Behavioral Archaeology

Principles and Practice

Michael B. Schiffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134903726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Behavioral archaeology offers a way of examining the past by highlighting human engagement with the material culture of the time. 'Behavioral Archaeology: Principles and Practice' offers a broad overview of the methods and theories used in this approach to archaeology. Opening with an overview of the history and key concepts, the book goes on to systematically cover both principles and practice: the philosophy of science and the scientific method; artifacts and human behavior; archaeological inference; formation processes of the archaeological record; technological change; behavioral change; and ritual and religion. Detailed case studies show the relevance of behavioral method and theory to the wider field of archaeological studies. The book will be invaluable to students of archaeology and anthropology.

III.

TECHNOLOGY

9	Research on Technology: History and Overview

Just as the writing of Formation Processes got underway in 1982, J. Jefferson Reid and I laid out a bold plan: we would build in the Department of Anthropology an “Institute of Behavioral Archaeology.” We announced our venture by posting a sign on the door leading to our adjoining offices. These offices had once been part of the Bureau of Ethnic Research, which had lain dormant for many years. Under new leadership and a new name—the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology—this unit set out to reclaim its former space. Our proclamation was a response to this threat, yet it also embodied beliefs about archaeology’s future.

Reid and I understood that the frenetic pace of American archaeology was rapidly filling museums with artifacts recovered by CRM projects, most of which had been analyzed only cursorily. Thus, a vast trove of information about the past awaited those who could apply to these burgeoning collections state-of-the art analytical expertise and techniques. Our institute would specialize in analysis, training generations of students in techniques grounded in a sophisticated understanding of formation processes. The institute was to include hard-money lines for four new faculty members who would specialize in zooarchaeology, ceramics, lithics, and archaeometallurgy. The Department of Anthropology and the Arizona State Museum already had some experts in these subjects, including pioneering zooarchaeologist Stanley J. Olsen, ceramic specialist William A. Longacre, and Paleolithic archaeologist Arthur J. Jelinek, but we wanted to add researchers who would fill gaps and also take analyses in new directions. On the basis of this vision we wrote an ambitious proposal aimed at the university administration.

In the meantime, I began to think about where the institute might be housed in our cramped anthropology building. A large room on the first floor had recently become vacant, owing to the removal of thousands of pots to the Arizona State Museum. Room 125, some 1,100-square feet, would do nicely for the labs envisioned as part of the institute. I immediately solicited equipment from various national manufacturers as well as from local Tucson businesses, and donations began pouring in. The department head, William Stini, gave me permission to store the equipment “temporarily” in the old pot room. With the help of James M. Skibo, then a junior graduate student, we trucked in equipment and furnishings from around town, and soon the space was full. Room 125 had become an archaeological laboratory, with student-initiated experiments already underway. Fortunately, Stini gave it his blessing.

My latent interest in experimental archaeology had been aroused during conversations with Gordon Bronitsky, who believed that experiments in ceramic technology could lead to a better understanding of prehistoric pottery design (Bronitsky 1986). As a sometime-potter myself, such experiments had great appeal because my passion for studying formation processes was beginning to wane, despite the intensity of ongoing work on Formation Processes. Nonetheless, capitalizing on my expertise, I wrote a grant proposal to the N.S.F. that, among other research, called for experiments to identify the traces of formation processes on lithic and ceramic artifacts. The money would go mainly for a research assistant and low- and high-power optical photomicroscopes, which the department lacked. The project was funded.

The proposal for the institute was never submitted to higher administration. Senior colleagues advised us that it was far too ambitious and stood no chance of approval in times of straitened university finances. Appreciating that our vision of the institute, per se, had died, I wrote another proposal requesting only temporary and token funding for student experiments. After a personal pitch to the V.P. of Research, Lee B. Jones, I received the funding. In the following years, I wrote several N.S.F. proposals to fund an institute-like laboratory, but all were rejected.

As it turned out, however, archaeological hires in the next decade, including Barbara J. Mills, W. David Kingery, Steven L. Kuhn, Mary C. Stiner, and David J. Killick, helped to bring our original vision to fruition: one of the Department of Anthropology’s core strengths became archaeological analysis, from archaeometallurgy to zooarchaeology. And room 125 morphed into the Laboratory of Traditional Technology, which I still direct. To recruit students for experiments, I initiated a course entitled “Experimental Archaeology,” which I still teach. Over the decades dozens of student experiments have been published in journal articles, M.A. theses, and dissertation and book chapters.

