Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept

Author(s): Patty Jo Watson

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 683-694
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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PATTY JO WATSON / WASHINGTON

UNIVERSITY,ST. LOUIS

and the
Arckaeology,
Anthropolog,
CUlture ConCept
Whatfollows is the text of the Distinguished Lecture
presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, held in Atlanta, Georgia,
in November 1994.
ALTHOUGHI HAVEbelonged to the American Anthropological Association since 1953, my first year in graduate
school, I have been so deeply immersed in my own archaeological comer for the past 20 years that I hadn't noticed,
until I began thinking about this talk, how very different
the current anthropological landscape is from the one in
which I came of age in the discipline. That fact makes the
present assignment a considerable challenge: to say something that might hold the attention of an audience representing the diversity of 1990s anthropology. So I decided
to structure much of my discussion around something
central to anthropology and anthropologists since the
formational period of the discipline: culture.
As a University of Chicago graduate student, I encountered the anthropological culture concept not long
after my commitment to a particular form of Protestantism, as a matter of personal faith and belief, had faded
away. So it is perhaps not surprising that during my preM.A. period I concluded culture was a crucial tenet of
anthropological faith. It seemed to me absolutely necessary to commit myself to one of the many definitions of
culture then under discussion (Kroeber and Kluckhohn
1952) before I could be confirmed as a real anthropologist
(before I could pass the comps). After that, I would earn
a Ph.D. and live my anthropological career in accord with
my own personal understanding of culture, which might
also be Kluckhohn's or Kroeber's or Linton's. As a matter
of fact, it was Robert Redfield's version of E. B. Tylor's
classic definition that I chose to cleave to. Tylor said,

JOWATSON
is Professor,
ofAnthropology,
PAT-Y
Department
Washington
St. Louis,MO63130.
University,

"Culture... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired ... as a member of society" (Tylor 1871:1). In Redfield's rendering, "Cultureis 'an
organized body of conventional understandings manifest
in art and artifacts which, persisting through tradition,
characterizes a human group'" (Redfield 1940; see Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:61).
Redfield's definition is a little shorter and snappier
than Tylor's, and hence easier to memorize for a person
struggling-as I was then-not only with detailed culturehistorical sequences in several parts of the Old and New
Worlds but also with Murngin,Naskapi, and Nuer kinship
systems; with how to tell a phoneme from a phon; and with
how precisely the Australopithecine pelvis differs from
ours and from a chimpanzee's. Also relevant was the fact
that Redfield was a senior member of the Chicago anthropology faculty and someone my adviser (Robert J. Braidwood) respected. Moreover, Redfield's definition specifically mentions manifestations of culture ("art and
artifacts") and explicitly invokes duration through time,
two characteristics that appeal strongly to archaeologists.
Secure in my grip on the culture concept, I passed my
comps, got an M.A, and went on to dissertation research
in Near Eastern prehistory. Redfield, Eggan, Tax, Braidwood, Washburn, and McQuown taught us that anthropology was a unitary enterprise made up of four equal parts:
social anthropology or ethnology, archaeology, physical
anthropology, and linguistics. A prominent Harvard archaeologist, Philip Phillips, also formally emphasized the
close ties between archaeology and the broader field of
anthropology in an influential article published in 1955,
concluding that "American archaeology is anthropology
or it is nothing."
I wholeheartedly accepted all this and identified with
anthropology as fervently as with archaeology. Sometime
during the late 1950s when I was completing my Ph.D.
dissertation, I received an initial reality check concerning

American
Association.
? 1995,American
Anthropologist
Copyright
97(4):683-694.
Anthropological

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684

* VOL. 97, NO. 4 * DECEMBER

AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST
1995

the relation between archaeology and anthropology. Having attended a lecture and subsequent reception for Ruth
Landes, whose Ojibwa ethnographies I had read and admired, I introduced myself to her as an anthropologist. She
asked what my specialty was and I said Near Eastern
prehistory, at which point she turned away abruptly saying, "Thenyou're not an anthropologist, you're an archaeologist." Her remark was my first inkling that the anthropological world was not as well integrated as my mentors
had led me to believe.
I had ample opportunity to confirm the inkling while
carrying out research in the Old World, and then later as
I transferred my fieldwork locale to eastern North America. By the early 1980s I knew of at least two North
American departments of archaeology completely separate from anthropology (Calgary and Simon Fraser) with
another (Boston University) on the way. There were also
separatist themes clearly voiced in the literature by several archaeologists.1 A few years later a full-scale anti"archaeology as anthropology" assault was launched from
England and northwestern Europe.2 "American archaeology as anthropology" was rejected along with other tokens of American imperialism. And, of course, during the
1960s and 1970s I had noticed that the subdisciplinary
balance in my alma mater department at Chicago had
become markedly asymmetric in favor of one kind of
sociocultural anthropology and against archaeology and
physical anthropology.
All this I knew, but until I heard Kent Flannery's
distinguished lecture at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in December 1981 (Flannery 1982), I had not noticed that the other foundation of
my basic anthropological training-the culture concept,
even culture itself-was under attack within American
sociocultural anthropology. Flannery quotes Eric Wolf's
1980 assessment:
An earlieranthropologyhad achievedunityunderthe aegisof
the cultureconcept.It was culture,in the view of anthropologists, that distinguishedhumankindfrom all the rest of the
universe,and it was the possession of varyingculturesthat
differentiatedone society fromanother.... The past quartercentury has underminedthis intellectualsense of security.
The relativelyinchoate concept of "culture"was attacked
from several theoretical directions.As the social sciences
transformedthemselvesinto "behavioral"
sciences, explanations for behaviorwere no longertracedto culture:behavior
was to be understoodin terms of psychologicalencounters,
strategiesof economic choice, strivingsfor payoffs in games
of power. Culture,once extended to all acts and ideas employed in social life, was now relegated to the marginsas
"worldview"or"values."[Wolf1980]
Flannery mourns the loss of an integrating concept
of culture in ethnology, and fears the threat of such loss
in archaeology. Now, somewhat more than ten years later,

