George Cowgill's database and my introduction to scientific archaeology

Here is a very short video that describes how I first got into the science of archaeology:

George had a database!

Ian Hodder says archaeology is bullshit. My reply: “Bullshit!”

In a remarkably bad short paper in the current SAA Archaeological Record, Ian Hodder makes a number of statements that equate to the claim that archaeology is bullshit (Hodder 2018). “Bullshit” is a term that refers to speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. Liars care about the truth and try to hide it; bullshitters don’t care whether their speech is true or false. Harry Frankfurt (1986, 2005) published the major works on bullshit, although antecedents can be found back to Plato and Orwell (1946 (1968)); see also Cohen (2002).

Hodder’s first dubious claim is that “the most important public value and function of archaeology is its role in place- and history-making” (p. 43). That is, archaeology is primarily about heritage, identity, and cultural achievement. It is about the present, not the past. Most archaeologists disagree with this. Archaeology is about the past. That is why we carry out excavations, surveys, artifact analyses and dating—to reconstruct and learn about human society in the past. Hodder’s first claim may be wrong and regressive, but it does not qualify as bullshit.

Hodder then gets to his main point: “much of archaeology uses the past to play out the contemporary preoccupations of dominant groups and to regurgitate the present in their interests … I have become tired of archaeologists just mirroring present concerns and theories” (p.43). The bad guys here are people like me, who study inequality, sustainability, or some of the other “grand challenges” we have identified for the discipline (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b). Archaeologists go for headlines and not for local context, we are told; “This is what I mean by a post-truth archaeology or fake history.” (p. 44).

The concepts post-truth and fake news are typically applied to current affairs to refer to the kind of disregard for the truth captured in Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit. As Kathleen Higgins (2016) noted in Nature, “post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation … scientists and philosophers should be shocked by the idea of post-truth” (p. 9). So, Hodder is suggesting that people like me and my co-authors (Kohler et al. 2017), or the grand challenges crowd (Kintigh et al. 2014a; Kintigh et al. 2014b) are blatantly lying about the past. We are (knowingly, I guess) just projecting the concerns of the present—the “preoccupations of dominant groups”—back to the distant past.

I am not surprised that someone like Ian Hodder would characterize research by someone like me as post-truth and fake news. To make such an accusation, however, one must have workable concepts of science and truth in order to know that they have been violated. But, Hodder shows in this article (and elsewhere) that he has a faulty understanding of science. Like other post-processual archaeologists, Hodder thinks that science consists of discovering “universals that are singular in their unique law-like characteristics” (p. 43). In a recent paper in Antiquity (Smith 2017), I note how Hodder's post-processualist colleagues like Matthew Johnson (2010) criticize the concept of science in archaeology by employing a 50-year-old (outdated) definition of science and explanation. Science is not necessarily about universals and it is not necessarily about laws. It is about a rigorous search for evidence and explanation by constantly testing claims and hypotheses.

Contrary to Hodder’s assertion, those of us who use archaeological data to study phenomena such as sustainability, inequality, or political systems in the past do not adhere to the post-processualist caricature of science. Instead, we employ current concepts and epistemologies. These are aptly summarized by philosopher of science Daniel Little’s list of three epistemic features of science:

1. empirical testability

2. logical coherence

3. an institutional commitment to intersubjective processes of belief evaluation and criticism (Little 1995)

For additional statements of the nature of science in relation to archaeology and the other social sciences, see (Smith 2017), (Wylie 2000), (Gerring 2012:11), (Bunge 2011), (Little 2009). Or see some of my prior posts on this topic, including:

Science, social science, andarchaeology: Where do we stand?

Why is it important to strive for a morescientific archaeology?

Why is a scientific archaeology so hardto achieve?

Because Hodder has a faulty understanding of science, he has little basis for criticizing the scientific claims of other archaeologists. A look at the journals that my colleagues and I publish in (Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS-One, etc.) shows that the “big question, big data approach” that Hodder dislikes (p.44) does indeed conform to contemporary scientific standards. So, just what standards are we violating that would warrant the labels post-truth and fake news? Hodder has none to offer.

I turn the tables here and characterize Hodder’s article as bullshit. He evidently does not know the nature of science, and thus his critique shows a disregard for the truthfulness or rigor of our work. His paper is post-truth, fake news, bullshit.

