Tag: Explanation
These items have all been tagged with the tag "Explanation", You can see other tags in the Tag CloudToward a Unified Evolutionary Theory of Culture
Christopher Pierce
Although scholars have long appreciated the fact that human cultures and societies evolve, there is yet little agreement on what a theory of cultural evolution should look like. Among anthropologists and other social scientists, a wide range of opinion exists regarding the appropriate features of a viable evolutionary approach to explaining sociocultural variation and change (e.g., Barton and Clark 1997; Boone and Smith 1998; Dennett 1995, 1998; Dunnell 1980, 1989; Durham 1991; Flinn 1997; Hallpike 1988; Lyman and O'Brien 1998; Maschner 1996a; Rindos 1985; Rosenberg 1994; Spencer 1997; Sperber 1996; Trigger 1998). Several schools of evolutionary thought have developed within the social sciences including sociocultural evolutionism, cultural selectionism, cultural transmissionism, coevolutionism, processualism, evolutionary archaeology, human evolutionary ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cultural virus theory, and memetics. Although some of the differences among these evolutionary approaches are substantial, many points of disagreement are very subtle and difficult to follow.
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The History of Attempts to Explain Southwestern Corrugated Pottery
Christopher Pierce
Southwestern corrugated pottery consists mainly of utilitarian or culinary jars displaying distinctively textured exterior surfaces, but lacking slip and paint. The textured surface was produced by not obliterating or smoothing the thin coils or ropes of clay used to construct the vessels creating a horizontally ridged appearance, hence the name corrugated. From the late tenth through early thirteenth centuries AD,ancestors of the modern Pueblo people across most of the northern part of the American Southwest (Figure 1) adopted a variety of corrugated pottery referred to as all-over, or full-body indented corrugated. This form of corrugation has systematically pinched or indented coils left exposed over the entire exterior surface of the vessel. Precursors to full-body corrugation had unindented exposed coils restricted to the neck portions of the jars, and are referred to as neck-banded pottery. Earlier still, culinary vessels had entirely plain surfaces produced by scraping both interior and exterior surfaces until the coils or other construction elements were completely obliterated (Figure 2). The all-over indented corrugated technology continued until the fifteenth century when Pueblo potters returned to plain-surfaced cooking pots.
Write Comment (1 Comments)Science and Explanation in Archaeology: A Response to the Post-Processual Critique
Christopher Pierce
The goal of scientific explanation has proven to be a significant challenge in archaeology as well as other social sciences. During the rise of the "New Archaeology" in the 1960s, there was great optimism that archaeology could become a true science simply by adopting the methods of science, in particular the explicit formulation and testing of hypotheses (e.g., Watson et al. 1971). However, this optimism has waned considerably as archaeologists have come to recognize that scientific explanation requires far more than borrowing rituals and concepts from other well-established sciences. Currently, little agreement exists among archaeologists regarding the particular theories and methods that are most suitable for generating valid, accurate and useful scientific explanations, and numerous different approaches vie for acceptance (Cordell 1994; Trigger 1989).
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A Critique of Middle-Range Theory in Archaeology
Christopher Pierce
For the past decade, several archaeologists have advocated the development of middle-range theory as a way to give objective meaning to the archaeological record (e.g., Bettinger 1987; Binford 1977, 1983b; Thomas 1983, 1989; Torrence 1986). They argue that we must translate the static archaeological record into behaviorally dynamic terms by documenting causal linkages between relevant behaviors and their static material by-products. This is accomplished, they argue, by making observations today that establish signature patterns allowing the unambiguous recognition of particular dynamics from their static by-products, and inferring past dynamics from identification of signature patterns in the archaeological record. Further, it has been emphasized that the operations and products of middle-range theory must remain logically independent of the general theory we use to explain the past to avoid automatically confirming our ideas about the past through a tautology. This approach to middle-range research is flawed in two major respects. First, the justification of inferences relies on the establishment of universal behavioral laws and unambiguous signature patterns to validate the use of uniformitarian assumptions, neither of which can be accomplished in the manner proposed. Second, the tautological relationship between description and explanation is not only an unavoidable, but also a necessary aspect of science. Solutions to these problems lie in using the physical characteristics of the archaeological record itself as our source of knowledge about the past rather than translating the record into untestable behavioral reconstructions.
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