it appears that the culture situation in ethnology and

sociocultural anthropology is even more problematic.
Back in 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952:149)
noted that after Tylor published his definition of culture
in 1871, there were no other formal definitions offered for
32 years. Between 1900 and 1919, they found six; between
1920 and 1950 there were 157. The word culture had great
currency throughout this whole time, including the three
decades post-Tylor, but it was being used without explicit
defmition.
According to a recent sunrmary volume (Borofsky
1994), research on or about the culture concept, or "the
cultural," now ranges from linguistic, cognitive, and psychological approaches to a variety of postmodern and
post-postmodern experimental efforts on the literary side
to politically, historically, empirically, and/or methodologically oriented work, to that which focuses explicitly
on the nexus of biology and culture, of natural science and
human science, and to that which concentrates on intercultural encounters in premodern, modem, or postmodern world systems.3 I return to this issue below, in the
concluding section, but first take up something with
which I am somewhat more familiar:recent travels of the
culture concept in archaeology.
The culture concept in anthropological archaeology
has followed a well-marked but nonlinear trajectory over
the past several decades. After a freewheeling and primarily data-free speculative period in the 19th century (Willey
and Sabloff 1993: ch. 2), North American archaeology
developed around a culture-historical approach parallel
to but separate from concurrent processes in European
archaeology (Trigger 1989:187, 195). At the turn of the
century, "the term culture was first applied to groups of
sites containing distinctive artifact assemblages in the
Ohio Valley. By 1902 William C. Mills had distinguished
the Fort Ancient and Hopewell cultures" (Trigger
1989:187).
At this time in North American archaeological parlance, Trigger says a "culture"was mainly a geographical
entity-a taxon for one of several synchronic units-because so little was known about chronology. The period
between World War I and World WarII was characterized
by intense concern with temporal relations and by a great
deal of historical particularism in North American archaeology. Trigger notes, as have other scholars, that Americanist archaeologists of the 1930s and 1940s paid no attention to human behavior, to function, ecology, or even
quantification.4 There was no interest in culture per se,
although widely used classificatory units (foci, aspects,
phases) were implicitly understood to be cultural units,
possibly reflecting ancient tribes or groups of related
tribes. Archaeological cultures in North America were
believed to be conservative, changing slowly if at all in
response to diffusion of objects and ideas, and/or to migration of large and small human groups. Walter Taylor's

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ARCHAEOLOGY
ANDTHECULTURE
CONCEPT/ PATTYJO WATSON 685

detailed critique of Americanist archaeology, published in

1948 and promoting a very different view of culture to and
for archaeologists, was a radical departure from mainstream 1940s archaeological practice.
Taylor's argument (1948: ch. 4) included a view of
culture as composed of two concepts, one holistic-Culture-and one partitive-cultures. Holistically speaking,
Cultural phenomena are distinguished from natural phenomena, both organic (nonhuman biological) and inorganic (geological, chemical). Cultural phenomena are
emergent, more than the sum of the partitive parts, they
are in a realm of their own, a realm created and maintained
solely by human cognitive activity.
Partitively, the culture concept also denotes a specificpiece of the whole of human Culture, a culture. Either
way, C/culture "isa mental phenomenon, consisting of the
contents of minds, not of material objects or observable
behavior" (Taylor 1948:96). Cultural content is cumulative: "The culture-whole existing today owes its form and
at least the majority of its content to what is called the
cultural heritage" (Taylor 1948:98). The (or a) cultural
heritage consists of mental constructs. "Mere physical
form is extraneous as far as culture is concerned, being a
property of the world of physics and not of culture" (Taylor 1948:99). What was once called "material culture" (as
distinct from "nonmaterial culture" or "social culture"),
according to Taylor, is not culture and is in fact two
removes from the real thing: the locus of culture is mental,
ideas in people's minds.5Artifacts and architecture are the
results of behavior, which itself derives from mental activity. "Culture [the first-order phenomenon for Taylor] is
unobservable and non-material."Behavior (second-order
phenomenon) is observable but nonmaterial, and only
with third-order phenomena resulting from behavior do
we come to artifacts, architecture, and other concrete
materials making up the archaeological record: "this
[third] order consists only of objectifications of culture
and does not constitute culture itself' (Taylor 1948:100).
Taylor's handling of the culture concept is seemingly
a departure from the position held more or less contemporaneously by Kroeber, who says that materials and
objects are all part of culture equally with ideas and
customs: "Wemay forget about this distinction" (Kroeber
1948:295-296). If one reads Kroeber's whole discussion,
however, one realizes that his view is probably the same
as Taylor's (and Redfield's). He says,
Whatcounts is not the physicalax or coat or wheat but the
idea of them, theirplace in life. It is this knowledge,concept,
and function that get themselves handed down throughthe
generations,or diffusedinto othercultures,while the objects
themselves are quickly worn out or consumed. [Kroeber
1948:295]
So it is not difficult to see how Taylor, beginning with
the traditional, then-current views on culture, and think-