Major Experimental Projects

Organic-Tempered Pottery

In collaboration with Kenneth C. Reid, James M. Skibo and I undertook experiments on temper to understand better the fiber-tempered wares of the Late Archaic period in eastern North America. In the course of this work, we began to expand the concept of performance characteristic, which Braun (1983) had brought to the attention of archaeologists. In our view, a performance characteristic had to be behaviorally relevant, something that past people could have perceived and attended to while striving to design effective pots for cooking, storage, and other functions. It was becoming clear that material properties such as thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity, which were measurable by standardized tests on precisely machined specimens, told us virtually nothing about how well traditional vessels performed during cooking activities.

To overcome the limitations of measuring thermally related material properties, we formulated the performance characteristic called “heating effectiveness,” which denoted how quickly a pot raised the temperature of its contents. Obviously, vessels have many cooking-related performance characteristics, but heating effectiveness appeared to be relevant for harried cooks, especially those wanting to conserve fuel. In addition, we designated other performance characteristics that might have been relevant to the makers and users of the early organic-tempered wares, such as workability during manufacture, paste-drying rate, evaporative-cooling effectiveness, portability, and abrasion resistance. Then we designed behaviorally relevant tests for comparing the performance of specimens—pastes, briquettes, or whole vessels—having different tempers (organic, mineral, and untempered). Details of the experimental procedures and their results were published in American Antiquity (Skibo, Schiffer, and Reid 1989). In retrospect, I must acknowledge that Lawrence H. Keeley years earlier had expressed the need for behaviorally relevant experiments (e.g., Keeley 1974, 1980), and no doubt we had been strongly influenced by his work.

As Skibo and I developed expertise in ceramic experiments and began to publish our findings, critics carped that our research was not anthropology and had no theoretical basis. An invitation to write a paper on our experiments for Current Anthropology, generously tendered by Susan K. McIntosh, gave us the opportunity to silence the critics. This mainly theoretical paper left little doubt that the explanation of technological change must rest upon a base of correlates established, often, through behaviorally relevant experiments (Schiffer and Skibo 1987). Employing the correlates that our experiments had generated on the performance characteristics of different tempers, we crafted an explanation for the transition from Archaic (fiber-tempered) to Woodland (sand-tempered) pottery. Chapter 10 is composed of excerpts from this paper, whose basic ideas remain fundamental.

Although the Current Anthropology paper underscored the crucial role of experimentally derived correlates in fashioning explanations and also presented theoretical formulations, some archaeologists read into this work an unintended meaning. Because our case study concerned utilitarian functions (techno-functions) of cooking pots, it was assumed that the behavioral approach to technology could not handle symbolic functions and that the concept of performance characteristic was restricted to utilitarian capabilities. Our next major project, on the techno-functional performance characteristics of traditional surface treatments, also inadvertently furnished fodder for those who would dismiss the behavioral approach on this basis. The latter archaeologists began to explore social-constructivist, agency-practice, and other frameworks for studying technological change (we engage these frameworks in Skibo and Schiffer 2008: Chapter 2).

Traditional Ceramic Surface Treatments

Archaeologists of the American Southwest had long been fascinated by the “corrugated” ceramics of prehistoric puebloans. These undecorated wares were laboriously built of thin, flattened coils that, in the joining process, were indented on the exterior surface, and so produced a distinctive texture. Although corrugated vessels were used mainly for cooking and storage, it was widely believed that corrugation and other traditional surface treatments were decorative, performing only visually or perhaps tactilely. Skeptical of these explanations, I believed that it would be instructive to examine experimentally whether surface treatments could also affect utilitarian performance characteristics.

In the spring of 1988 I began experiments myself, making dozens of miniature pots in molds, to study the effects of surface treatments on heating effectiveness and on evaporative-cooling effectiveness (Schiffer 1988a, 1990). During testing under behaviorally relevant conditions, the vessels exhibited great performance variation. For example, it was shown that an exterior texture, such as corrugation, would degrade heating effectiveness unless the vessel’s interior surface was impermeable to the flow of water.

Having done the first experiments myself and developed considerable expertise, N.S.F. reviewers looked kindly on my proposal for a project to study the utilitarian performance characteristics of traditional surface treatments, and it was funded. During the next several years, most of the proposed experiments were completed and published. Several findings of this project are summarized in Chapter 11.

