Archaeology in a Social Science Context

San Juan County Archeological Research Center and Library at Salmon Ruins

Archaeology is a social science.  I’ve complained before about archaeologists referring to what they do as “science,” which tends to associate it with the more prestigious physical or “hard” sciences, but “social science” is the standard name for the group of disciplines that includes archaeology, and trying to change that now would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Back Wall of Chetro Ketl from the Talus Unit

There are many ways to demonstrate that archaeology patterns with the other social sciences more than with other disciplines, but one of the most straightforward ways it does is that it shows the major divide between two fundamental theoretical approaches that characterizes social science disciplines.  Fabio Rojas (via Crooked Timber) characterizes it thus:

In general, there seem to be to two mindsets in the social sciences. The first I call “precision modeling.” The attitude might be summarized this way:

Social science should focus on simple & clearly defined concepts. Real science is when you formalize these simple concepts into models. The height of empirical research is clear identification of cause and effect mechanisms implied by such models.

The second attitude I call “thick accounts.” Here’s my summary:

Social science should be built around a tool box of flexible concepts. These flexible concepts can be juxtaposed, elaborated and rephrased. The height of empirical research is when researchers can use this tool box to interpret an otherwise opaque complex social domain.

In the first box are folks like modern economists, experimentalists, and generative grammar people. It’s all about seeing first principles and all about tool building. It’s about a style of positivist certainty. A premium is put on tools that extract conceptual clarity. In the second camp, you see qualitative folks, most sociological institutionalists, and historical people. Since formal models usually require simple actors and simple situations, these people can’t stand tool-centric theories that can’t accomadate meaning and eliminate complexity.

This strikes me as exactly right, and characteristic of social science precisely because of its ambiguous position between the “hard” sciences, with their rigorous methodologies and formal theorizing, on the one hand and the humanities, with their more flexible methodologies and lack of analytical precision, on the other.  Indeed, this ambiguity is right there in the name “social science”: are these disciplines more “social” or more “scientific”?  Different schools of thought approach this question differently, and as Rojas notes certain disciplines are more inclined overall in one or the other direction, while other disciplines are more split.  Economics, for instance, is very much on the “science” side, while sociology (as befits its name) tends more toward the “social,” although neither generalization is without exceptions, of course.  Generative (i.e., Chomskyan) linguistics is another good example of a more “scientific” approach, and one that has been very dominant within its discipline, although that is beginning to change as more “social” alternative theories emerge.

Sealed Doorway at Salmon Ruin

So where does archaeology fit into this picture?  It’s one of the disciplines with a split in perspectives, I’d say.  Understanding how it ended up there requires a look back at the history of American archaeological theory, focusing on southwestern archaeology, and Chacoan studies in particular, because it’s what I know best.

Back Wall of Pueblo Bonito

The early days of American archaeology involved little explicit theorizing, and a whole bunch of random digging not easily distinguishable from what we would today call “looting” or “pothunting.”  In the southwest the first glimmers of “professional” archaeology began with the Hemenway Expedition in the 1880s, led by the prominent anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, which did relatively well-controlled and -documented excavations at Hohokam sites in Arizona, and continued with further projects such as the American Museum of Natural History excavations under George Pepper and Richard Wetherill at Chaco in the 1890s.  These digs were primarily aimed at collecting museum specimens, however, and while quite a bit of data was published, the resulting publications were mainly descriptive and made little attempt to synthesize or interpret information about the sites.

Richard Wetherill's Grave

In the 1920s, as archaeology began to develop into a “professional,” scholarly discipline, interpretation and synthesis became more important, and more careful excavation techniques provided the additional information necessary to contribute to explanations of the cultures that produced the artifacts and sites being studied.  The theoretical perspective that came to underlie most of these explanations was known the “culture-historical” paradigm, which emphasized historical processes such as migration and diffusion of cultural traits, and in many cases relied on ethnohistoric and ethnographic information on the tribes presumed to descend from the ancient people in question to fill in many gaps in the archaeological record.  The idea that such information could be used straightforwardly relied, of course, on the assumption that Indian cultures hadn’t really changed that much over time, which is tied in to a whole bunch of other problematic ideas about “the Indians” that I’ll discuss some other time.