Bunge, Mario

2011 Knowledge: Genuine and Bogus. Science and Education 20: 411-438.

Cohen, G. A.

2002 Deeper into Bullshit. In Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, pp. 321-339. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Frankfurt, Harry

1986 On Bullshit. Raritan 6 (2): 81-100.

2005 On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Gerring, John

2012 Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Higgins, Kathleen

2016 Post-truth: a guide for the perplexed. Nature 540 (7631): 9.

Hodder, Ian

2018 Big History and a Post-Truth Archaeology? The SAA Archaeological Record 18 (5): 43-45.

Johnson, Matthew

2010 Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Blackwell, Oxford.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright, and Melinda Zeder

2014a        Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79 (1): 5-24.  http://dx.doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, and Melinda A. Zeder

2014b        Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122: 879-880.

Kohler, Timothy A., Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman, Christina E. Peterson, Aleen Betzenhauser, Matthew C. Pailes, Elizabeth C. Stone, Anna Marie Prentiss, Timothy Dennehy, Laura Ellyson, Linda M. Nicholas, Ronald K. Faulseit, Amy Styring, Jade Whitlam, Mattia Fochesato, Thomas A. Foor, and Samuel Bowles

2017 Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North and Mesoamerica. Nature 551: 619-622.

Little, Daniel

1995 Objectivity, Truth, and Method. Anthropology Newsletter, American Anthropological Association Nov. 1995: 42.

2009 The Heterogeneous Social: New Thinking About the Foundations of the Social Sciences. In Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, edited by Mantzavinos Chrysostomos, pp. 154-178. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Orwell, George

1946 (1968)        Politics and the English language. In The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell, pp. 127-140, vol. 4. Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2017 Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91 (356): 520-528.

Wylie, Alison

2000 Questions of Evidence, Legitimacy, and the (Dis)unity of Science. American Antiquity 65: 227-237.

How archaeology is distorted by Science magazine and the National Geographic Society

The public has a lot of interest in archaeology, and new finds and discoveries are often in the news. Sometimes the press reports outlandish, nonsense claims, and sometimes it reports rigorous and important claims. Many archaeologists ignore such press coverage (good and bad), and many of us engage with it. If there are elements of the press that distort archaeology, we may or may not want to deal with this. I often ask myself if it is worth the time and effort to try to correct some misleading claim going around social media and the internet. In a very real sense, this kind of thing can be viewed as separate and apart from the actual process of scientific research. I can do my archaeology just fine without worrying about whether the latest "news" about an ancient monkey god is a pile of baloney or not.

But there are other distortions of archaeology that are more insidious and more troubling. These come from well-established, serious institutions whose missions include furthering research and knowledge in many fields, including archaeology. I am thinking here of Science magazine and the National Geographic Society. Science publishes archaeology, and thus promotes the scholarly work of archaeologists while showcasing our work to a wider audience beyond archaeology. This is good. But the kinds of archaeology article they publish is a biased and distorted sample of current scientifically-inclined archaeological research. Thus, Science distorts archaeology.  The National Geographic Society funds archaeology, and also publicizes archaeology in its website, TV shows, and magazine. Again, this is good. But, again, the archaeology promoted by NGS is often a distorted view of the past, emphasizing spectacular and mysterious finds, often to the point of severe distortion. This is done for commercial gain.

Science Magazine

The review process for Science is a clear example of scholars and individuals who are not archaeologists making decisions about what archaeology is worthy of publication in Science, and those decisions distort our field. The single most popular post in the 11-year history of this blog -- by far -- is one from 2012 called "Rejected by Science" (over 100,000 hits, when most of the posts get well under 5,000 hits). So, let me quote from that post:

 If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earliest" this or that. While I can only recall one or two papers in Science that I thought were incompetent (a much better record than most archaeology journals, some of which are full of incompetent articles), their selection of archaeology papers is definitely biased in a certain direction. I think one way of expressing this might be that Science publishes archaeology articles that will appeal on methodological grounds to non-archaeological scientists. My guess is that papers that are more synthetic or less methods-heavy don't make it through the initial review (which is done by non-archaeological scientists).

