Society for American Archaeology

Society for American Archaeology Review Author(s): R. G. Matson Review by: R. G. Matson Source: American Antiquity, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 458-460 Published by: Society for American Archaeology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/279925 Accessed: 27-11-2015 18:46 UTC

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existing system and what the catastrophe's archaeological implications are. Instead, Snow simply asserts that a catastrophic change could have occurred; without any documentation, we are left wondering whether it ever occurred. For example, the change in inventories and lifeways from the paleo-Indian to Early Archaic periods is supposedly a catastrophe (p. 159). It represents a real discontinuity in the archaeological record. However, Snow's casual use of this theory raises further questions. Are these really catastrophic changes or are they simply shifts in adaptations? While rapid in geological time, these changes might be easily accommodated by a few human generations. Snow raises this second possibility himself when he states: "On the contrary, there appears to have been continuity from one period to the next, albeit under reduced circumstances. That being the case the social system probably remained intact" (p. 171). Finally, population pressure and carrying capacity are considered inadequate explanatory models for the eastern United States Holocene record. In fact, Snow claims that numerous collapses and sharp increases in population could have occurred during the Holocene, (e.g., decreases in the Early Archaic and the Early Horticultural periods and increases in population during the Late and Terminal Archaic periods). While he might be correct, his criticisms of competing models lose their impact when one critiques Snow's own analysis. For example, he claims that the debate between Malthusian and Boserupian explanations of population growth is often carried on in a limbo of imaginary carrying capacities (p. 256). Instead, Snow utilizes highly questionable population density estimates (see Historic Baseline chapter) to establish that only a very low rate of population growth would be necessary to expand the number of paleo-Indians into the contact period population (p. 256). This figure is so low that only a minor increase would be necessary to rapidly produce the contact population. In fact, a number of periods of rapid growth and decline could have occurred during the Holocene without preventing Snow from ending up with the contact figure. Again, Snow might be correct; however, his analysis requires that we accept his population estimates, and he does not demonstrate that these are more reliable than the ones utilized elsewhere in some carrying capacity studies. Furthermore, his explanation leaves us with an additional question: Why would population growth rates vary during the Holocene? In conclusion, Snow discusses the archaeological record and he provides some analysis of the inferred cultural systems. However, his poorly documented explanations for culture change create doubts about the accuracy of his conclusions. One could even ask: Why did Snow choose one explanation for a situation instead of another? Also, his prehistory of New England is not satisfying. His coverage is skewed towards the record outside modern political New England. While one can discover where certain tools are found, how old they are, and occasionally, where the tool's raw material came from, these offerings

[Vol. 47, No. 2,19821

are not clearly linked to any contemporary anthropological issues. The result is a version of the Archaeology of New England, which will be of limited value for many readers.

Sampling in Contemporary British Archaeology. JOHN F. CHERRY,CLIVEGAMBLE, and STEPHEN SHENNAN, editors. B.A.R. British Series 50, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1978. xv + 411 pp., illus. ?8.50 (paper). Reviewed by R. G. Matson, University of British Columbia This volume is a testament to the notion that more than the Atlantic Ocean separates the British and American schools of archaeological thought. Granted, the conference on which the volume is based took place in late 1977. By our standards of 1981, it looks dated. But the inevitable comparison with James Mueller's 1975 Sampling in Archaeology only serves to substantiate the impression that there is a definite lag. The papers and sampling methods under discussion here seem comparable to the American situation before Mueller rather than after. A number of factors may have contributed to this apparent lag. Great Britain lacks the arid uninhabited environments found in western North America which have provided us a fertile field for regional sampling. Or, as Groube claims (final chapter) the fact that most British archaeologists are retread historians may shed light on fundamental differences of outlook. Whatever the factors in question may be, the volume often has a dated polemical style although it does contain a number of practical examples of sampling methods. The editors have selected 21 papers from the conference and added an introduction and glossary. Three types of sampling universe are treated in three sections. They are, respectively, regional sampling, intrasite sampling, and sampling from archaeological assemblages. The papers selected are both readable and scholarly, and although the quality of printing is only average, translucent overlays are used effectively in several places. One of the underlying topics with which the volume deals indirectly is the role of sampling in rescue archaeology, the British version of our contract or applied archaeology. Comments include both how to use sampling better, and discussions on the restrictions of contract work. These references make it clear that the North American situation of dominance by contract archaeology is not unique, although there are differences in the English setting. Another pervasive aspect of the volume is discussion about the use of normal theory sampling estimates. This issue has appeared in North America as well, although I think the limits of assuming normality and the alternatives to this assumption have been discussed in more depth by American archaeologists. On the other hand, I was relieved to find little concern for precision for its own sake, a deplorable