ing about how to transform observations on the archaeological record into information about culture, came to
the formulation outlined above. If only the ideas and
knowledge in people's minds are culture and the ultimate
source of culture, then archaeologists who want to contribute to cultural anthropology, the discipline that studies culture, must address their thrice-removed materials
in ways calculated to delineate past cognitive patterning.
The archaeological record can reveal ancient culturethe mental activities of long-dead people-if skillfully
interrogated. The archaeologist as archaeologist is merely
a technician digging up physical materials and their associations, in space and time, but the archaeologist as anthropologist is uniquely qualified to produce truly cultural
information about ancient peoples and extinct societies
throughout time and space.
One might think that to be an exciting and appealing
prospect, but virtually no one heeded Taylor's call to
reshape the practice of archaeology and make it more
anthropological. Nothing happened even after two eminent, well-respected members of the archaeological establishment, Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, repeated
Phillips's earlier admonition that "American archaeology
is anthropology or it is nothing"in a widely read and highly
influential volume, Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Phillips 1955; Willey and Phillips 1958:2). Why
not?
One very immediate and practical obstacle was the
ad hominem, or straight-to-the-jugular, technique Taylor
used to highlight the sins and errors committed by living,
active, and highly influential senior archaeologists, who,
he said, preached anthropology but practiced "mere
chronicle," sterile time-space distributions of selected artifacts. Such personal assaults are almost never successful as a long-term strategy. In a published Ph.D. dissertation, they are suicidal.
Another a priori reason why Taylor's program was
never implemented, not even by Taylor himself, is that the
demands it placed upon field and laboratory recording
and analysis were simply impossible to meet at the time
A Study of Archaeology was published. Even now, with
quite powerful computer hardware and software available
to archaeologists, and with greater knowledge of siteformation processes as well as more widespread interest
in ancient ideational patterns, Taylor's conjunctive archaeology is a rather tall order.
As Dunnell (1986:36) has pointed out, there is yet
another possible explanation why Taylor's reform call
was virtually totally ignored, and that is the concept of
culture he provided as the source and center of his formulation. Taylor asserted, with most sociocultural anthropologists of his day, and indeed since Tylor, that the locus
of culture is mental. Artifacts are not culture, they are only
objectifications of culture at several removes from the
real thing. Moreover, he insisted that the highest goal

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686

AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST
. VOL.97, NO. 4 . DECEMBER
1995

archaeologists could aspire to was eliciting cultural anthropology from archaeological remains, which meant the
mental processes (the true, the real culture) of those past
peoples. This argument easily led to a view of archaeology
as being highly marginal within general anthropology.
As indicated earlier, Taylor's views also ran counter
to the basic operating assumptions of most Americanist
archaeologists at the time he was writing (Binford
1987:397), many of whom did not believe that the original
meanings-to their creators-of the items they excavated
could be retrieved, and most of whom were less immediately interested in this proposition than they were in basic
time-space systematics. In 1943, Griffin matter-of-factly
stated,
Theexactmeaningof anyparticularobject forthe livinggroup
or individualis foreverlost, and the real significanceof any
objectin an ethnologicalsense has disappearedby the timeit
becomesa partof an archaeologist'scatalogueof fmds.[Griffin 1943:340]
Almost exactly 20 years after Taylor completed the
dissertation published in 1948 as A Study of Archaeology-a closely reasoned, devastating critique that seemingly sank without a trace-another reformer published a
much shorter and much more successful appeal, similar
in some ways to that of Taylor but quite different in others:
Lewis Binford's 1962 American Antiquity article, "Archaeology as Anthropology," initiated a period of dominance by processual archaeology, or "the New Archaeology," as it is often called.6 Like Taylor, Binford and the
New Archaeologists were intent upon expanding the goals
of Americanist anthropological archaeology beyond
those of typology and stratigraphy. Although Binford insisted that all aspects of past societies could be investigated archaeologically, in practice he focused almost exclusively upon subsistence and ecology. Processual or
New Archaeology came to be a kind of neo-evolutionary
"econothink" (Hall 1977) with heavy emphasis on hypothetico-deductive method, quantification, computers,
and statistics. Binford's concept of culture, appropriate to
the general tenor of New Archaeology and quite different
from Taylor's, was that of his professor at the University
of Michigan, Leslie White: "culture is man's extrasomatic
means of adaptation" (Binford 1962; White 1959:8,38-39).
Binford himself-like another of his Michiganprofessors, James Griffin-had little interest in the meanings
archaeological materials might once have had for their
makers and users, and he paid no serious attention to
ideational issues, regarding them as epiphenomena at
best. Thus, under his highly influential leadership, Americanist archaeology was materialist, functionalist, and evolutionist in orientation, overtly anthropological and scientific in its aspirations. This trajectory was very successful
during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it still represents the
mainstream of practicing archaeology in the United States