I have been rejected by Science at least four times (and about 3 times by Nature, and a couple of times by PNAS). I've been rejected by some of the finest journals in the world! So, maybe my complaint is just sour grapes. But I have had many colleagues over the years express agreement with my sentiments as quoted above. Papers are first skimmed by a high-level reviewer, none of whom is an archaeologist. If they think it might be interesting, the manuscript is sent out for review. Most papers are dropped at this stage. I must say, Nature does the same thing, but quicker. I think one of my rejections from Nature took only a couple of hours!

The fact that papers are initially screened by someone who is NOT an expert in the subject matter of the paper is a common critique of the Science review process. Indeed, one of the ways that PLOS-One touts their rigor is their claim that all papers will be reviewed by subject-matter experts.

This review process, and its outcomes, clearly distorts the archaeological content published in the journal Science. Paper are not judged by archaeologists, and only a narrow range of types of archaeological papers get published. Check out my older on issues with Science and Nature:

"Rejected by Science!"  (2012), initial post

"Rejected by Science, Yet Again!" (2012)

"Problems with Science and Nature"  (2013)

National Geographic Society

The publicity put out by the National Geographic Society provides another case where the nature of the archaeology that is funded and reported is often distorted. But instead of a bias within science, as in the case above, this is a commercial bias that favors sensationalism, mystery, and click-baiting themes. The NGS website may make sensationalist claims, and these get taken up by the mainstream media. The Guardian often seems to swallow them, hook, line, and sinker. The latest example is the claim that archaeologist Chris Fisher has discovered an ancient city in Mexico, using LiDAR, that "had as many buildings as Manhattan," to quote the Guardian. Some Mexican and French archaeologists objected in the Mexican paper, El Pais. They claimed that a city that big could not possibly have existed, because it was not mentioned in the historical sources! Give me a break, that is just silly. The city (Angamuco) IS large, but much of the LiDAR has not been ground-truthed yet, so this is a speculative claim.

Another recent case was the announcement that a new huge city was found below the jungle in Guatemala by LiDAR! It was accompanied in the press by image of Tikal. See my prior post on this. The National Geographic Society press release is mostly hype and speculation, which then got worse as other media outlets picked up the story. My purpose here is not to question hype or expose silly claims. Rather, I want to emphasize that the nature of the archaeological finds that get promoted are in the hands of an institution outside of archaeology, one that does a lot of good through funding and publicizing. Maybe we should give NGS a break, since they do a lot of good for archaeology. But I am more inclined to question their methods and goals. They are commercializing archaeology, and using our hard work to make a buck. That might be ok, if they were more objective in their reporting. I did get some funds from NGS back around 1990, but I'm not sure I would accept their funding now. Who knows what nonsense they could create from my research.

More hype than archaeology

If you want an extended example of NGS nonsense and hype, check out the story of the "Lost city of the Monkey God." NGS-funded "explorers" tramped around the Honduran jungle and came out with outrageous claims about finding a lost city. Never mind that the site in question was well known to archaeologists and had been studied earlier. A whole story of intrepid explorers and fantastic discoveries was generated. The resulting book has become a best-seller. Please check out these sources for some objective, archaeologically-appropriate writing about this episode:

blog post by Rosemary Joyce from 2012

another post by Joyce, 2015

article in Smithsonian magazine about the episode (2015)

An open letter to NGS signed by a bunch of archaeologists that lists all the problems with the activities and their reporting.

These archaeologists are so discouraged that they feel that any additional harping will only increase sales of the book by Preston. I hope I am not contributing to the hype here.

Apart from the scientific and scholarly nonsense of the Monkey God episode, I find it discouraging for the same reason as the reviewing procedures used by Science: archaeology is being distorted by non-archaeological institutions that purportedly exist, in part, to promote and improve archaeology.

Social media attack to blog post to journal article

figure from my paper

My paper, "Social Science and Archaeological Enquiry", was just released, online, by the journal Antiquity (last week, I think). It is volume 91 (356), pp. 520 - 528. You can find a copy here.   This is without a doubt the strangest journey to publication of any of my papers, so maybe it is worth telling. I have the Grateful Dead on in the background, which helps. The story begins with my attendance at a talk on the "new materiality" by Rosemary Joyce at the University of Colorado Department of Anthropology in late January or early February, 2016. I did not like the lecture, and I made some snide remarks about it in this blog, here.