Plaque at Pueblo Bonito Commemorating Neil Judd's Work

The best example of the culture-historical approach in a Chacoan context is Neil Judd’s excavations at Pueblo Bonito and elsewhere at Chaco in the 1920s.  Judd’s techniques were a vast improvement over what Pepper and Wetherill had done, although they were still very crude by today’s standards, and his documentation was quite extensive as well.  Using both the extensive data he gathered from excavation and his knowledge of modern Pueblo cultures, Judd came up with an elaborate theory of the culture history of Pueblo Bonito.  Noticing that the earliest part of the site, “Old Bonito,” is quite different in many respects from the later additions, Judd posited two groups of inhabitants of the site, the “Old Bonitians” who built Old Bonito and the “Late Bonitians” who migrated in later and built the expansion of the site.  He considered the Late Bonitians responsible for the flowering of Chacoan culture in the eleventh century, but noticed an apparent decline in the quality of architecture and other aspects of material culture afterward, which he attributed to the remaining presence of Old Bonitians during the Late Bonitian florescence and a reassertion of Old Bonitian dominance after the decline of the Late Bonitians.  This is classic culture-historical stuff: migrations and ethnic differences as the core explanatory mechanisms for differences in material culture.

Mealing Room with Row of Metates, Pueblo del Arroyo

The UNM field schools in the 1930s and 1940s were also part of this general theoretical movement, although much of the data they produced was never published and the publications that did result tended to be more descriptive than theoretical.  Nonetheless, the theoretical arguments that did come out of the UNM work were in line with the culture-historical approach, with Clyde Kluckhohn’s argument that the great houses and small houses represented different ethnic groups in the canyon being a good example.

Small House under Cliff

The culture-historical approach held near-universal sway in American archaeology until the 1950s and 1960s, when the so-called “New Archaeologists” began to complain that it was too particularistic and not useful for what they saw as the main role of archaeology as a subdiscipline of anthropology: providing generalizable theories to explain cultural phenomena.  They proposed that archaeology needed to become more “scientific” and utilize rigorous, testable hypotheses to generate theories that could be applied beyond the context in which they were developed.  This would require a major shift from the rather “social” (though, perhaps, undertheorized) approach of the culture historians to a more “scientific” methodology.  Interestingly, a similar shift was taking place at the same time in linguistics, another subdiscipline of anthropology, with the rise of Chomsky and his theories about generative grammar and the subsequent decline of the previous behaviorist paradigm.  That change, however, ended up going in a very different direction; while the New Archaeologists wanted to integrate archaeology more closely with the rest of anthropology, the Chomskyans ended up taking linguistics out of anthropology entirely and making it a separate discipline.

Excavated Rooms at Salmon Ruin

What the New Archaeologists wanted was a way to make archaeological theories generalizable, which meant discarding explanations based on postulated contingent historical events, such as migrations, and focusing more closely on the similarities among processes operating in different places at different times to find underlying “rules” to explain those processes.  This emphasis on process led the approach, once it was no longer “new,” to be called “processualism.”  The mechanism for doing this was the classic Popperian “scientific method,” with its emphasis on the development of testable (and disprovable) hypotheses.  Given practical contraints, of course, this methodology could only really be carried out at a fairly small scale, and processual archaeologists began to focus more tightly on small areas and to rigorously define what exactly a project was meant to achieve before any survey or excavation began.  This small-scale approach went hand-in-hand with an increased focus on the development of cultures in place, without ascribing change to outside influence or migration.  Processualism also required a careful examination of all factors likely to influence the development of cultures, including climatic and environmental factors, which in an arid environment like the southwest became a major part of processualist theories.

Pueblo Alto Sign

The Chaco Project in the 1970s is probably the most obvious example of Processualism regarding Chaco specifically, with its emphasis on the development of the Chaco Phenomenon within the canyon, its careful attention to dendroclimatology and other methods for determining ancient environmental conditions, and its use of explicit research designs to determine where and how to excavate.  Explicit hypothesis testing, however, was not used systematically in Chaco Project research, and this is typical of many other projects at the time.  Processualism was still developing at the time, and not everyone was using quite the same methodologies.

Salmon Ruins Sign

A much more Popperian type of processualism was going on at the same time, however, at the Chacoan outlier on the San Juan River known as Salmon Ruin.  This site, which had been protected by the Salmon family which had owned the land for decades, was becoming an increasing target of looters  by the 1960s, when the family could no longer keep as close an eye on it as before.  In order to protect it San Juan County bought the land on which the site stood and turned it over to the San Juan County Museum Association, which immediately began plans to excavate and arranged for Cynthia Irwin-Williams of Eastern New Mexico University to conduct the work.  Irwin-Williams was a committed New Archaeologist, and before beginning excavations she developed an elaborate research methodology involving a complicated initial model based on world systems theory, with specific hypotheses derived from the model to be used as guidelines for the excavations.  These hypotheses were then rigorously tested in the course of excavation and analysis, which took place over most of the 1970s, at the same time that the Chaco Project archaeologists were also active.

