what I take to be the major issues and problems confronting American arche- ology at the turn of the century. I do this as an outsider, since I am an Old.
Teaching Anthropology: SACC Notes VoL7,No.l Spring-Summer 2000
The Many Anxieties of American Archeology G. A. Clark Arizona State University The "big thing" intellectually these days in American archeology is the rise of neo-Darwinism as a metaphysical paradigm in archeological research.
This afternoon I am going to present what I take to be the major issues and problems confronting American archeology at the turn of the century. I do this as an outsider, since I am an Old World prehistorian and paleo-anthropologist. However, I am also a product of the American university system. I teach in a six-fields department with a large and nationally-ranked graduate program, and thus, interact daily with American archaeologists of all kinds, of which we have more than a dozen (including Keith Kintigh, the current president of the Society for American Archeology—SAA). As head of the AAA's Archeology Division, Prof. Wundram charged me with reporting on the state of the discipline in terms of its intellectual development and its sociopolitics. So far as the first is concerned, the "big thing'"intellectually these days in American archeology is the rise of neoDarwinism as a metaphysical paradigm in archeological research. Over the past five years, archeologists have increasingly recognized the potential of neoDarwinian evolutionary theory (NDT) to serve as a conceptual framework for all kinds of archeology, from that of early hominids to that of the very recent timeframeswith which New World workers are accustomed to dealing. These efforts, embodied now in five or six books published since 1995, seek to demonstrate (at both the levels of "high" and "middle range" theory and case studies and applications) the shared conviction that NDT and its modern derivatives constitute the only generally acknowledgedframeworkwithin which to understand human biological and cultural evolution, "writ large or small." More precisely, evolutionary archeolo-
gists argue that natural selection (and other NDT mechanisms and processes) act on human behavior and influence the material products of that behavior. By focusing on the requirements of NDT at the theoretical and methodological levels, the approach goes some considerable distance toward creating a novel, coherent framework for explaining all kinds of variation in the archeological record.1 An explicitly evolutionary archeology is the product of Western science, and at the level of the metaphysical paradigm, Western science has subscribed to materialist biases, assumptions and preconceptions since it assumed its modern form in the last half of the 19th century. Since prehistoric archeology has aspired to be a "sciencelike" endeavor over much of its existence as a relatively formalized discipline, and since NDT is the quintessential materialist paradigm, it would seem natural for archeologists of whatever persuasion to incorporate Darwinian concepts and models in their research. So far, however, that hasn't happened, although there are indications that a synthetic evolutionary paradigm for archaeologists is beginning to emerge in the literature. Why it hasn't happened in the Americanist research tradition has been explored by Robert Dunnell, who suggested that modern efforts to make archeology a materialist discipline must contend with the neo-evolutionary legacy of Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, and with how this anthropological paradigm was interpreted, integrated and adopted by the emergent "new archeology" after the mid-1960s.2 Dunnell argued that these approaches derive from
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"Spencerian" (or cultural) evolution, with its teleological, orthogenetic notions of progress, human intentionality and essentialist biases. A Spencerian concept of evolution was adopted in the US (but, interestingly, not in the UK) because of the prevailing misconception that humans, as cultural animals, were somehow unique' in the natural world. He also argued that two kinds of evolutionary theory—one biological, the other cultural—were required to account for change in organisms and cultures, respectively. The jury is still out on the necessity for, and credibility of, efforts to develop a cultural evolutionary theory under the aegis of NDT (the best known of these efforts is Boyd and Richardson s "dual inheritance theory")3 Regardless of that contentious issue, it has become evident to even the most casual observer that humans have become a lot less "unique" since the 1960s. Many Americanists react with skepticism to Darwinian archeology, especially to the reductionism implicit in the adoption of its conceptual framework. My Arizona State University (ASU) colleagues are pretty typical of this reaction. These people are, by and large, uncomfortable with the extreme reductionism that characterizes much contemporary biological thought, and which they perceive as infecting Darwinian archeologies as well. Is there any basis for this skepticism? Well, it depends. Frankly, some efforts to link pattern in recent archeology to the individual reproductive success by which fitness is measured in NDT strike me as rather far fetched. And there is an understandable tendency by those inclined toward the "cultural" side of the nature/culture dialectic to focus on the enormous learned component of modern human behavior, and to de-emphasize the epigenetic and developmental mechanisms that underlie what some think of as "uniquely human." In the recent archeology of the New World, with its rich and fine-grained ethnographic and historic records, there is considerable justification for doing this—for treating archeology as "history-like." But it simply won't work in "deep time." For the archeology of