The new materiality: Vacuous or just incomprehensible?

Looking back, I was perhaps a bit harsh in my tone, bordering on rudeness. Some students from UCB posted some critical remarks about my post on their departmental Facebook page.

You can see some of the posts from the Boulder group here.

I fired back and posted some more remarks on my blog. I was taken to task by the department chairman, in a rather rude ad hominen post, for shooting my mouth off without restraint, rather like a small child. You can find all this pretty easily if you are interested (note: it is not very interesting...). Nearly all of the criticisms from Boulder suggested that my speech was not valued. I was insulting; I was trying to spoil their special lecture; I should not say such nasty things about their distinguished visitor. Many people came along and liked their critical posts. I became a pariah to UCB Anthropology-Facebook. But not a word about the intellectual content of the lecture or my reaction to it.

I was dismayed, insulted, and demoralized by my first social-media hazing event. The comments to some of my blog posts discuss some of these issues. But to me, the key issues were--and are--scientific and intellectual. I found the whole approach of Rosemary Joyce's talk to be anti-scientific and thus detrimental to the advance of the kind of archaeology I advocate in this blog. I was particularly incensed at her argument that fields like archaeology had to choose between the humanities and the natural sciences. She claimed that, given the inadequacies of natural science, we should choose to follow the humanities. This is so wrong-headed, it drove me nuts.

My reactions led to me create a series of posts that clarified my views of science, social science, and the place of archaeology. Writing these helped me clarify my own views of the topic, and try to put them into a framework that would be clear to other archaeologists (ever wonder why i blog? This is a primary reason - it helps me clarify my thoughts).

Science, Social science, and archaeology: Where do we stand?

Pascal Boyer's view of science, social science, and the humanities

Why is it important to strive for a more scientific archaeology?

Why is a scientific archaeology so hard to achieve?

((you can get to the later posts from the first one))

After this whole event had died down, it occurred to me that I should present these ideas in a larger venue, in a streamlined and more efficient context. Why had no one called the postprocessualists to task for their outdated and inaccurate views of positivism and science? Why haven't scientifically-minded archaeologists shot back at the epistemological hogwash? So I sent off a short piece to Antiquity, and they accepted it. I was a bit nervous, wondering if it was entirely proper to put ideas from a blog post into a journal article. But this was not at all a literal re-doing of the blog. The basic message was the same, though. I came across the paper on archaeological theory by Julian Thomas, and found that none of the work I do - theoretical or empirical - would fit under his definition of "archaeological theory." So I contrasted it with the list of different approaches to archaeological theory given by Jarvie and  Zamora-Bomilla. I also continued some of the themes from my paper on archaeological arguments.

So the path of this article was:

- attended a talk I did not like
- wrote a snarky blog post about it
- was attacked on social media
- sharpened my thinking in a series of blog posts
- condensed and sharpened the ideas further for a journal paper

So, I figured that it was time for another blog post (this one). Perhaps I should give a bad lecture on the whole affair and complete the circle. Or maybe I should shut up and concentrate my efforts on publications, not blogs.

To quote my favorite rock band, "What a long strange trip its been....."

References:

Jarvie, Ian and Jesús Zamora-Bomilla (editors)
2011 Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Sage, New York.

Smith, Michael E.
2015 How Can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

2017 Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91: 520-528.

Thomas, Julian
2015 The Future of Archaeological Theory. Antiquity 89: 1287-1296.

Carl Sagan's Toolkit for Skeptical Thinking (or call it Smith's epistemology)

I just read a nice blog post by A.P. Van Arsdale, "Size, Science, and Scientific Truth on bias in scientific thinking. I differ from Van Arsdale somewhat in my view that science is not about "Truth," but about reducing error. As Professor Indiana Jones once said,  "Archeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's Philosophy class is right down the hall.'   Archaeology, like all science, is about facts and patterns and explanations, not about truth. But I do understand that many people use the word "truth" informally to refer to facts, patterns, and explanations.

In his post Van Arsdale lists nine principles from Carl Sagan that comprise a "Toolkit for sceptical thinking." These are from Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark." These are great precepts, and they neatly describe my own epistemology.

