Exploring Cause and Explanation

Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement in the American Southwest

Cynthia L. Herhahn, Ann F. Ramenofsky, Cynthia L. Herhahn, Ann F. Ramenofsky

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781607324720
• eBook ISBN: 9781607324737
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This 13th biennial volume of the Southwest Symposium highlights three distinct archaeological themes—historical ecology, demography, and movement—tied together through the consideration of the knowledge tools of cause and explanation. These tools focus discussion on how and why questions, facilitate assessing past and current knowledge of the Pueblo Southwest, and provide unexpected bridges across the three themes. For instance, people are ultimately the source of the movement of artifacts, but that statement is inadequate for explaining how artifact movement occurred or even why, at a regional scale, different kinds of movement are implicated at different times. Answering such questions can easily incorporate questions about changes in climate or in population density or size.
 
Each thematic section is introduced by an established author who sets the framework for the chapters that follow. Some contributors adopt regional perspectives in which both classical regions (the central San Juan or lower Chama basins) and peripheral zones (the Alamosa basin or the upper San Juan) are represented. Chapters are also broad temporally, ranging from the Younger Dryas Climatic interval (the Clovis-Folsom transition) to the Protohistoric Pueblo world and the eighteenth-century ethnogenesis of a unique Hispanic identity in northern New Mexico. Others consider methodological issues, including the burden of chronic health afflictions at the level of the community and advances in estimating absolute population size. Whether emphasizing time, space, or methodology, the authors address the processes, steps, and interactions that affect current understanding of change or stability of cultural traditions.
 
Exploring Cause and Explanation considers themes of perennial interest but demonstrates that archaeological knowledge in the Southwest continues to expand in directions that could not have been predicted fifty years ago.
 
Contributors: Kirk C. Anderson, Jesse A. M. Ballenger, Jeffery Clark, J. Andrew Darling, B. Sunday Eiselt, Mark D. Elson, Mostafa Fayek, Jeffrey R. Ferguson, Severin Fowles, Cynthia Herhahn, Vance T. Holliday, Sharon Hull, Deborah L. Huntley, Emily Lena Jones, Kathryn Kamp, Jeremy Kulisheck, Karl W. Laumbach, Toni S. Laumbach, Stephen H. Lekson, Virginia T. McLemore, Frances Joan Mathien, Michael H. Ort, Scott G. Ortman, Mary Ownby, Mary M. Prasciunas, Ann F. Ramenofsky, Erik Simpson, Ann L. W. Stodder, Ronald H. Towner
 

1
The Challenges of Cause and Explanation in Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement

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ANN F. RAMENOFSKY AND CYNTHIA L. HERHAHN

One goal of the 13th Biennial Southwest Symposium was to explore the current state of regional archaeological knowledge across three significant themes—historical ecology, demography, and movement—recently highlighted by Keith Kintigh and colleagues as grand challenges in the discipline (Kintigh et al. 2014). Movement and ecology have been emphasized in many Southwest symposia (Cameron 1995; Fish and Reid 1996; Hegmon 2000; M. C. Nelson and Strawhacker 2011), but demography has received less attention. In the 1992 symposium (Fish and Reid 1996), demography was linked to organizational complexity, and demographic papers have appeared occasionally in other volumes (Creamer et al. 2002; Doelle 2011; Ramenofsky et al. 2011). Here, however, demography is treated as an independent domain in archaeological investigations. We viewed this focus as essential. Although trivial to say, without people there is no archaeological record.

Another goal of this volume is to consider the broader epistemological issues of cause and explanation in archaeology. The incorporation of these concepts is significant on several fronts. They provide the contextual and theoretical “glue” that binds the three themes together into a coherent whole. Consideration of cause and explanation honors the contributions of Southwest archaeologists to the discipline as a whole (Cordell and Plog 1979; Fritz and Plog 1970; Plog 1974, 1981), adding intellectual depth to all the case studies or discussions and reminding us about the “confines of normative thought.” Of equal importance, using these concepts facilitates assessing the current and past state of knowledge within each domain. The assessment, in turn, ties back into the structure of the Southwest Symposium. The biennial meeting and subsequent publications of papers create a permanent record of development and change in archaeological knowledge that can be continually revisited. This structure allows us to evaluate older ideas and theories in light of new fieldwork and introduce new methods and techniques to evaluate what we thought we knew only a few years earlier.

Given the importance of cause and explanation to the volume as a whole, we begin by discussing these concepts at the scale of the discipline. To be consistent with this scale, we extend this discussion by examining cause and explanation within each theme at regional scales both outside and within the Southwest. This examination contextualizes how section leaders structured their topics. We end this chapter by introducing the organizational structure of the sections addressing each theme.

Cause and Explanation

During the heyday of Processualism, discussions of cause and explanation in scientific archaeology focused on universal laws, single causes, and the Deductive-Nomological model of explanation (Binford 1968, 1977; Watson et al. 1969, 1984). This structure, however, has not survived. Due in part to the post-processual critique, the purported objectivity associated with cause and explanation has shifted to more contingent and subjective structures for understanding the human past (Fogelin 2007; Hegmon 2003; Kelley and Hanen 1987; Wylie 2002b). These shifts, however, do not make science passé or imply that discussions of cause and explanation are no longer relevant to the discipline. Revisiting these epistemological concerns is appropriate, especially in light of our goal of presenting and assessing current knowledge.