Great Kiva at Salmon Ruin

Incidentally, Irwin-Williams was the sister of Henry Irwin of Washington State University, whom I discussed a little while ago for his role in classifying Paleoindian artifact types.  Irwin-Williams herself began her career with more of a focus on early periods, and is well-known for her theories about the Archaic period in particular, but once she began the Salmon Project her focus shifted to the Chaco Phenomenon and its manifestations in outlying areas such as the San Juan valley and the valley of the Rio Puerco of the East.

McPhee Reservoir and Mesa Verde Escarpment from McPhee Campground

By the 1980s, when Cultural Resources Management projects set up to comply with historic preservation laws began to dominate southwestern archaeology, processualism and research designs based on rigorous formation and testing of hypotheses became standard in the area.  This situation has continued to this day.  There is still some research, mostly done by academic archaeologists, that could be considered part of the culture-historical paradigm (I’d say Steve Lekson’s work, despite his Chaco Project background, qualifies), but the field is definitely dominated by processual approaches.  The whole CRM scene is certainly processual, and many academics utilize similar methodologies; the work of Jeff Dean and the other dendrochronologists at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research is a good example.  This puts it firmly within the “scientific” side of the dichotomy I mentioned above.

Lintel at Pueblo Pintado Showing Core Sample Hole

Recently, however, a backlash against processualism has been gaining some momentum.  This movement, called “post-processualism,” asserts that the processualists have gone too far with their scientific methods and models, many of which seem overly deterministic.  In the southwest, especially, the processualist attention to the important matter of paleoclimatology has tended to verge on environmental determinism.  Post-processualism seeks to bring the people back into the past, by a renewed focus on historical contingency and the ways individuals may have affected events.  In a prehistoric context, of course, it’s nearly impossible to even identify specific individuals, let alone determine how their actions shaped their societies, so there’s a rather speculative cast to much of this research.  It tends to heavily utilize practice theory and concepts of “agency,” which can be interpreted either as the influence of individuals on events or, conversely, as the way communal groups influenced those events.  These two interpretations, while equally speculative in many ways, tend to spring from different perspectives on social and political theory in general, which leads to intense arguments between their proponents.  Pierre Bourdieu’s influence looms large in this body of research, and he is very frequently cited in its literature.

Vent at Salmon Ruin

Post-processualism is a very big deal in Europe, but in Americanist archaeology it hasn’t really caught on as much.  In a recent review article on theory in Americanist archaeology Michelle Hegmon argues that this is because there isn’t the same sharp divide between processualism and post-processualism here, and that adherents of both theoretical approaches tend to use many of the same methodologies in practice.  While post-processualism is often considered “post-modern,” and many examples of it certainly are, Hegmon argues that Americanist version generally tend to be just as modernist as processualism, with the focus still on a positivist attempt to use reason to find answers to questions about phenomena in the world.

Chacoan Masonry at Salmon Ruin

As I said above, southwestern archaeology remains largely processual, and post-processualism hasn’t made much impact on it.  This is in contrast to some other regions, such as the southeast, where the study of Mississippian chiefdoms has been influenced by post-processualist ideas thanks to the efforts of Tim Pauketat at the University of Illinois and others.  Nevertheless, a few lines of southwestern research could be considered broadly post-processual, particularly the cultural landscape approaches advocated, in very different ways, by John Stein and Ruth Van Dyke.  Some recent research focusing on the contact period and the Pueblo Revolt could also be considered post-processual with its emphasis on practice theory and agency in Pueblo resistance (and strategic accommodation) to Spanish influence.  Given the presence of historical documentation, practice theory is on firmer ground here than in prehistoric contexts.

Plaza at Salmon Ruin

I have my own opinions about a lot of this, of course, and about the role of archaeology more generally, but this post is mostly descriptive in intent.  It mostly shows the position of southwestern archaeology within the social science context, and where it falls in regard to the “social” versus “scientific” dichotomy with which I began.  Ultimately it is more “scientific” than “social” at this point, but there are some lines of research that are more “social” than the mainstream, and these fall into both culture-historical and post-processual spheres.  It’s important to note, however, Hegmon’s point that these boundaries are very fluid, and much research can be interpreted as drawing on multiple traditions.

Backfilled Rooms at Salmon Ruin