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”  
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight – “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.  
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.”
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify.  If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there is a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work–not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis proposed can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle – an electron, say – in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? 

If you have read any of my ranting and raving in this blog about science, scholarship, and the deleterious effects that postmodernism, postprocessualism, and social archaeology have had on the advancement of archaeology, these points are no surprise. For more formal statements of some of my epistemology, see Smith (2015; n.d.). Or see many of my prior posts, especially my series on science in archaeology, starting with "Science, Social Science, and Archaeology: Where do we Stand?"

Smith, Michael E.
2015 How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4):                 18-23.

n.d. Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity  (in press).

And if you want to see Carl Sagan in some wild and wonderful videos, check out the mash-ups by Melody Sheep. I especially like this one.  Whoop  Whoop......

In praise of reductionism

Suppose I have a business making clothing. I want to know how many items of what size to manufacture. If I can know the distribution of men's and women's adult heights in the U.S., I can plan how many shirts or pants to make of each size. Assume that the height data are not readily available. So I draw a sample of people, measure their heights, and calculate means, standard deviations, quartiles, and probably other measures of the distribution. I think that an anthropologist down at the U might be interested in my height data, so I head downtown.

The first anthropologist I run into is a cultural anthropologist. When I show him my data, he chides me for being simplistic. How can I possibly think I have described my population of people when I have only looked at their height? We want to know so much more about people, she says. My little study is ridiculously limited and it can't help him understand people at all. It is reductionist, It is useless. Why did I bother.

Then I run into an evolutionary anthropologist. She likes the data I gathered. She can compare these results with her own measurements of height in Lower Slobovia, and learn something about human height variation. To her, these are interesting and important data.

For my own purposes, and for the evolutionary anthropologist, my little study of height provides important data. It helps each of us answer a question of importance about height. Is this study rigorous and useful? Yes.It is reductionist? Yes, again. Is that bad? Only for the cultural anthropologists who wants more information and more nuance.

You can probably see where I am going here. Over the past couple of years, I have encountered considerable opposition to our work in settlement scaling from archaeologists, historians, and others.

(On the scaling work, see this post from 2014,  or a bunch of posts in Wide Urban World; this is the latest post there.)

These people  complain that this research is reductionist. How can we possibly understand ancient settlements by just comparing the population to one other variable using a graph and an equation? Cities and settlements are far too complex to be explained by two variables. But we have never claimed to explain ancient cities or settlements on the basis of a scaling regression. Instead, we claim to produce a better understanding of a particular limited domain of ancient settlements. If you want a comprehensive analysis of individual ancient cities, then be my guest. I have done that kind of thing (Smith 2008), and it is a useful approach. But now, when I am addressing a limited domain using a few variables, please don't accuse me of reductionism, as if that charge invalidates the research.

This is not just me feeling oppressed by clueless reviewers, colleagues, audience members, and such. The roster of the reductionism naysayers I have encountered includes some good, smart scholars. In fact, even very well-known and respected scholars fall victim to this malady of poo-pooing single indices or variables for not explaining everything one might want to know about a phenomenon. For example, here is what Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, says about the Gini index:  "Indeed, it is impossible to summarize a multidimensional reality with a unidimensional index without unduly simplifying matters and mixing up things that should not be treated together" (Piketty 2014:266). As pointed out by Branko Milanovic (2014), Piketty dismisses the Gini index as an "aseptic" measure of inequality. But who has claimed that the Gini index will tell us everything we want to know about inequality? It tells us one kind of thing, and it allows us to compare separate contexts.

The Gini index, and my hypothetical measure of height, are intentionally reductionist. Their goal is NOT to document or explain everything about some domain. Rather, their goal is to abstract a key dimension from a complex reality, to reduce the messy details to a single measure so that comparisons can be made among domains. Comparative analysis is impossible without simplification, without ignoring a lot of details. If  you want to say, "I'd rather do a detailed comprehensive analysis of one case," that is fine. If you want to say "I don't like statistical studies or regression analysis," that is fine (well, maybe its not really fine, but it is not too uncommon). But please do not say "Because I happen to like details, then your reductionist measure is worthless."