(Willey and Sabloff 1993:317),partly because of the great

initial success of the New Archaeology and partly because
of the 1974 federal legislation (the Moss-Bennett Bill, or
the Archeological Conservation Act) mandating the inclusion of archaeology in federally funded environmental
impact assessments. This legislation formalized and
routinized archaeological procedures in an early-1970s
mode that persists throughout the United States today.
In the late 1960s, however, Binford's attempts to
understand the morphological variation in Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) assemblages in France resulted in his
turning the full force of his research into ethnography in
northern Alaska and elsewhere (Binford 1983:100-106).
Largely, although not by any means entirely, owing to
Binford's influence, ethnoarchaeology became a standard
research focus duringthe 1970s and 1980s for Americanist
and other prehistorians and is now an established, productive sub-subdiscipline.7
Meanwhile, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the few
anthropological archaeologists who were not entirely
swept away by Binfordian, processualist New Archaeology with its heavy methodological emphasis received
powerful reinforcement from British and European advocates of postmodernist (postprocessualist) directions in
archaeology, wherein ontological issues were central.
The most influential among these-at least in the anglophone world-is usually said to be Ian Hodder (1982a,
1985, 1991a, 1991b). Although Hodder strongly opposes
nearly everything Binford advocates, and Binford wholeheartedly embraces their adversarial relations, both are
deeply committed to ethnoarchaeology as an essential
archaeological technique.8 Obviously the foci of their ethnographic observations differ. Binford, to whom culture
is humankind's extrasomatic means of sustaining themselves in a wide array of physical environments through
space and time, documents the interplay of climatic, topographic, floral, faunal, geological, and other natural factors with human hunter-gatherer-foragersubsistence and
technology. Hodder, to whom culture is mental (symbolic), material, social behavioral, and the recursive relations among all three, takes note of the important roles
played by artifacts in the complex, dynamic tensions characterizing human social and societal encounters. He insists on the primacy of archaeology as archaeology and
archaeology as history, ratherthan archaeology as anthropology, and stresses an empathic, particularistic approach to understanding the past, much like that of R. G.
Collingwood (1939, 1946).
Binford rejected the traditional anthropological culture concept (Tylor's, Kroeber's, Redfield's, Taylor's) because it was not appropriate to his goals and practice as
an archaeologist, not even as an explicitly anthropological
one. Hodder is committed to a fluid semiotic version of
the traditional culture concept in which material items,
artifacts, are full participants in the creation, deployment,

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ARCHAEOLOGYAND THE CULTURE CONCEPT /

alteration, and fading away of symbol complexes. Hodder

advocates a contextualist archaeology-as did Walter
Taylor-but one in which artifacts are not just objectifications of culture, they are culture.
Like Binford's earlier explicit rejection of an archaeologically unworkable, mentalist-idealist concept of culture in favor of Leslie White'sfunctionalist, neo-evolutionist formulation, Hodder's move is clever and strong; but it
is in the opposite direction of Binford's. Hodder begins
with the mentalist concept of culture, then takes archaeology from a completely peripheral position with regard
to that concept and places it squarely in the center of
symbolic-structuralist inquiry. Artifacts-their creation,
use, and discard-are "symbols [i.e., Culture] in [social]
action" (Hodder 1982a). Hence, archaeology with its primary focus on material culture is very centrally and strategically located in the arena of social theory.
Binford does not deny that artifacts had intrinsic
meaning, semiotic content, for their makers and users, but
this does not interest him. He rejects the traditional archaeologist's narrow focus on artifacts solely as markers
of time and space, and he also rejects Taylor's focus on
artifacts as mere clues to-objectifications of-cultural
patterns in minds long gone, as he rejects the further
implication that, no matter how hard they try, archaeologists who accept Taylor's program can never be more than
cultural anthropologists manque. Binford views artifacts
and associated non-artifactual/ecofactual information as
the essential means to interpret the interactive dynamics
ofpaleoenvironments and human paleoeconomies in synchronic and diachronic detail, important work that only
archaeologists can do. To make the artifacts and ecofacts
comprising the archaeological record speak substantively
to these issues, however, those artifacts and ecofacts
must be approached via site formation processes and
ethnoarchaeology, all of which Binford refers to as "middle range theory."
Hodder is not interested in matters of subsistence
and brute livelihood. Rather, the intrinsic meanings with
which the artifacts were imbued, the roles they once
played in complex social actions and interactions, are
central. He agrees with the symbolic anthropologists and
other social theorists that symbol systems are what distinguish the human primate from all other beasts; those
symbol systems include and are importantly shaped by
material objects and architectural forms. Hodder approaches these issues of symbolic systems, past and present, via ethnoarchaeology (Hodder 1982a, 1982b).
So what is this thing called ethnoarchaeology, upon
which the most influential representatives of contemporary Euro-American archaeology have converged? Ethnoarchaeology is one of the multitudinous ways in which
archaeologists obtain information relevant to creating
and expanding their inferences from archaeological data,
and to making those inferences more plausible. Ethnoar-

