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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Basic Incompatibilities Between Evolutionary And Behavioral Archaeology, Michael J. O'Brien, R. L. Lyman, R. D. Leonard
Basic Incompatibilities Between Evolutionary And Behavioral Archaeology, Michael J. O'Brien, R. L. Lyman, R. D. Leonard
History Faculty Publications
Schiffer (1996) recently proposed that, despite some incompatibilities, considerable common ground exists between behavioral archaeology and evolutionary or selectionist, archaeology. He concludes that there is no fundamental reason why the two approaches cannot work in concert to explain human behavioral change. There are, however, several important reasons why the two programs, at least as currently conceived, cannot work together in any thoroughly integrated fashion. Although both programs employ inference, behavioral archaeology conflates the distinct roles of configurational and immanent properties, searches for nomothetic answers to questions about human behavior, overlooks historical contingency when inferring and explaining the nature of past …
Seriation, Superposition, And Interdigitation: A History Of Americanist Graphic Depictions Of Culture Change, R. L. Lyman, S. Wolverton, Michael J. O'Brien
Seriation, Superposition, And Interdigitation: A History Of Americanist Graphic Depictions Of Culture Change, R. L. Lyman, S. Wolverton, Michael J. O'Brien
History Faculty Publications
Histories of Americanist archaeology regularly confuse frequency seriation with a technique for measuring the passage of time based on superposition - percentage stratigraphy - and fail to mention interdigitation as an important component of some percentage-stratigraphic studies. Frequency seriation involves the arrangement of collections so that each artifact type displays a unimodal frequency distribution, but the direction of time's flow must be determined from independent evidence. Percentage stratigraphy plots the fluctuating frequencies of types, but the order of collections is based on their superposition, which in turn illustrates the direction of time's flow. Interdigitation involves the integration of sets of …