I gave a talk in Europe recently promoting comparative approaches to past urbanism. I made the point that in order to compare cities, one had to abstract some key aspects and ignore many details. This allows one to generate useful and interesting conclusions. When I was done, the first question (from an urban historian) was,"Isn't all this quite reductionistic?" My answer was "Yes! And that is precisely why I do it!"

Take a look at my post from last year , "Against nuance," for some related ideas.

Milanovic, Branko
2014    The Return of 'Patrimonial Capitalism': A Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Economic Literature 52 (2): 519-534.

Piketty, Thomas
2014    Capital in the Twenti-first Century. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA.

Smith, Michael E.
2008    Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Why is a scientific archaeology so hard to achieve?

This is the third of three posts on my view of a “scientific archaeology.” The first two were, “Science, social science, and archaeology: Where do we stand?”, and “Why is itimportant to strive for a more scientific archaeology?”

I will give four reasons why a scientific archaeology is hard to achieve:

1. The new archaeologists picked the wrong model of explanation, and we are still paying for their mistake

2. Confusion about “archaeological science” and “scientific archaeology”

3. Ignorance of the social sciences

4. A widespread commitment to abstract and philosophical social theory

Reason 1:  The new archaeologists picked the wrong model of explanation, and we are still paying for their mistake

Lewis Binford and the New Archaeologists latched onto the covering law model of explanation, as promoted by Carl Hempel and the other logical positivists. This is a very restrictive model that does not work in the social sciences. Explanation consists of subsuming a particular case under a general or universal law. But the new archaeologists could not identify any general laws that would help, other than trivialities famously labeled “Mickey Mouse laws” by Kent Flannery. Philosophers of science had already shown the limitations of covering laws for the social sciences, even before the new archaeologists started promoting Hempel. A philosopher of science pointed this out in an archaeology journal (Morgan 1973). The archaeologists replied that Morgan was not an archaeologist and didn’t understand archaeology, and so his critique did not count (Watson et al. 1974)!

A number of archaeologists were highly critical of the covering law approach (Flannery 1973; Sabloff et al. 1973), but they did not have a viable alternative model of explanation. For a while it seemed that systems theory might fill the gap. When I was in graduate school in the late 1970s, systems theory was the cool new thing, and I even published a paper with boxes and arrows (Smith 1983). I published it in Mexico, in Spanish, figuring I could help spread the word on systems theory. Later, I was slightly embarrassed about the paper, glad it was published in an obscure journal!

Explanation via causal mechanisms didn’t become popular until ca. 1990 (Elster 1989; Stinchcombe 1991). But it should be obvious to anyone interested in the archaeology of social processes or in social history that causal mechanisms provide a far more appropriate and satisfying account of explanation than covering laws (see the quote from Charles Tilly in my prior post). This table, from Hedström (2005), contrasts covering laws, mechanisms, and statistical explanations.

Strangely, some archaeologists have continued until recently to argue in favor of explanation by covering laws (Kuznar and Long 2008). But covering laws are most often encountered today either in historical accounts of archaeology, or in works by archaeologists who want to critique natural-science epistemologies as a basis for archaeological argumentation (e.g., Martinón-Torres and Killick n.d.). Get over it, folks. Covering laws are dead. They were superseded by causal mechanisms over 30 years ago!

Reason 2: Confusion about “archaeological science” and “scientific archaeology”

Riddle: What is called “science” but is not science?

Answer: Creation science and “archaeological science.”

That riddle is not entirely fair, but it does bring out an important issue in the way the term “science” is used in archaeology. Consider two dichotomous schemes. The first is one I have talked about several times in this blog (original discussion; see also here). I talk about Science-1 to refer to archaeology with a scientific epistemology and Science-2  describes the use of techniques from the natural sciences, whether or not employed within an overall scientific epistemology. I point out the irony of using the term scientific for non- and anti-scientific archaeological epistemologies, even if used by scholars who employ “scientific” techniques.

The second scheme, as described by Martinón-Torres and Killick (n.d.) distinguishes “scientific archaeology” (the use of a natural-science epistemology in archaeology) and “archaeological science” (the use of natural-science techniques by archaeologists). These are parallel schemes, but quite distinct in their implications. Do you see the difference?