PATTY JO WATSON

687

chaeology can be as simple as collating descriptive and

functional details about objects and processes archaeologists frequently encounter-stone scrapers, bone awls,
sherds from wheel-made pots, metallic ore, and slagfrom archival sources, such as old ethnographies, ancient
histories, museum exhibits and collections; or from published and unpublished photos, drawings, paintings. But,
classically, ethnoarchaeology means designing and carrying out ethnographic research in one or more contemporary locales, chosen for their relevance to some archaeological problem. Binford picked the Nunamiut of
northern Alaska because he believed the caribou hunting
techniques they practice in an arctic environment are
relevant to his archaeological interpretation of Middle
Paleolithic caribou hunters in arctic western Europe during the Late Pleistocene. The Nunamiut also instructed
Binford about the dynamics of mobile, successful huntinggathering groups in close touch with relevant natural
resources in their landscapes. Binford's books and articles on lessons learned from the Nunamiut were, and are,
highly influential among Americanist archaeologists, as is
the other ethnoarchaeological or actualistic research he
has done in the interests of middle-range theory: "the
relationship between statics and dynamics, between behavior and material derivative."9
Hodder initially chose East Africa as a suitable place
to investigate, for archaeological purposes, spatial patterning of artifacts in relation to ethnic boundaries (Hodder 1982a), but then he was distracted by other aspects of
the contemporary scene in Baringo and turned to the
study of material objects, symbol systems, and their intersection with archaeological interpretation. In examining
ideas about spatial patterning of material culture, ideas
that were widely held among archaeologists, Hodder
found that his observations among several East African
groups (the Njemps or Ilchamus, the Lonkewan Dorobo
and Samburu, the Lozi, the Nuba) contradicted these
ideas, or at any rate made them appear highly problematic.
For example, most archaeologists would readily agree
that material culture reflects the degree of interaction
between groups: the more interaction, the greater the
similarity of artifacts, and vice versa. Hodder noted that
the nature of the interaction and the degree of competition
between the groups play an important role in how basketry or styles of ear decoration are used "to constitute
and reproduce ethnic group distinctions despite the long
history and high degree of inter-ethnic flows" (Hodder
1982a:35). He also found that the symbolic status and
functioning (the cultural meaning) of material items, such
as the spears carried by young unmarried men and the
calabashes decorated by young married women, determine the morphology and distribution of those items
within and beyond a single society (Hodder 1982a: ch. 4,
1991a:109-119). Finally, he was strongly impressed with
the fluidity and activity of symbolic loading on and in

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ANTHROPOLOGIST
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objects of material culture, which are continually created

but also continually act back on their creators, users, and
perceivers to maintain or to disrupt culturally defined
boundaries within and between social groups (young men
versus old men, men versus women, Samburu versus
Dorobo):
materialculturetransformsstructurallyratherthan reflects
behaviorally... refuse and burial patterns relate to social
organizationvia such conceptsas purityandpollution.... So,
how materialculturerelates to society depends on the ideologicalstructuresand symboliccodes.10
Hodder and other postprocessualists are also very
concerned about the sociopolitical setting of contemporary archaeology. They urge archaeologists to be aware
and self-critical about their biases and preconceptions,
lest they unwittingly create a past in the image of their
own present, a past that then helps legitimate contemporary social or political themes (Hodder 1991a: ch. 8;
Shanks and Tilley 1988: ch. 7).
In sum, regarding the two men and their programs:
one may, and should, quarrel with Binford's narrow
"econothink" focus, as does Robert Hall (1977:499), who
coined the word in reference to 1970s New Archaeology
(see also Fritz 1978; Redman 1991). And one may object
to the ahuman (no people in it) ecosystemic orientation
(Brumfiel 1992), and the general theoretical underpinning
of Binford's position (P. Watson 1986a, 1986b; Wylie
1985), but his influence has instigated and continues to
impel a considerable amount of fruitful archaeological
research. That is, Binford has been successful in defining
goals and methods that many archaeologists find feasible
and rewarding.
Much of the work of Hodder, his students, and his
postprocessualist colleagues has been heavily dependent
on ethnographic and historic information, and the method
he advocates has yet to be comprehensively demonstrated for purely prehistoric data, although such a demonstration is perhaps forthcoming from the work he is
currently directing at the famous site of Chatalhoyuk in
Turkey. Meanwhile, however, Hodder and other postprocessualists (by now a diverse group scattered through
Europe, Australia, and North America) have certainly
influenced contemporary archaeological practice in the
heartland of the old Binfordian New Archaeology, and
even in parts of the cultural resource management universe. There is much more interest now than even five
years ago in semiotic approaches and in critical theory
applied to the archaeological record and to the practice
of archaeology. It is perhaps too soon to see a comprehensive synthesis emerging, but some manner of rapprochement is definitely underway (see Willey and Sabloff
1993:312-317).
Beginning in 1989, the Archeology Division of the
American Anthropological Association requested a