I was pleased with the outcome of the surface-treatment project, for it had yielded robust correlates that could help to explain aspects of pottery design. However, I had failed to anticipate that this project would contribute to the unfair branding of the behavioral program as only capable of dealing with techno-functions. Even if I had foreseen this outcome, I would have pursued the research anyway. I believed, and still believe, that it is essential to understand how an artisan’s technical choices enabled his or her products to perform utilitarian functions in everyday activities. This commitment did not preclude investigations of symbolic functions, which were fully sanctioned in our theoretical writings (e.g., McGuire and Schiffer 1983; Rathje and Schiffer 1982; Schiffer and Skibo 1987), but this nicety had apparently eluded detractors. At the same time, being preoccupied with formation processes and laboratory experiments, we had not yet fashioned appropriate method and theory for putting the study of social and ideological functions on a sound behavioral foundation. That would come later.

Portable Radios and Such

In 1988 W. David Kingery, known in engineering circles as “the father of physical ceramics,” joined the Anthropology and Materials Science Departments at the University of Arizona. Kingery had an abiding interest in the history of ceramics and in the study of technology, and for several years we co-taught a course on “Culture and Materials Technology.” Aware that I was collecting portable radios, Kingery suggested that I make my collection the centerpiece of a serious study of technological change. I took his advice, plunging into historical sources, conducting interviews, and accumulating more radios.

The portable radio study was an opportunity to show that the behavioral approach could address a modern, industrial technology as easily as prehistoric houses or cooking pots. Although I did not set out to demonstrate that our theoretical framework could deftly handle social and ideological factors, my research revealed that many design changes in portable radios had social causes, such as the advent of hostilities in Europe preceding World War II, leisure activities in the post-war period, and the musical tastes of American youth in the late 1950s. Moreover, this work showed that behavioral archaeologists could address the research topics that postprocessualists had prioritized, such as social conflict, gender, ideology, and symbolic phenomena. Seeing an urgent need to assert the continuing relevance of behavioral archaeology, I urged our graduate students to craft new method and theory for tackling postprocessual research topics (see Part IV).

The Portable Radio in American Life (Schiffer 1991), intended for a general audience, was reviewed in Science—ironically, my only book to achieve this distinction. Although Portable Radio garnered many favorable reviews in scholarly journals and magazines, archaeologists seemed mildly scandalized by my foray into modern technology.

The first product of my radio research was not Portable Radio, but a paper on changes in table radio design that was rejected repeatedly by archaeological journals. Nonetheless, believing that the paper contained valuable insights, I did not give up. I decided to bundle my previously published works into a book on technological change, which included the paper on table radios. In Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change, I also developed new theoretical formulations on the roles of technology in society and on the nature of technology-related knowledge (Schiffer 1992: Chapter 7).

Many researchers, in and out of archaeology, have found the title of this book more than a little puzzling. My intention was to call attention to the fundamental behavioral tenet that all questions about human behavior are in effect questions about technology; and, conversely, all questions about technology are questions about human behavior. This symmetry follows directly from the behavioral tenet that human behavior consists of sequences of people–artifact interactions in activities. Because most questions in the social and behavioral sciences today lack technological content, there is a vast potential to reformulate old questions in behavioral terms and to construct new questions and new method and theory for answering them.

Archaeologists familiar with my radio research often asked me, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, if my next project would be about toasters or waffle irons. In fact, the portable radio project did change the course of my career. I enjoyed historical research, especially on electrical things, and wanted to do more. Perhaps the behavioral framework might interest historians and students of technological change in other disciplines. I had even envisioned the next project while finishing the radio study: research on the competition between electric and gasoline automobiles that began just before the turn of the twentieth century and was essentially over by the end of World War I. The outcome of this change process was well known, but the received explanations, larded with technological determinism, were disputable. The behavioral approach might furnish a more satisfactory explanation that encompassed social and ideological factors.

Framing technological change as competitions at various scales, already implicit in previous behavioral works (e.g., McGuire and Schiffer 1983; Schiffer 1979; Schiffer and Skibo 1987), took center-stage in the car project. No doubt I had been influenced by the writings of evolutionary archaeologists, people who then called themselves selectionists. While rejecting some tenets of selectionism (Schiffer 1996a; see also S...