These authors write from the perspective of high-level, abstract social theory. To them, “scientific archaeology” describes the bad guys—new archaeology, behavioral archaeology, and evolutionary archaeology—all of whom are accused of being neo-positivists under the spell of Hempel et al. I don’t want to speak for those three approaches, but from my perspective, the scheme of Martinón-Torres and Killick ignores the kind of social-scientific epistemology that I am promoting.

Their second concept, “archaeological science,” is ironic when describing archaeometric work by archaeologists who fail to follow a scientific epistemology.  Martinón-Torres and Killick give an extended discussion of how “archaeological science” has helped further high-level abstract social theory in archaeology (e.g., materiality, social constructivism). But those applications are not science; that is, they do not follow a scientific epistemology. Perhaps the simplest “litmus test” of the scientific status of an argument is to pose the question “How would you know if you are wrong?” (Smith 2015); based on Haber (1999). Look at archaeological papers on materiality or poststructuralism, and see if they pass this litmus test.

I want to be clear here. I do NOT claim that any work that invokes high-level abstract theory is unscientific by definition. It is entirely possible to use such theory within a paper that also includes lower-level empirical theory in a scientific fashion. But if the ONLY theory on the table is abstract social theory, then it is very unlikely that a scientific epistemology is being followed. I'd love to be proven wrong here, but I don't see it.

I apologize if you are sick of reading the term “epistemology.” But I find it necessary to navigate these waters where non-scientific arguments and research design can be labelled scientific, and scientific approaches are omitted from descriptions of "scientific archaeology."

Reason 3: Ignorance of the social sciences

My graduate training was quite isolationist about archaeology and other disciplines. Classical archaeology was portrayed as silly and irrelevant. I remember when this bubble was popped for me. Shortly after I started teaching, at Loyola University of Chicago, I attended a workshop on survey archaeology in the Mediterranean at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Having been socialized that Mesoamerican survey archaeology was the best in the world, I was flabbergasted to learn that some of the Classical archaeologists had better methods than we used in Mesoamerica! More rigorous collections, better calculation of surface counts and densities, and a more rigorous and intensive approach to surface archaeology. This was not silly or irrelevant! (Alcock and Cherry 2004; Barker and Mattingly 1999-2000).

A second component of disciplinary isolation was the message that other social sciences were not of interest to archaeology. We were part of anthropology, the story went, and anthropology stood alone as the light through the forest of nonwestern and ancient cultures. Archaeology got its theory from anthropology (remember the nonsense about archaeology not having any theory of its own, we got it all from anthropology? Good for a laugh today). Disciplines like sociology and political science, I was told, were irrelevant. When I started working on comparative imperialism in the 1990s, it quickly became clear that political scientists and comparative historians had better things to say about empires than did anthropologists (surprise, surprise). But when my interests turned strongly to urbanism, there was no contest. Anthropology had very little useful theory or comparative data (with some notable exceptions, such as urban ethnography in the developing world in the 1960s-1970s), whereas other fields were full of extremely worthwhile material. See my paper on urban theory (Smith 2011) for examples of relevant theoretical perspectives that are mostly non-anthropological and entirely non-philosophical, non-abstract, and non-highlevel.

There is no excuse in 2016 for remaining ignorant of the social sciences. To claim that the choice offered by C.P. Snow in 1959—natural science or humanities—is still relevant is absurd. Killick (2005:186) does point out, in a historical discussion, that “Snow himself acknowledged that he had overlooked the role of the social sciences as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.” But in his other writings (Killick 2015; Martinón-Torres and Killick n.d.), there is little indication that he identifies social science as a “third culture” (Kagan 2009), not just something vaguely “intermediate” between natural science and the humanities, but fully distinct from those two approaches to knowledge. I apologize for dumping on Martinón-Torres and Killick’s paper so much here. It is not an especially egregious example of the problems I am discussing; its views seem pretty widespread. But it does discuss major issues clearly and explicitly, making it easier to pinpoint some of the key epistemological points.

If you have any doubt about the relevance or the usefulness of the social sciences for archaeology, see my prior posts. Check out some of the works cited in those posts. Go read some Charles Tilly.

Reason 4: A widespread commitment to abstract and philosophical social theory

In case you hadn’t noticed, I have a strong antipathy toward high-level, abstract social theory (also called grand theory) in archaeology. It is not that I think there is anything inherently wrong with this type of theory. Rather, an obsession with this material by archaeologists has slowed progress in the development of archaeology as a social science. Let me try to express my views here as clearly as I can. I will describe five propositions and three conclusions.