prominent archaeologist to deliver a distinguished lecture

at the yearly divisional get-together during the annual
meeting of the association. Very conveniently for my purposes here, the four lectures published so far all address
this very issue.]] The four distinguished archaeological
lecturers provide a series of authoritative opinions and
examples concerning relations between archaeological
theory-past and present-and the actual doing of archaeology (fieldwork, laboratory and library work, interpretation and publication). Each speaker focuses upon
crucial themes in archaeological theory and practice, past
and present, and provides suggestions about how to improve our present understanding of the past.
Redman (1991) begins the series by pointing out how
much continuity there is between 1970s and 1980s archaeology. He also notes that although contextualist or postprocessualist archaeology and New Archaeology (processual archaeology) are obviously complementary, it is
unlikely that there will be significant integration. He
thinks coexistence is the best we can expect because a
major impetus for postprocessualist critiques comes from
fundamental differences between archaeologists with humanistic goals and those committed to science. He advocates making the most of both approaches, and recommends that "we encourage serious scholars to do what
they are best at doing and to coordinate diverse thinking
to form a loose but lasting alliance for new knowledge of
the past and present" (Redman 1991:304).
In spite of Redman's well-founded reservations about
explicit integration between processual and postprocessual archaeology, Bruce Trigger (1991) sets himself the
task of indicating what such a synthesis might look like.
He characterizes processual archaeology as neo-evolutionism and ecological determinism, counterposing it to
postprocessualist emphases on "the contingent, psychological, and mental aspects of human experience" (Trigger 1991:553). In other words, the confrontation is between "reason" and "culture" (Trigger 1991:551, 554).
Trigger then discusses external and internal constraints
on human behavior: ecological, technological, and economic factors and forces being the most familiar external
constraints, whereas cultural traditions made up of mental constructions-some
unique to specific societies,
some much more widespread cross-culturally-are the
internal constraints. Because cultures are "historical precipitates," the invention of new concepts is not random,
but is strongly affected by earlier concepts and their
history. The best means archaeologists have to get at the
cultural meanings of historically related archaeological
evidence is to develop the direct historic approach, Trigger says (1991:562), admitting that we will probably never
know the specific meaning that Upper Paleolithic cave art,
say, had for its creators. Nevertheless, he urges archaeologists to embrace wholeheartedly "the study of cultural
traditions as well as of ecological and systemic con-

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ARCHAEOLOGY
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CONCEPT/ PATTYJO WATSON 689

straints... to take accountof the constraintsimposedon

human behavior by cultural traditions as well as by rational accommodations to external factors," thus synthesizing the ecological determinism ofprocessual archaeology with the historical particularism of postprocessual
archaeology (Trigger 1991:562-563).
Trigger's optimism about the possibility for synthesis
is encouraging, but he fails to give any consideration to
the very significant problems involved in deciding what is
"cultural"("internal")and what is "natural"("external")in
ethnographically or archaeologically documented societies. Hence, this part of his discussion misses the whole
point of the anthropological enterprise, which is to obtain
knowledge about that very conjunction: How is it that
human individuals and human societies-past and present-intricately blend and intertwine nature and culture?
Brumfiel's distinguished lecture (1992) is a clear and
eloquent argument about the importance of paying attention to social change in ways that the dominant ecosystemic orientation of New Archaeology discouraged or
disallowed. She is especially concerned with gender,
class, and faction, and argues three points:
First,the ecosystem theorists'emphasisupon whole populations and whole adaptivebehavioralsystems obscures the
visibilityof gender,class, and faction in the prehistoricpast.
Second, an analysisthat takes account of gender,class, and
faction can explain many aspects of the prehistoricrecord
that the ecosystem perspective cannot explain. Third, an
appreciationfor the importanceof gender,class, and faction
in prehistorycompels us to rejectthe ecosystem-theoryview
that cultures are adaptivesystems. Instead,we must recognize that culturallybased behavioral"systems"are the composite outcomes of negotiation between positioned social
agentspursuingtheir goals underboth ecological and social
constraints.[Brumfiel1992:551]
In the body of the address, Brumfiel succeeds in
showing how thoughtful archaeologists could actually
begin to forge the synthesis Trigger speaks of, or at least
the "loose but lasting alliance" Redman hopes for.
Cowgill's distinguished lecture to the Archeology Division (1993) is an even more explicit attempt to bring
together and build upon the most successful aspects of
processual archaeology and the most exciting promises of
postprocessual archaeology. In describing the achievements and shortcomings ofprocessual archaeology, Cowgill notes that one characteristic of most archaeologists is
underconceptualization of the past at different levels: On
the lowest level there are no people at all, just pots or
potsherds, projectile points, or other artifacts. At the second level, people are present but they have no individuality; they are Ruth Tringham's "faceless blobs" (Tringham
1991). At the third level, people are "rational actors."
Cowgill points out that we badly need a fourth level, where
people not only find food, shelter, mates, allies, and enemies while creating, using, modifying, losing, breaking,

