Archaeology

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY is the scientific reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric and historic human behavior from the evidence of material remains. Although the theories archaeologists employ for framing their questions of the past have changed dramatically in the short one hundred years of its existence as an academic discipline, archaeology's primary goals—reconstructing and interpreting past human behavior and culture—have remained essentially unchanged. In the United States, archaeology has traditionally been viewed as one of the four classic subdisciplines of anthropology, along with cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and linguistics.

While archaeology is also historical in certain aspects, it differs from the study of written and oral history—although it uses both—in two fundamental ways. First, the materials archaeologists generally find in the ground do not indicate directly what to think about them or about the ancient cultures that produced them. Therefore, archaeologists have to make sense of the material remains of the past through analogy to historic cultures, experimentation, inference, behavioral modeling, and good detective work. Second, archaeology is a humanistic discipline as well as a science. As humanists, archaeologists are concerned with how societies function, the evolution of cultural complexity, ethnicity, ideology, power, and a host of other universal questions about human behavior and organization. As scientists, archaeologists develop and construct pictures of the past from limited evidence, just as physicists develop and construct a coherent view of how the natural world works from a limited set of observations. This combination of humanism and science

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is one of archaeology's many fascinations and strengths as a discipline: it reflects the ingenuity of the modern scientist through its use of technology and rigorous methodology as well as the processes of the modern historian through its focus on reconstructing the past and giving it relevance to the present and future.

American archaeology as a discipline is divided into two types: prehistoric and historic. Prehistoric archaeology is concerned with testing anthropological theories of human behavior and cultural evolution against the archaeological record of societies that left no known written records. Historic archaeology uses archaeological data both to test hypotheses about the operation of historically known societies and to fill in the historical gaps concerning the more mundane, but crucially important, aspects of the day-to-day functioning of those societies.

The History of Archaeology in the United States

The first systematic, well-planned archaeological investigation in the United States was organized by Thomas Jefferson in 1784. Because Jefferson had decided to carefully excavate one of the prehistoric earthen mounds on his property in Virginia in the hope of finding out who built it, he is often considered to be the "father of American archaeology." The fact that he excavated was important, since few individuals in his day undertook such a step. His work was also so carefully done that he was able to observe how soil, refuse, and artifacts had built up over time, and he was thus able to link the known present to the unknown past. And, most important, his excavation was carried out not to find objects but to resolve an archaeological question: Were the Native Americans present in Virginia descendants of those who built the mounds? (Jefferson demonstrated that they were.)

While Jefferson's research was little known until the late nineteenth century, the "mound builder question" did continue to engage the interest of Americans. As a result, several organizations, such as the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Smithsonian Institution, started to try to unravel the mystery. Findings were, however, sporadic and inconclusive. As a result, in 1884, Congress finally dedicated funds to solving the problem through a series of surveys and data collection to be carried out by Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), the first federally appointed archaeologist. The answer was determined within ten years: all of the mounds present in the United States were the products of the ancestors of current Native peoples. The bureau continued to explore the prehistory of the United States over the course of its eighty-seven year existence, culminating in the multivolume Handbook of North American Indians in the late 1970s. The BAE was incorporated into the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian Institution in 1965.

The resolution of the question of who built the mounds led to a growing public recognition of the need for cooperation between government agencies, academic

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institutions, and individual researchers to answer questions about America's past. This circumstance was one factor that helped lead to the formation of archaeology as a discipline. In addition, by 1906 the federal government saw the need to protect archaeological sites and artifacts and began creating national monuments and parks as well as passing legislation such as the Antiquities Act.

That archaeology was largely incorporated within anthropology by 1900 was a result of the work of Franz Boas, considered to be the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas realized at the beginning of the twentieth century that no ethnographic study of the quickly vanishing New World peoples could be complete without a thorough understanding of their present culture, their past culture, their biology, and their language. This realization led to the formation of anthropology as a professional discipline with the creation of the American Anthropological Association in 1902 and to the rapid founding of departments of anthropology at universities like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Michigan, and California at Berkeley. The foundations of academic archaeology in the United States were laid well before Boas, however, with the creation of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879, which mainly concerned itself with Old World archaeology. Anthropological archaeology focusing on America's past was not formalized as a discipline until the founding of the Society for American Archaeology in 1934.