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Teaching Anthropology: SACC Notes VoL 7, No. 1 Spring-Summer 2000
human ancestry, there is no alternative to Darwinian archeology. I turn now to the sociopolitics of American archeology. Here I can recommend a single, current, reference— Melinda Zeder 's The American Archaeologist—A Profile, published in 1997 by Altamira Press with the cooperation of the SAA. Based on a 1994 SAA survey, it contains every imaginable statistical compilation of the various constituencies involved in doing archeology in the United States today. While I cannot summarize this important work in the brief space allotted, I can point to what I see as some important trends and tendencies, backed up empirically by Zeder s scholarship. For one thing, the profession is becoming increasingly "feminized," as more and more women enter graduate school and as more of them leave the academy with advanced degrees. More than half the archeology Ph.Ds awarded in 1998 were awarded to women, a sharp reversal of a decades-long trend extending back to the World War Two era. Men also tend increasingly to stop at the MA level and seek employment in cultural resource management (CRM), where most of the job opportunities are. Over $400 million was spent on CRM research in the US last year, compared with about $7-8 million for research outside the country. In short, American archeology has pretty much become contract archeology, and this has created both opportunities and tensions. Zeder also underscores the growing division between academic archeology and that of CRM. All those contract archeologists receive their formal training in academic departments, but the latter are frequently criticized as being insensitive to the demands of archeology as a business—an area about which, of course, they know nothing at all. In short, there is a strong divergence in the interests, attitudes and objectives of archeology as an intellectual pursuit and archeology as a business. However, despite the vastly greater number of job opportunities, the allure of funding orders of magnitude beyond that of any NSF grant and better salaries overall, a career in contract arche-
ology is almost invariably viewed as a "fall-back" position among archeology grad students. Despite the dismal job market, these students overwhelmingly prefer the job security, intellectual freedom, creative opportunities and relative lack of stress that come with an academic career. In 30 years at ASU and as the chair of nearly 50 graduate committees, I have never met a single student who expressed a desire to study for a higher degree so that he or she might be more competitive in the CRM environment.
at all levels. The dicho "it ain't science, it's compliance" perhaps says it all. If there is one thing that archeologists in academic settings share, it is the conviction that archeology is, or should be, a science-like endeavor that proceeds from the same collection of materialist biases and preconceptions as does any other science. Anything that calls this fundamental principle into question will be strongly resisted in the academy. In sum, American archeology at the close of the century is many things. At a minimum, it is a "science-like" endeavor, an industry (the "heritage indusMore than half the archeology try"), a platform for promoting various Ph.Ds were awarded to women political agendas, a medium for educatin 1998, while men increasing the public and an exercise in public ingly stop at the MA level and relations. As before, it has academic, seek employment in cultural private, museum and government asresource management. pects, but these different constituencies co-exist in an uneasy alliance with each Small though it is, the academic sec- other brought about by very real differtor also accounts for practically all of ences in interests, attitudes and objecthe intellectual development in the field, tives. In light of their frequent employat least as measured by the number of ment in CRM contexts during graduate articles published by academics in school, contract archeologists are American Antiquity. The failure of puzzled that grad students continue to CRM series specifically designed to seek jobs in the academy, especially publicize the work of contract archeol- given the dismal academic job market. ogy simply underscores the lack of in- I suggest that intangibles related to acaterest in that sector in archeology's more demic employment probably play imscholarly pursuits. So, it seems to me portant roles in coloring student attithat archeology will continue to get its tudes about employment in these set"high" and "middle-range" theory from tings. In particular, the greater freedom the academy, just as it always has. Con- of academic and museum archeologists versely, most methodological innova- to choose the research topics they purtion will probably come from the pri- sue, to have more independence in the vate sector, which is best able to sus- design and scheduling of research and tain the considerable costs associated the fact that they exercise complete conwith the adoption of new technologies. trol over publication of the results of In the 1970s and '80s, CRM had a the work are all important considersubstantial presence in universities and ations. There is also the familiar "culcolleges and in museums. All