and discarding material things, but also these people perceive, they think, they plan, they make decisions, and in
general they are ideationally active. In the rest of his
paper, Cowgill discusses how archaeologists might hope
to approach the ideational realms of prehistoric peoples
by trying harder to get at ancient ideation; by becoming
more sophisticated about direct historical approaches
(here he obviously agrees with one of Trigger's points);
and by working imaginatively and responsibly to develop
what he calls "MiddleRange Theory of the Mind."By this
he means, in part, seeking out widespread aspects or
principles of symbolization, attempting to link design
properties (in art styles or architecture) with social features and/or culturally specific cognitive maps, and in
general taking seriously what he dubs "psychoarchaeology."
What is most interesting and heartening to me about
this suite of distinguished lectures is that all four explicitly, creatively, and thoughtfully address the major schism
in contemporary Americanist archaeology, and all four
explicitly, creatively, and thoughtfully recomrnend ways
to bridge the schism at various points, as well as ways to
advance archaeological knowledge using methods from
both sides of the fault line.
Another very promising development is the new generation of ethnoarchaeological fieldworkers who are undertaking and completing longer-lasting, finer-grained investigations than those of Binford and Hodder. Of many
good examples I note just three here: the 30-year trajectory of ethnoarchaeology among the San of Botswana
from the work of Yellen and Brooks to that of Hitchcock,
Weissner, and Kent; Longacre's 20-year-long Kalinga ceramics project in northern Luzon; Herbich and Dietler's
ten years of research on Luo pottery and on Luo settlement biographies in western Kenya.12
As regards the other focus of this paper, is there an
edifying conclusion to be drawn from comparing the odysseys of the culture concept in Americanist sociocultural
anthropology/ethnology and in archaeology? Yes, there is.
In each subdiscipline, certain practitioners took that concept very seriously, not just as a more or less meaningless
piece of antiquated anthropological dogma. Because archaeologists of the 1930s did not attempt to operationalize
the prevailing culture concept, but rather ignored it while
absorbed in creating time-space frameworks essential to
North American prehistory, Walter Taylor (1948) made a
strenuous effort to align Americanist archaeology with
Americanist sociocultural anthropology by taking the traditional, Tylorean culture concept as a central tenet in his
argument. He had very little immediate influence on his
archaeological colleagues, in large part because that culture concept could not be implemented or operationalized
in ways congruent with archaeological concerns of the
1940s and 1950s. Binford enjoyed much greater success in
the 1960s and 1970s by insisting with Taylor that archae-

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ANTHROPOLOGIST
1995

ology must be anthropology, while highlighting a nonTylorean, nontraditional concept of culture, that of Leslie
White. Hodder has gone back to something like the traditional culture concept but modified it to place artifacts,
architecture, and archaeology in the center of anthropology and social theory, while explicitly rejecting Phillips's
conclusion that "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing." "Archaeology is archaeology," he and the postprocessualists insist, even as portions of their program are
being incorporated into both academic and cultural resource management Americanist anthropological archaeology, partly to reinforce certain minority themes present
there before the postprocessualist movement, and partly
to further syntheses between processual and postprocessual goals in archaeology.13
The revisionists in sociocultural anthropology and
ethnology eventually found that the traditional culture
concept was not very useful to them, so they modified it
to suit their purposes. Many of them, past and present, are
quite explicit about this, and many of them were quite
successful at initiating productive research lines based
upon their new formulations. 14In sociocultural anthropology over the past 40 to 50 years, there has accordingly
been a proliferation in approaches to culture from the
earlier essentialist concept to cultures as configurations
of a psychological sort, as a series of distinctive cognitive
maps, as symbolic and/or adaptive systems, as infinitely
varying surface phenomena that may reveal deep truths
about universal human thought processes, as social
knowledge networks, and as trait complexes defined and
studied within neo-Darwinian frameworks.
Does this mean that the center of anthropology-belief by all anthropologists in some widely sanctioned variant of a unified culture concept-has been destroyed? If
so, does the lack of unanimity about culture-what it is
and where it is and whether it matters-mean that anthropology itself as a holistic discipline is, or is about to be, no
more?
More than 20 years ago, that was Rodney Needham's
prediction for the very near future about academic anthropology (Needham 1970). He thought that pieces of anthropology would be redistributed among neighboring disciplines. That was Wolfs conclusion 14 years ago (Wolf
1980), the theme picked up by Flannery in his 1981 American Anthropological Association Distinguished Lecture;
and apparently James Clifford (1986:4) was of the same
opinion eight years ago when he remarked that" 'Man'as
telos for a whole discipline" has disintegrated. Clifford
Geertz, in his Current Anthropology interview with Richard Handler (Handler 1991) says 50 to 75 years from now
academic anthropology departments will no longer exist
because anthropology will have evolved into several different disciplines.
Perhaps these conclusions are correct; perhaps general, integrated anthropology is already or soon will be

