Giorgio Buccellati, Critique of Archaeological Reason
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| Evolutionary Archaeology | p.215-216 | In our view evolutionary archaeology has numerous parallels to modern paleobiology. It is geared to providing Darwinian explanations of the archaeological record like those offered by paleobiologists for the paleontological record. This involves first building cultural lineages - what O'Hara (1988) calls historical chronicles and then constructing explanations of those lineages - what O'Hara calls evolutionary narratives. In evolutionary archaeology, the population is artifacts, which are viewed as phenotypic features, and "it is the differential representation of variation at all scales among artifacts for which it seeks explanation". | ||||||||||||||||||
| Innovation | p.617 | Innovation and invention are obvious processes for creating new variants.No one however appears overly concerned with distinguishing between the process and the product. Mayr (1969) defined innovation as a newly acquired structure or property that permits the performance of a new function, which in turn will open a new adaptive zone. | |||||||||||||||
| Intent | p.617-618 | Rindos sees it as 'inherently unverifiable' thus should be excluded from an archaeology that desires a scientific status. Processual archaeology - noted that individuals do make decisions but evidence of those individual decisions cannon be recorded by archaeologists. | ||||||||||||
| Units of replicators and transmission | p.619-620 | Synonyms of one another which may be perceived as intergenerational or intragenerational. Artifacts are not replicators; they are what is replicated. Cultural traits conceived as ideas in the minds of individuals are the replicators that are transmitted; social learning is both the transmission mechanism and the source of variation resulting from transmission errors and recombination. | |||||||||
| Causation | p. 620 | Natural selection is unimportant in cultural evolution because human intentions direct its course. Evolutionary archaeology strongly disagrees. As Schiffer has observed, by "stressing that problem solving creates new adaptations, adaptationist explanation are incomplete and misleading because they gloss over the false starts, partial solutions, unintended consequences and dead-ends that problem solving also begets. | ||||||
| Natural selection and Drift | p.621 | Evolutionary archaeologists have however specified selection mechanisms and environments and they continue to do so as such mechanism and environments come to be better known and understood. Evolutionary archaeology has explicitly considered directional change resulting from processes other than selection. Here the critics have failed to grasp the significance of the paradigm's concept of style. Spencer (1997) says that he has 'urged archaeologists to adopt a more inclusive evolutionary approach one that employs historical as well as comparative analysis so that homology and analogy can both be addressed. Such "encouragement" has long been offered in anthropology and archaeology (Kroeber and Rouse) though few have paid much attention to it. Only those explicitly operating within the evolutionary archaeological paradigm have explicitly and consistently adopted the critical distinction between analogous and homologous similarity. As Dunnell made clear long ago and as O'Brien and Holland (1990, 1992) later elaborated, evolutionary archaeology conception of style explicitly incorporates the biological notion of drift, since distributions of particular artifact styles over space and through time are the result only of transmission and thus represent homologous similarity. The paradigm takes transmission to be merely the sending and receiving of something (gene or cultural trait). Natural selection plays no role here, but cultural change can nonetheless appear directional as Kidder (1917) noted many years ago. Dunnell (1978) did not argue that "any sustained directional change in the frequency of an artifact type is a sign of selection at work". Rather he said that there are two mechanisms for the apparent directionality of change, selection and transmission. The apparent direction of evolutionary change is just that - apparent - and is not part of evolutionary archaeological theory in general. This is because it explains nothing; rather it is "an observation about the record of change" that itself requires explanation. | |||
| Behavioral Archaeology | p.623 | According to Schiffer (1996) evolutionary archaeology must adopt some of the central tenets of behavioral archaeology to become a workable endeavor. Here we provide a brief synopsis between the three paradigms: First, both recognize the importance of human behavior in the context of archaeology; few if any evolutionists would disagree with Mayr (1970) assertion that behavior 'is perhaps the strongest selection pressure operating in the animal kingdom" (see also Mayr 1974); Second the experiments of behavioral archaeology are often the same experiments that evolutionary archaeology requires to understand variation in the performance characteristic of artifacts; and Third, both paradigms view artifacts as "the hard parts of the behavioral segment of past phenotypes. Further "behavioral inferences provide the basis for generating a view of the past compatible with a particular theoretical stance: the behavioralist premise that the basis of human societies is their complete reliance on complex and intimate relationships between people and artifacts. The study of such relationships, in all time and places, can, behavioralists maintain, lead to the creation of distinctive social theory in archaeology". We accept the "behavioralist premise" but disagree with other aspects of the program. Behavioral theory is said to improve "behavioral inference" thereby making the writing of narratives of behavioral history "rigorous" and to answer, "with credible theories and laws, the general questions raised in specific [historical] narratives. The first is accomplished by generating a "nomothetic understanding of material culture dynamics. Such nomothetic principles are "required for reconstructing a behavioral past". We perceive two weakness here: First, behavioral archaeology consists of reconstructing behaviors, arranging them in a historical sequence, and then explaining that sequence in behavioral terms; Second relations between behavior and material must be invariant if they are to serve as timeless, space-less rules of reconstruction. |
| New Ideas/Punctuated Equilibrium | p.626-627 | Cultural change is rapid and radical because "is a product of ideational and behavioral, rather than physical [genetic] processes, and its evolution involves elements particularly intragenerational change. One has to define a species in order to determine its morphological stability. Thus, the problem of recognizing instances of stasis involves classification and here is where the difficulty arises. Punctuated equilibrium - a unit, a reproductively isolated set of organisms that tend to speciate geographically. This conception of species results in the definition of entities that are limited to a particular portion of the time-space continuum. Therefore, the concept itself 'has no objective application to evolving continua, only an arbitrary one based on subjective criteria for division. Traditionally, under phyletic gradualism, individual specimens spanning some time period are measured without identifying them as members of particular species. "New subspecies, species and even genera are simply subsets (arbitrarily delineated) of an evolving continuum. Puctuated Equilibrum: 1) Assumes that species are real and distinct entities; 2) Because fossil species are characterized as having distributions in time and space, they must have some recognizable differentia, defined as "one or more morphological features serving simultaneously to [1] cluster a series of {fossils} over a certain segment of time and space, and [2] form a basis for distinguishing such a cluster form other similar ones. [Thus] by the mere recognition of any nontrivial stratigraphic range of any morphologically defined taxon at or near specific [species] rank, we are necessarily implying a stability or stasis in species-specific differentia; 3) Assumes that a species is mostly homogeneous and that there is no gradual cumulative or directional in morphology over time Most discussions of archaeological materials concern aggregates of artifacts, features, faunal remains and the like. Such aggregates tend to be analytically formed in an ad hoc manner, such as grouping all materials from a stratum or features together and considering them to represent an assemblage, component, occupation, or the like. The artifacts found within a stratum on or on the floor of a house pit may not constitute a data set that is concordant with a cultural unit such as an individual human organism, a nuclear family, or a community of people - all potential units of evolution. |