THE CHANGING SHAPE OF NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY

Over the course of the last half of the 20th century, North American anthropology and archaeology have witnessed many changes, not the least of which has been the divergence of the sub-disciplines as most dramatically exemplified by the organisational split between the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association in the mid- 1980s. Many academic departments have moved away from the traditional four-fields approach, with little to no crossover between sub-disciplines at the graduate level and specialisation within sub-disciplines for undergraduates. With increased specialisation, it has been many years since archaeologist and ethnographer have been the same individual, in the fashion of Frederica de Laguna (1960) in south-east Alaska. As a result, studies which explicitly seek to integrate oral tradition, ethnographic and archaeological data are extremely rare.

Specialisation has also been the dominating trend within North American archaeology. With the rise of the cultural ecological paradigm in the 1960s, many archaeologists began to employ a multidisciplinary approach, particularly with respect to natural sciences such as biology, plant and animal ecology, palynology, geology, chemistry and physics, giving rise to the technical specialist. As a result, many academic departments now offer tracks to train geo-archaeologists, ethnobotanists, faunal analysts, lithic analysts, or specialists in quantitative methods. It is notable that, with our roots in anthropology, the outside discipline that was left out was often cultural anthropology.

With the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s and the goal to go beyond the reconstruction of culture history to the explanation of culture change (e.g. Fritz & Plog 1970), we archaeologists also desired to be viewed as ‘scientists’. We wished to use the scientific method to conduct experiments, to develop multiple working hypotheses and test them in a deductive manner, and to employ logical positivism (Hempel 1966) in a manner analogous to that of the natural sciences in order to discover laws governing human behaviour. We adopted the trappings of science in an effort to distance ourselves from the humanities.