First, there is an epistemological hierarchy, as illustrated in the above diagram. This should not be controversial, although some postprocessualists have argued that all theory exists on the same level (See Smith 2011 for citations). But the overwhelming consensus in the social sciences and in the philosophy of science is that the notion of a hierarchy of levels of theory is useful and relevant. I review some of this material in Smith (2011) and will not repeat it here. The number of levels, their specific labels, etc. can vary, but the basic idea of an epistemological hierarchy is fundamental. Here is a simlar scheme, from Alexander (1982), and included in Abend (2008).

 Second, different levels of theory are useful for different goals. The clearest expression of this principle I am aware of is Gabriel Abend’s (2008) paper on the meaning of “theory” in sociology. I discuss Abend’s analysis in an earlier post. It is a brilliant paper. Abend identifies seven different ways that sociologists use the term “theory.” He is not claiming that there are seven types of theory that exist in the world, but that the varying definitions and meanings of theory by scholars tend to fall into seven clusters. Each has its uses.

Third, high-level, abstract social theory is useful for making sense of the world. Abend’s Theory-3 consists of statements about the meanings of social phenomena. Theses accounts provide an “interpretation,” a “reading, or a “way of making sense.” His Theory-5 consists of an overall perspective from which to view, and interpret, the world. His examples include postmodern theory, poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, critical theory, Marxist theory, structural-functionalist theory, and rational choice theory. High-level social theory, of Abend’s types 3 and 5, is fine for abstract thinking about the social world on a very general, conceptual level.

Fourth, because of its very generality and abstractness (see the diagram)—high-level social theory cannot provide accounts of concrete, on-the-ground social events, processes, or conditions. It cannot account for social variation on the level of individuals and institutions. If you doubt this, check out the quotes from sociologist C. Wright Mills and archaeologist Kevin Fisher on page 168 of Smith (2011). Check Roy Ellen’s (2010) discussion of this issue. High-level abstract social theory cannot be proven wrong, and thus fails to conform to a scientific epistemology.

Fifth, the kind of social theory that DOES provide explanations of on-the-ground social events, processes, conditions, and institutions is called “middle-range theory” (do I need to say it? Mertonian middle-range theory, not Binfordian middle-range theory, which is fine but is something completely different)  Again, I have an extensive discussion of this in Smith (2011), where I identify several bodies of such theory that are useful for analyzing ancient cities. Abend includes this domain under his Theory-1 (a general proposition about the relationship between two variables) and Theory-2 (an explanation of a particular social phenomenon). This latter is the kind of account provided by causal mechanisms. These are the kinds of theory that are used in conjunction with a scientific epistemology. This is what we should be doing in archaeology.

When I examine these five propositions in relation to the current state of theory in archaeology, I draw three conclusions:

First, many archaeologists seem unaware of causal mechanisms and kinds of middle-range theory needed to generate causal explanations of social phenomena in the deep past. This is a direct consequence of Reasons 1, 2, and 3 above.

Second, many archaeologists apparently believe that high-level abstract social theory is the only kind of theory that matters. Or, more precisely, it is the only kind of theory that they write about.

Third, until there is a more widespread recognition of the value of a scientific epistemology, of middle-range theory, and of causal explanations, archaeology will to find it hard:

•          To create a corpus of rigorous scientific knowledge that can be built upon and expanded as new research is done;
•        To develop accounts of patterns and change in the past that are acceptable to other social scientists, and potentially contribute to general social-science knowledge; and,
•          To communicate to the public just what we are up to, in words that most people can understand. The public loves archaeology. Wouldn’t it be great if they appreciated our ideas and results as much as they do our spectacular finds? Abstract social theory will not accomplish this.

 References

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2008  The Meaning of "Theory". Sociological Theory 26: 173-199.

Alcock, Susan E. and John F. Cherry (editors)

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Alexander, Jeffrey C.
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Barker, Graeme and David Mattingly (editors)

1999-2000  The Archaeology of Mediterranean Landscapes. 5 vols. Oxbow Books, Oxford.

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2010  Theories in Anthropology and "Anthropological Theory". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 387-404.

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