gone. Although I care deeply about this issue, owing to my

1950s imprinting in holistic anthropology, I cannot get too
worked up over the disintegration prediction. Anthropologists have been worrying about this for at least 40
years and recently went through another bout of explicit
fretting in the pages of the Anthropology Newsletter (see
Givens and Skomal 1992). Those who contributed to the
discussion are pro-integration and pro-four fields. Givens
and Skomal (1993) conclude that a four-field holistic anthropology is, at the present time, both myth and reality.
Another reason that I manage to remain calm in the
face of savage attacks on the old-time culture concept,
attacks supposed by some to mark or presage the disintegration of anthropology, is that the sociocultural subdiscipline, and, ultimately, all of anthropology benefits from
the culture conceptual shifts briefly referred to above. In
sociocultural anthropology, as in archaeology, each new
research trajectory counterposed to some aspect of the
traditional culture concept results in new data, new insights, and new knowledge. Moreover, the old-time culture concept still plays an integrating role as a central
reference point even for the radically revisionist anthropologists, for whom it is variously a bete noire, a punching
bag, or a springboard to alternative perspectives on the
human condition, past and present.
Finally, the 1950s characterization of anthropology is
true enough and strong enough to bear the weight of most
contemporary, intradisciplinary construction and reconstruction. Anthropology is still the only human science all
about humankind, from four million years ago to the
present: Who are we? Where did we come from? What
happened to us between origin and now? What is the
scope in all its compelling detail of past and contemporary
human physical and cultural variation, and what does that
variation mean in biological, social, and cultural terms?
No other discipline has ever asked these questions
about the entire spatial and chronological sweep of the
human past and present, as well as about the particulars
concerning specific portions of that sweep. And certainly
no other scholarly band ever set out to actually obtain
answers to such questions. In spite of episodic skeptical
crises within anthropology, and a chronic agoraphobia
about where our center is and where our boundaries are,
anthropology is still here-even Geertz gives it another
half-century: an undisciplined discipline, an unruly semiaggregate, but one with research methods and research
results of enormous global importance and great intrinsic
interest.

Notes
Acknowledgments.I am gratefulto Anna M. Watsonfor insights on culture in the partitive sense and on cultural diversity
in the contemporary world, to Rubie S. Watson for providing
some crucial bibliographic guidance, to James L. Watson for

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ANDTHECULTURECONCEPT /
ARCHAEOLOGY

many lively discussions about contemporary developments in

sociocultural anthropology, and to Richard A. Watson for commentaries on postmodernism in literature and elsewhere. David
Browman and Richard Fox kindly supplied important reference
material on short notice; a chance remark of Jean Ensminger's
was the inspiration for the direction taken by this essay. My
account of the culture concept in archaeology originated during
a short course on archaeological theory that Don Fowler invited
me to teach in the Cultural Resource Management program at
the University of Nevada-Reno in January 1992, and was developed further during successive meetings of a seminar on archaeological theory at Washington University, St. Louis: I owe a
special debt of gratitude to the students in those classes. Prepublication revisions to this paper were made at the Camargo
Foundation, Cassis, France; I am grateful to Michael Pretina,
director, and Anne-Marie Franco, administrative assistant, for
their support.
1. Dunnell 1980; Gumerman and Phillips 1978; Meltzer 1979;
Wiseman 1980.
2. Chippindale 1989:69;Clarke 1968:13;Hodder 1991a: ch. 9;
Shanks and Tilley 1988:213,item 6.5; Shennen 1986; Tilley 1989:
especially 110.
3. Barth 1994; Bernard 1994; Bloch 1994; Goodenough 1994;
Harris 1994;Keesing 1994;Kottak and Colson 1994;Marcus 1994;
Sahlins 1994; Salzman 1994; Scheper-Hughes 1994; Strauss and
Quinn 1994; Tambiah 1994;Tishkov 1994; Wolf 1994; see also A.
Watson 1992-94; J. Watson 1994;R. A. Watson 1964;R. R. Watson
1978; R. S. Watson 1994.
4. Bennett 1943; Binford 1962; Kluckhohn 1940; Taylor 1948.
5. See also Kroeber 1948:295-296; Kroeber and Waterman
1931:11.
6. Caldwell 1959; P. Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971,
1984; R. A. Watson 1972.
7. Gould 1978; Kleindienst and P. Watson 1956; Kramer 1979,
1994; Longacre 1974; P. Watson 1979; Yellen 1977.
8. Binford 1987, 1988; Binford and Stone 1988; Hodder 1988,
1989, 1991a; P. Watson 1991.
9. Binford 1976, 1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1981, 1982. Quotation
comes from Binford 1981:29;see also parts 3 and 4 in Binford
1989.
10. Hodder 1982a:210-211; see also pp. 155-170 for his detailed discussion of bone refuse disposal and burial customs
among the Nuba.
11. Redman 1991; Trigger 1991; Brumfiel 1992; Cowgill 1993.
12. Kramer 1994 provides references and commentaries on
the San work; see Longacre 1991 for overviews of the Kalinga
research, and of other work in ceramic ethnoarchaeology, some
of which long predates the era of New Archaeology; Herbich and
Dietler's project is summarized in Herbich 1987 and Herbich and
Dietler 1991.
13. See, for example, Fritz 1978; Hall 1976, 1977; Kehoe and
Kehoe 1974; Marshack 1972.
14. For earlier and more recent examples, see Aunger 1992,
in press; Benedict 1934, especially ch. 3; Geertz 1973:4-5; Fox
1989; Harris 1964; Kroeber 1952:part 1; Levi-Strauss 1955, 1962;
Tyler 1969.

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