REVIEWS

sidetrack of many of our own colleagues. In its typical form, for example, North American archaeologists complain that the confidence intervals around a point estimate for the total number of sites within a large land modification project are too wide. Greater precision is often sought, even while its necessity for some particular anthropological problem goes unspecified. Perhaps this spurious concern for "precision" is a stage that British archaeologists have yet to pass through. The absence of it in this volume is refreshing. Turning to several specific points in the volume, I will comment on each of the three sections in turn, taking up individual papers and themes of general interest. In many ways the first section, on regional sampling, is the weakest. The section begins with a paper by Cherry and Shennan and another by Foley which outline a number of reasons for using regional surveys, the role of sampling within regional surveys, and the interaction between sampling and problem selection. In particular, Cherry and Shennan direct their comments at the British situation and the constraints and requirements of rescue archaeology. The subject of Hamond's paper is an interesting example of the combination of settlement pattern simulation and regional sampling for Neolithic archaeology in the lower Rhine. He examines the usefulness of sampling to discriminate between various simulated settlement patterns, at the same time demonstrating an understanding of nonnormal survey data. None of the essays mentioned so far explains how to implement regional sampling. The only paper which comes close to presenting an actual example of regional sampling is by Schadla-Hall and Shennan. They outline a proposed regional survey in Wessex on the basis of a pilot 5% regional sample done in East Hampshire. As a check on the reliability of their Hampshire survey, they compare the number and clustering of existing buildings found in the sample versus that known for the entire area. Although this was not the variable of interest, it is one way of getting an indirect measure of accuracy. The density figure for the sample was very close to that of the general population, although both were very that the assumption of normality skewed-suggesting would be inappropriate. Their sample measure of dispersion was not in as good agreement with the population value but should be interpreted in the same way. Of interest also were SYMAPs of site density of both the sample and the population. I found two papers in this first section interesting, although they do not fit in very well with the others. The two-part paper by Winham discusses the effects of postoccupational disturbance on settlement patterns and gives a nicely presented example of sampling from a known population. The population in this case was a list of known sites, and the author reports some of the results of his survey (or resurvey) and points out some of the advantages of using this approach. The paper by Palmer is also concerned with the effects of postoccupational disturbance, focused on the use of aerial photography for settlement pat-

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tern work. I found his discussion of problems in interpretation stimulating. The second section deals with a number of aspects of intrasite sampling. My own opinion is that formal sampling theory is not as readily applicable to excavation as it is to the regional survey. Most regional survey problems are closer to the sampling model of statisticians than are those of intrasite sampling. The units are often of different sizes and the variables of interest vary in size from large features to microfossils and, in distribution, from continuous to discrete. There appears to be an awareness of these problems in the papers in this section as sampling was often put secondary to other concerns. A general review of the problems and approaches of intrasite sampling is presented by Haselgrove. Although he does not enter into specifics, he does present some ideas on the relationship between academic and applied archaeology that are very similar to those presented by W. D. Lipe (A conservation model for American archaeology, Kiva 39: 213-245). The paper by Peacock, on the other hand, is an example of the use of sampling theory in the excavation and analysis of a shell midden on Oronsay, in the Inner Hebrides. Here, sampling concerns are presented as part of a well-integrated research program involving a number of stages. Overall population estimates are calculated using cluster sampling and ratio estimate formulations. While these are here presented as general formulae, Peacock has gone on to use them in a substantive analysis in his dissertation. Another interesting research design chapter, written by Jones, deals with a large site in Oxfordshire excavated under rescue conditions. The site was divided into two strata and sampled by different sized trenches. At the time this chapter was written, however, the analysis was just beginning, so the results are inconclusive. Two chapters evaluate intrasite sampling using simulation of completely sampled sites. The paper by Champion is on the simulated sampling of a completely excavated Saxon site, Chalton. His work indicates that in many cases much of the information often culled from large-scale stripping operations can be obtained from relatively small sampling fractions, although, for some information, large-scale stripping is still preferable. The long chapter by Voorrips, Gifford, and Ammerman is a continuation of prior discussions of a procedure for sampling simulations using a Maasai site in Kenya collected by Gifford. In this case the efficiency of optimally allocated stratified sampling designs for excavation is evaluated. One of the important aspects in stratified sampling is to have a good "predictor," a variable that is used to assign the sampling units to each stratum so that intrasite homogeneity and the interstrata heterogeneity are both maximized. In this study three classes of faunal remains are used to predict themselves and each other. A very interesting allocation procedure is used and a large series of different samples is simulated. I interpret the results of their work as reinforcing my impression that stratified sampling often does not provide sufficient statistical gain to make it a worth-