Anthropological archaeology as a distinct discipline has gone through many phases in its efforts to understand the past. At first, scholars were mainly interested in finding rare and unique artifacts. Then, archaeologists focused on describing as much as possible about the past by recording the smallest details of many types of artifacts and architecture. Once accurate dating techniques became widely available, archaeologists began to ask more and more complex questions about the past.

The archaeologist who provided the first dating breakthrough was Alfred V. Kidder. Through his painstaking excavation work at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico from 1918 to 1928, he was able to demonstrate that archaeologists could better understand chronology by carefully paying attention to two factors: how soil, refuse, and artifacts built up over time at a site, and how artifacts change through time at a site. Especially important was his discovery of the series of changes that the pottery in the northern Southwest had undergone. Once this series of changes was understood, a researcher could generally date a site in the region from the pottery found at it. Kidder's research set the standard for the discipline and is still widely used today.

The problems with exact dating were solved with the advent of dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) in the 1920s by Andrew E. Douglass and radiocarbon dating in the 1940s by Willard F. Libby. Tree-ring dating allowed researchers in the Southwest to obtain the exact dates when certain prehistoric structures were built, while radiocarbon analysis allowed exact dating in a wider variety of contexts and over much greater periods of time. The dating revolution enabled archaeologists to construct highly detailed descriptive temporal sequences for most of the known prehistoric cultures of America. It also opened the door to even bigger questions: When did the first Americans arrive? (The answer turned out to be much earlier than any one had imagined.) When did certain cultures start to develop? When did Native Americans start practicing agriculture? Despite these technical dating advances, the focus of archaeology was still on description rather than explanation.

Nevertheless, the dating revolution signaled the beginning of archaeology as a truly multidisciplinary enterprise, for the new dating techniques were developed by chemists and astronomers, not archaeologists. At present, because researchers have become increasingly interested in how past peoples interacted with and were affected by their surroundings, many archaeological projects now also include biologists, geographers, geologists, and environmental scientists.

The Great Depression helped forge archaeology as a discipline because it generated some of the most massive archaeological projects the United States has ever seen. These projects, carried out by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Projects Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, were intended to keep extremely large numbers of people employed. Such projects required skilled archaeologists with incredible leadership and managerial abilities to run them. Many of the most influential archaeologists of the twentieth century, including James A. Ford, Roger E. Taylor, and Alex D. Krieger, got their start on these projects. Such massive undertakings also signaled the beginning of large-scale government funding of archaeology, which continues to this day.

It was not until the 1960s that many archaeologists finally became frustrated with the discipline's focus on minute description over concrete explanation. No one was talking about why cultures developed in certain ways or why cultural change took place at all. The infusion of fresh anthropological and scientific thinking into archaeology by a new generation of researchers, such as Lewis Binford, Michael Schiffer, and others, catapulted archaeology into a new era, one that was centered on trying to discover the universal processes behind cultural complexity and change. Despite the postmodern, nonscientific leanings of some current researchers, American archaeology remains largely focused on these goals.

Archaeology and the Public

Archaeology, by discovering history firsthand through the welter of objects left behind from past human activity, has raised the consciousness of the American public with respect to this country's cultural heritage. Furthermore, the media in all its forms spends a great deal of time showcasing the discoveries of archaeologists, especially the controversial and exciting ones.

Since the 1970s, archaeologists have been embroiled in public debates about who owns the past and has the right to protect it and interpret it. Native Americans have protested that their histories were being written by other people, that their heritage was being sold in auction houses or put on display in museums, and that their ancestral sites were being destroyed. Ultimately, the historic preservation movement, along with the legal protection of unmarked graves, brought much of America's archaeological heritage under the auspices of the federal and state governments and helped address some Native American concerns. By the 1990s, it was increasingly common for tribes to have their own preservation officers and for archaeologists to plan investigations that addressed both archaeological and indigenous questions and needs.

Archaeology is still struggling with how best to meet the needs of the general public while maintaining its responsibility to preserve the past for the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fagan, Brian M., ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Meltzer, David J., Don D. Fowler, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds. American Archaeology, Past and Future: A Celebration of the Society for American Archaeology, 1935–1985. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.

Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Sturtevant, William C., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. vols. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978–1996.

Thomas, David Hurst. Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. A History of American Archaeology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980.

Devin Alan White

See also Anthropology and Ethnology ; Archaeology and Prehistory of North America ; Indian Mounds ; Radiocarbon Dating .