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Measuring Time with Artifacts

University of Nebraska Press

Chapter One

In Chapter 1, we noted that ontology is the branch of philosophy that concerns the nature of entities in the world and pointed out that we consider the models and theories that explain these different kinds of entities to be variations in ontology. We explore such differences in ontology in Chapter 2, where we outline the history of evolutionary thinking as manifest among American anthropologists and archaeologists between about 1900 and 1960. We argue that although early in the twentieth century the basic evolutionary view was somewhat (if implicitly) Darwinian, arguments by Boas, Kroeber, Steward, and others who were major figures in the discipline caused a shift away from Darwinian evolution to the form of cultural evolution outlined by Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward B. Tylor, and others during the nineteenth century and popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by Leslie A. White and Julian H. Steward. Arguments to abandon Darwinism were simple. First, biological species did not hybridize, but cultures did. Second, biological (Darwinian) evolution was diversifying (or cladogenetic, to use the modern term), whereas cultural evolution was reticulate; cultures not only diversified, they hybridized. Third, biological evolution could only occur between generations, whereas cultural evolution could take place within a generation; the latter was so much faster than the former that the key mechanism of biological evolution identified by Darwin as natural selection could not possibly have influenced the evolutionary development of a culture.

In Chapter 2 and elsewhere (e.g., O'Brien and Lyman 2000, 2003) we suggest that the arguments against adapting, not just adopting, a Darwinian form of evolution to the study of cultural phenomena are misguided. One reason for this is that the equation of a culture with a species is unwarranted; what distinguishes a species is its supposed inability to hybridize with another species, but what distinguishes one culture from another is unclear in the literature produced early in the twentieth century, and this is still a problem today (Palmer et al. 1997 and references therein). Another reason we find arguments not to utilize Darwinian evolutionary theory to assist in explaining the archaeological record, one that is not explored in Chapter 2, concerns the mechanism of cultural inheritance, now typically referred to as "cultural transmission" (Boyd and Richerson 1985). This evolutionary mechanism results in the process of hereditary continuity, a critically important aspect of most artifact-based chronometers, yet it was hardly mentioned in the archaeological literature of the time (Lyman 2001). Nor is cultural transmission given detailed consideration in most renderings of the cultural evolution popular among many archaeologists today (e.g., Spencer 1997). Interestingly, it was Leslie White-arguably a cultural anthropologist who had significant influence on the emergence of processual archaeology (O'Brien et al. 2005)-who perhaps did more to clarify and explicate the cultural transmission process than any other cultural anthropologist. This is something we did not appreciate sufficiently in 1996 when Chapter 2 was written. White (1947a:693) indicated that because culture was "dependent on the use of symbols, ... its elements are readily transmitted [and thus] culture becomes a continuum; it flows down through the ages from one generation to another and laterally from one people to another." Cultural transmission-and its attendant processes of innovation, integration, and the like-constituted what White (1948:586) termed the "culture process," defined by him as "a stream of [culture] elements that are continually interacting with one another, forming new combinations and syntheses, eliminating some elements from the stream, and incorporating new ones." White's culture elements would later be called "symbolates" (White 1959a), units of cultural transmission equivalent to the cultural traits of historical ethnologists (Chapter 3).

According to White (1948:586), the culture process "has its own principles and its own laws of change and development," and he insisted that "culture as culture can only be explained in terms of culture, i.e., culturologically." As we point out in Chapter 2, White (1943:339) rather arrogantly proclaimed that the "culturologist knows more about cultural evolution than the biologist, even today, knows about biological evolution." Thus there was no need to consult with a Darwinist about possible principles and laws of change and evolutionary development. Rather, it seems that White would have argued that the consultation should be the other way around; biologists should be consulting culturologists. Whether White was correct or not, the history of the ontology of evolution within anthropology and how that ontology changed during the early twentieth century had a significant influence on how archaeologists went about building chronometers and the units that attended them. It is important to have a firm grasp of the basics of that ontology so as to understand why it was thought that the chronometers worked the way that they did.

In Chapter 2 we describe two evolutionary ontologies that American archaeologists variously used (often implicitly) to help explain the archaeological record. We bring the story up to the early 1960s, when what is generally referred to as "processual archaeology" emerged (O'Brien et al. 2005). We focus particularly in Chapter 2 on two sets of differences: that between the evolution of Charles Darwin and that of Herbert Spencer, and that between A. L. Kroeber's conception of history and evolution and the conceptions of Leslie White. Spencer and White subscribed to a version of evolution referred to in biology as orthogenesis. We reserve detailed discussion of orthogenesis for Chapter 7, where the nuances of that version serve to highlight the ontology underpinning the direct historical approach.

Chapter Two

Culture historians had as one of their goals the writing of the evolutionary histories of cultural lineages (Lyman et al. 1997b). They implicitly used various models or theories of evolution founded on distinct ontologies to assist their writing. Given that different models of evolution-how it works and why it works the way that it does-serve as the (typically implicit) explanatory basis of archaeological research focused on building archaeological chronometers based on artifacts and also as the basis of writing the developmental histories of cultural lineages, it is critical to consider the history of evolutionary approaches in American archaeology. Two models-Darwinian evolution and cultural evolution-played major roles in American archaeology during the twentieth century. In this chapter we do two things. First, we outline how the two evolutionary models differ in biology and in anthropology. Second, we document how and why the cultural model made its way into archaeology during the 1950s and replaced the Darwinian model. American archaeologists early in the twentieth century made efforts to incorporate elements of Darwinian evolution in their work, but that version of evolution fell...