical, idiographic (or historical) and generalizing approaches constitute complementary modes for understanding human behavior. While comparative studies are necessary for theory building, sound studies of this sort must be based on well-understood case studies. Hence the long-term, intensive research on particular cultures, peoples, or regions that most archaeologists enjoy carrying out provides the most valuable data for understanding the forces that have shaped the archaeological record.

theoretical confrontation. Hence these two approaches, the confrontational and the systems-building, would complement one another. Even partial success in creating a broadly-accepted corpus of theory would facilitate more informed selection of ‘frames of reference’ to guide research on specific problems (Binford 2001). It would also reduce the need for archaeologists to renegotiate positions as if nothing had previously been accomplished. They could stop reinventing the wheel. Assessing the relative value of different propositions and articulating them as parts of a larger theoretical structure is not something that can be accomplished by logic or by seeking consensus. It must be done empirically, by determining how well specific theoretical propositions correspond with archaeological evidence. Constructing a general theoretical framework requires paying attention not only to ecological and cultural approaches but also to the findings of biological anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Butterworth 1999; Cowgill 1993; Dennett 2003; Donald 1991; Gazzaniga 1992, 1998; Low 2000; Mithen 1996; Pinker 2002; Renfrew and Scarre 1998). More specifically, it requires ascertaining in what contexts particular sorts of explanations are useful and integrating these approaches. Archaeologists must strive to establish under what conditions and to what extent learned behavior is likely to predominate over individual innovation and how innovations do or do not become established in society. What combinations of factors are functionally likely, possible, or impossible? Under what circumstances does natural selection favor certain behavioral traits or types of sociocultural systems over others and what effect does that have on general patterns of cultural development? What sorts of behavior reflect drives or thought patterns that are innate to humans and to what extent can such drives and patterns be manipulated by cultural and social factors? To what extent must long-term processes be understood separately from short-term ones, as historians such as Braudel (1972) suggest, or are such trajectories, as evolutionary biologists believe, outcomes of the same processes that produce short-term change? While these are examples of the general types of problems that must be investigated, significant progress can only be made by formulating such problems in ways that permit their efficacy to be tested against specific bodies of evidence. Acknowledging the complex networks of factors that influence human behavior has important implications for conducting archaeological research. The positivist approach, combined with assumptions of sharply-focused causality and high-levels of cross-cultural uniformity, encouraged processual archaeologists to investigate isolated problems out of context. Data were used

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Acknowledgements

This paper, which is an expanded version of the Shallit Lecture, given at Brigham Young University on October 20, 2003, incorporates portions of an addresss titled “Confrontation, Polemic, and Synthesis: The Role of Comparative Studies in Anthropological Theory Building” that I delivered February 28, 2002 as part of the Centennial Lecture series marking the 100th anniversary of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and of “Anthropological Megatheory: Searching for the Big Picture,” a lecture presented to a Department of Anthropology seminar at McGill University on March 18, 2002. The disciplinary focus of the present paper has been altered, new ideas introduced, and old ones modified to take account of the rapid theoretical changes currently going on in anthropological archaeology. I wish to thank all who attended these oral presentations, or who read various versions of these papers, for their comments. This paper is the product of research and reflections leading to a revised version of A History of Archaeological Thought. Its production was funded by the stipend attached to my James McGill Professorship. I thank Cynthia Romanyk for her help with wordprocessing.

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BRUCE G. TRIGGER is James McGill Professor in the Department of Anthropology, McGill University. Born in Preston, Canada, in 1937, he was educated at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1959) and Yale University (Ph.D. 1964), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation, on the relative importance of factors bringing about changes in settlement patterns in Lower Nubia from the beginnings of agriculture to the Moslem conquest of the region, under the co-supervision of Michael D. Coe and William K. Simpson. He has taught at McGill University since 1964. His publications include History and Settlement in Lower Nubia (1965), Beyond History: The Methods of Prehistory (1968), The Huron: Farmers of the North (1969), The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (1976), Time and Traditions (1978), A History of Archaeological Thought (1989), Sociocultural Evolution (1998), and Understanding Early Civilizations (2003).