of these ture" of the academy, a far more coninstitutions saw in it an unparalleled genial place in which to spend one's source of ready cash, and thought they career than the dog-eat-dog world of could reconcile the conflicts inherent in business.4 "archeology as business" and "archeFinally, Zeder's survey showed that, ology as science." This turned out to while all archeologists share common be much more difficult to do than any- concerns, archeologists in different one had originally supposed. As a con- work settings differ profoundly in their sequence, these academic-affiliated pro- levels of interest in various archeology grams have gradually dwindled in size policy issues. Most academics have and number during the 1990s as the practically no interest in legislative or market forces of CRM have made them policy matters related to archeological decreasingly competitive for contracts research in the U.S., whereas CRM ar-
leacningAnthropology:
SACC Notes VoL 7, No. 1 Spring-Summer 2000
It is hard to discern anything that might reconcile the competing aims of "archeology as science" and "archeology as a business." cheologists, who must contend with these laws and their implications on a daily basis, find them curiously fascinating. Private and public sector archeologists think that academic archeology and the organizations that represent it are becoming less and less relevant to the kinds of archeology that already dominate the field today. Academics, in turn, are generally appalled at the notion of "archeology as a business," and express concerns about what will happen to its 'science-like aspects in the face of capitalism run amok: about standards infieldwork,reporting, publishing and the ability to apply the results of contract work to research questions deemed significant in the academy. Where is American archeology headed in the next century? It's hard to say. It is clearly in the throes of a transformation with respect to its composition, orientation, aims and objectives. Sometimes this transformation is embodied in the notion of a "professionalization" of the discipline (i.e., archeology is moving from a scholarly pursuit with a shared metaphysic into a much broader, multifaceted endeavor with some scholarly aspects). It is hard to discern anything that might reconcile the competing aims of "archeology as science" and "archeology as a business," so I would imagine that the schism between academia and CRM will continue to grow wider. This in turn would eventually entail the divorce of the business of archeology from its scholarly underpinnings. However, it seems to me that the two need each other—the academics to supply the conceptual frameworks for the research, the contract archeologists to supply the data needed to evaluate hypotheses about pattern in the past, and what is causing it to occur. This will only work if data recoveredfromCRM contexts can be used to evaluate the credibility of theories and models gen-
erated in the academy, and if those theories and models are deemed important enough to the concerns of CRM to be taken seriously. Only time will tell. Notes and References 1 Some recent books on Darwinian archeologies—notice that all of them post-date 1995. Unencumbered by cultural evolution, the approach dates to the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom. Teltser, Patrice (editor) 1995 Evolutionary Archaeology— Methodological Issues. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Maschner, Herbert (editor) 1996 Darwinian Archaeologies. New York: Plenum. O'Brien, Michael (editor) 1996 Evolutionary A rchaeology— Theory and Application. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Steele, James & Stephen Shennan (editors) 1996 The Archaeology of Human Ancestry. London: Routledge. Barton, C. Michael and Geoffrey Clark (editors) 1997 Rediscovering Darwin—Evolutionary Theory and Archeological Explanation. Washington, DC: Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 7. 2
Especially influential in shaping the direction of the emergent 'new archaeology' were: Sahlins, Marshall and Elm an Service 1960 Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Service, Elman 1963 Primitive Social Organiza-
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tion. New York: Random House. Steward, Julian 1955 Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. White, Leslie 1959 The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGrawHill. Some of Dunnell's more influential publications: 1980 Evolutionary theory and archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 3: 35-99. 1982 Science, social science and common sense: The agonizing dilemma of modern archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Research 38: 1-25. 1989 Aspects of the application of evolutionary theory in archaeology. In Archaeological Thought in America (C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ed.), pp. 3549. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995 What is it that actually evolves? In Evolutionary Archaeology (P. Teltser, ed.), pp. 33-50. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
3
The primary source for dual inheritance theory (DIT) is: Boyd, Robert and Peter Richerson 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4
A thoughtful analysis of some of the more pernicious effects of capitalism on the changing social context of archeology in the United States is. Patterson, Thomas 1999 The political economy of archaeology in the United States. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 155-174. TA
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