Cause and explanation address both how and why questions (Dunnell 1982, 1989). These questions are the scaffolding that supports cause and explanation, involving different causal mechanisms and different explanatory scales. How questions address process, or those steps, feedbacks, and interactions that result in one or more consequences. Answering why questions, however, requires variables external to the subject of explanation itself. Although process can be part of explanations addressing why, how questions need not include why.

Take, for instance, the depopulation of the Colorado Plateau in the thirteenth century. If we want to know why this abandonment occurred, then investigating climate, precipitation patterns, and intergroup aggression must be considered. By contrast, asking how abandonment occurred involves issues such as abandonment rate, group sizes, and routes taken—all factors internal to the process. As another example, social networks may be causal in the distribution of certain artifact types during one or another time period. If this is the case, then investigating how social networks work is essential to explaining the distributions. If, however, the goal is to explain why such networks form, rather than their functions, then causes of their formation must be investigated. How social networks function cannot explain why social networks form. We need other mechanisms to avoid circularity.

As the examples make clear, there are no single causes. Instead, there are many causes that vary with the kind of question asked and that are framed in terms of research goal and scale. Research goal establishes what we want to know; functioning like a zoom lens, scale is the scope or inclusiveness of that goal. Accordingly, our investigations can expand or contract along one or more dimensions, including time and space. As a result, stipulating an appropriate cause at one scale becomes inadequate at a different scale.

As our understanding of causal scales has become more sophisticated, so too has our knowledge of adequate explanations. Explanations are inferences. There is a “best” explanation in a particular context, but to select among explanatory options, or “multiple working hypotheses” (T. C. Chamberlain 1890), involves a set of standards against which these competing inferences are judged. Standards include evidence, modesty, generality, simplicity or parsimony, refutability, testing, and conservatism. Even then, no explanation is final. The best explanation is likely to shift as we accumulate new evidence, as our understanding becomes more inclusive, or as explanations require fewer assumptions (Fogelin 2007). Creating these inferences is a process that Alison Wylie (2002a) describes as “archaeological tacking,” or moving intellectually between the theoretical and the concrete.

Relevant here is whether or not this understanding of inference excludes interpretation, defined as relative or subjective understanding of the past. Are explanation and interpretation mutually exclusive? Much archaeological ink has been spilled over this issue (Hegmon 2003; Hodder 1991; Preucel and Hodder 1997; Preucel 1989; Shanks and Hodder 1998; VanPool and VanPool 1999), and we do not provide a final answer to that question. More conservatively, however, because interpretation is also an inference, it can serve the same function as explanation so long as the same criteria of “best” are applied.

Cause and explanatory or interpretative inference, then, are concepts framed in terms of how or why questions that structure and facilitate understanding the archaeological record. Significant here is the integration of the three themes into this conceptual framework. In the following section we explore the ways cause and explanation are treated within each of the three topics.

Cause and Explanation in Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement

Historical Ecology is an interdisciplinary paradigm that subsumes many disciplines, including cultural and human ecology, cultural and historical geography, anthropology, archaeology, environmental history, and landscape ecology (Denevan 2006). Uniting all these disciplines is the strongly held assumption that humans are inextricably tied to the landscapes they inhabit, use, modify, and leave (Balée and Erikson 2006; Denevan 2006; Kintigh et al. 2014; Mann 2011). Although change results from the interaction of humans and landscapes, cause and explanation can be weighted in terms of either variable. The difference between these kinds of cause was recently dramatized by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Proceedings of the Southwest Symposium
• Exploring Cause and Explanation
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Tables
• Figures
• 1 The Challenges of Cause and Explanation in Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement
• Section I: Historical Ecology and Extreme Events in the Southwest
• 2 Historical Ecology in Southwestern Archaeology
• 3 Terminal Pleistocene Paleoindian Ecology and Demography
• 4 Sunset Crater and Little Springs Volcano Eruptions
• 5 Changing Landscapes of Early Colonial New Mexico
• Section II: Approaching Convergence in Archaeological Demography
• 6 Cause and Explanation
• 7 Why All Archaeologists Should Care about and Do Population Estimates
• 8 Quantifying Morbidity in Prehispanic Southwestern Villages
• 9 Demographic Patterns in the Prehispanic Puebloan Southwest
• 10 Ethnogenesis and Archaeological Demography in Southwest Vecino Society
• 11 The Stress of History
• Section III: Movement in the American Southwest: The Intersection of Objects, People, and Ideas
• 12 Tracking Movement in the American Southwest
• 13 Turquoise Trade in the San Juan Basin, AD 900–1280
• 14 You Get It Here, I’ll Get It There
• 15 Modeling Post–AD 700 Population Movements and Culture in the Upper San Juan Region
• 16 Movement of People and Pots in the Upper Gila Region of the American Southwest
• References
• Contributors
• Index