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while practice. In their analysis, substantial statistical gain occurs only when the predictor variable is correlated with the target variable in the region of 0.8. An archaeologist would have little incentive to excavate if he could predict the results to this degree! A correlation of this magnitude was achieved only when the surface variable was predicting itself, that is, when a 50% random sample of the surface material was correlated with the total surface material, looking at what was essentially the same faunal class. When one recognizes that in practice one is seldom trying to maximize the sampling of a single variable, the theoretical gains of stratified sampling become even more difficult to realize. While the authors may disagree with my interpretation I found this chapter useful precisely because empirical examples of this sort are important to check results predicted from formal methods. The final section, dealing with sampling archaeological assemblages, begins with an introductory essay by Cherry. I thought this was the most effective of the more polemical papers, due in no small part to the use of excellent examples demonstrating the need for sampling. While sampling problems are not usually discussed by faunal analysts, Gamble's paper gives a good general discussion with a number of pertinent examples. It should be noted that this chapter is marred by references to sampling fraction rather than sample size, a problem with several other papers, as well. A short paper by Fasham and Monk dealing with plant remains acts as a companion piece to Gamble's. Torrence contributed a chapter on subsampling lithic assemblages where a number of samples was taken from a fully described assemblage and compared against the population as a whole. The results here are striking and suggest that measuring more than 100 specimens is a waste of time. Unfortunately, the results are again cast as sampling fractions instead of sample sizes, although size was usually given as well. The concluding paper to the volume is a short address by Groube in which he integrates the use of sampling with other problems of modern archaeology. This volume suggests some ways of approaching some of the problems with sampling in archaeology. While it does not have numerous papers demonstrating sophisticated concepts of sampling, there are a number of well-written applications. Therefore, while this book is not for everyone's shelf, it certainly should be read by those interested in sampling or rescue archaeology.

Catchment Analysis: Essays on Prehistoric Resource Space. FRANK J. FINDLOW and JONATHON E. ERICSON,editors. Anthropology UCLA, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980. vi + 212 pp., tables, figures, biblio. $10.00 (paper). Reviewed by Donna Associates

C. Roper,

Commonwealth

The explicit realization that human groups procure resources from the region immediately surrounding the

[Vol. 47, No. 2,1982]

places they inhabit led to the formulation in the late 1960s of the analytic method of site catchment analysis. In its original form a site catchment analysis was performed by walking outward from a site and recording data on land-use zones, terrain types, and resources encountered along the way. The data were then used to relate the site to its biophysical setting to formulate hypotheses about the site's role in the regional economy. Many variants on this basic procedure have been developed in the decade since the first formulation of site catchment analysis; the basic principles have been more fully explicated, and examples of its use now abound. Inevitably, therefore, the practice of site catchment analysis has encountered some difficulties. The editors of Catchment Analysis perceive the major problems as being twofold: (1) the accurate estimation of size and shape of prehistoric catchments, and (2) the accurate modeling and ranking of environmental variables (p. v). The purpose of this book is therefore stated as "a desire to demonstrate that the major problems besetting catchment analysis derive from misunderstandings on the part of archaeologists rather than inherent problems with the locational theory upon which it is based (p. v)." In demonstrating the ways in which archaeologists have confronted these problems, Catchment Analysis presents papers of three types: critical, methodological, and substantive example. Although most of the papers engage in at least brief comment on some aspect of site catchment analysis, only one is devoted solely to critique. The paper is by Robin Dennell and is a discussion of "the use, abuse, and potential of site catchment analysis." Rather than evaluate all the studies, or at least types of studies, subsumed under the rubric of "site catchment analysis," Dennell concentrates on the original form, as practiced by the late E. S. Higgs and his students. At base, Dennell views the major principle of site catchment analysis as the tendency of human groups to minimize food procurement effort by residing in "the most advantageous locations (p. 2)." He argues that this principle is sound, as is its corollary that exploitation occurs "within a certain distance" of sites. The difficulty, he contends, arises from the estimation of this "certain distance." The original site catchment analysis used Richard Lee's observations on the !Kung Bushmen and Michael Chisholm's studies of agriculturalists to derive a 2-hour walk radius for hunter-gatherer sites and a 1-hour radius for agriculturalists. This assumes, according to Dennell (p. 3), that: 2-hour radius = mobile economy = hunter/gatherer = paleolithic/mesolithic community 1-hour radius = sedentary economy = agriculturalists = neolithic and later community Dennell rightly questions these assumptions, but rather than view them as in need of modification he instead explores the limits of their applicability, and hence, the limits of applicability of site catchment analysis. He therefore counters the trend of the remainder of the book where the emphasis is modification of assumptions and application of new techniques to catchment estimation and resource evaluation. Dennell's concentration on site catchment analysis in its original form extends also to his brief commentary on


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