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NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST, Vol. 31(1) 1-25, 2010
AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY TEXTBOOKS
AS REFLECTIONS OF THE HISTORY
OF THE DISCIPLINE
R. LEE LYMAN
University of Missouri-Columbia
ABSTRACT
Textbooks introduce students to a discipline’s methods and goals. In com-
bination with the desire of publishers to have up-to-date products, each
textbook should, hypothetically, reflect the state of the art in a discipline at
the time of its publication. Two series of multi-edition textbooks authored
by the same individuals confirm the hypothesis for American archaeology
that textbooks reflect disciplinary history. These volumes also indicate that
textbook series, like much secondary literature, do not provide nuanced and
thorough reflections of disciplinary history.
INTRODUCTION
To professionals, textbooks may be some of the least exciting literature produced
by a discipline’s practitioners. Yet it cannot be denied that textbooks are critical
to the education and training of new generations of professional practitioners.
Introductory textbooks might be made up of reprints of pieces of what at the
time of compilation seem to be critically significant bits of primary literature
(e.g., Deetz, 1971; Fagan, 1970; Green, 1973; Leone, 1972), but the majority of
textbooks are authored by one or two individuals and present summaries and
sketches of methods, techniques, and principles (and thus are secondary literature)
illustrated with particularly clear, minimally controversial examples. As eco-
logical historian Joel Hagen (2008:704) recently observed, it is through textbooks
1
� 2010, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.
doi: 10.2190/NA.31.1.a
http://baywood.com
that “students not only are exposed to well-accepted facts and theories, but also the
norms and goals of the discipline.” Further, publishers typically want textbooks to
be up-to-date if not cutting edge and innovative in order to maximize marketability
(Bauman, 2003; McKenzie, Seabert, Hayden, and Cottrell, 2009). Textbooks thus
provide not only a necessary service to a discipline, but it is probable that they
also represent a unique source of data on the intellectual history of a discipline.
In this article I test the hypothesis that a chronological series of multi-edition
texts provide a reflection of disciplinary history. This may seem to be a non-
controversial hypothesis, or at least one unworthy of testing given the textbook
industry and its desire to have up-to-date volumes (McKenzie et al., 2009). Yet no
one, to my knowledge, has actually tested this hypothesis. Further, it is unclear
how nuanced a history of a discipline a chronological sequence of texts might
provide. Given the secondary-literature nature of textbooks, I suspect any history
reflected by a chronological series of textbooks will not be detailed but instead
will reflect general, broad, and select trends. This suspicion too has not, to my
knowledge, been empirically evaluated. I offer such an evaluation here.
A discipline’s first textbook is a sign of initial professionalization of the field of
inquiry; it signifies to one and all that professionals believe that to be a practitioner
requires training by an expert rather than trial-and-error learning on the part of the
novice (despite the fact that this is likely how the first “experts” learned). Multiple
textbooks by different authors published within a few years of each other are signs
of a discipline’s vitality and perhaps disagreement over what should be included
in a textbook or which of several alternative techniques is considered the best.
Some textbooks will be revised and reissued as new editions—occasionally over
multiple editions—whereas others will be released in one edition only. In dynamic
fields with new developments in technique, concepts, data, and substantive con-
clusions, new editions permit a text to remain up-to-date, though they require some
degree of rewriting, deletion of old text and examples, and addition of new text
and examples. Some authors may find rewriting more tedious than producing a
first edition. This could explain why some texts have only one edition; alterna-
tively, some single edition texts may not sell well because they find little favor
among the professoriate for any number of reasons. One of those reasons might
be that the single edition text is published when another textbook by a different
author is much more popular and thus the former does not sell well.
One can likely add other speculations as to why some textbooks appear as
single editions and others appear as multiple editions. What is of particular interest
here, however, is how a chronological sequence of introductory textbooks—
particularly multiple editions of a single title by the same author(s)—reflects the
history of a discipline. In this article I focus on introductory textbooks, the
subject matter of which is American archaeology. By “American archaeology” I
mean the methods, techniques, interpretive models, and goals of archaeological
research as conceived and undertaken by individuals trained in North America,
particularly the United States. I do not mean to imply that European archaeology is
2 / LYMAN
somehow lesser or not interesting in its own right. It likely would be very
enlightening to determine similarities and differences between Europe’s early
textbooks (such as Kathleen Kenyon’s [1952] Beginning in Archaeology and
Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s [1954] Archaeology from the Earth) and those written
by North American archaeologists about the same time, or a more recent volume
by European archaeologists (e.g., Renfrew and Bahn, 2004) and its American
contemporaries, but such is not my goal here. In this article my goal is to determine
how well a chronological series of textbooks produced by archaeologists trained
and working in North America reflects the history of American archaeology.
To do this I examine two multi-edition series of textbooks, each series having
been authored by the same individuals. All of the textbooks discussed here are
“introductory” volumes meant to introduce the basics of archaeology to a
novice; there are many advanced textbooks aimed at upper-division under-
graduates or graduate students but these are beyond the scope of this discussion.
Should the introductory textbooks examined here provide nuanced reflections
of disciplinary history, then aspects of that history other than those considered
here can be explored at least in part by review of a sequence of textbooks. If, as
expected, introductory textbooks merely summarize and simplify, detailed and
nuanced histories will require review of the primary literature that serve as the
basis for the texts.
I take “archaeology” to signify a set of techniques and attendant explanatory
models for increasing knowledge about human (and hominid) prehistory. Discus-
sion of the history of historical archaeology (study of that portion of humankind’s
past having associated written documents) as practiced in the United States is
beyond my scope. I begin with a few observations on the early history of training
in American archaeology as reflected by what can only loosely be considered
textbooks written by members of the first generation of professional archae-
ologists and aimed at educating novices and avocationalists. Then volumes
(about 100 pages or more) written by the second generation of professional
archaeologists explicitly for training of students and commercially published
for sale to students are identified. Brief descriptions of these earliest true text-
books provide a historical context for detailed consideration of the two series
of textbooks examined here. Significant features of the history of American
archaeology that will be sought among the textbook series are identified prior to
review of those series.
EARLY BACKGROUND
The first formal “how to do archaeology” texts were produced in 1923 and 1930
by the National Research Council (Committee on State Archaeological Surveys,
1930; Wissler et al., 1923). At a combined 35 pages, neither was exhaustive
in coverage (notice these are labeled “texts” rather than textbooks), though
they did have an explicit purpose—educating otherwise untrained avocational
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 3
archaeologists on proper field procedures; the focus was on how to locate,
describe, and record the location of sites and how to retrieve artifacts without
loss of provenience and association information. At the time, avocationalists
outnumbered professionals and were doing most of the archaeological research
then being undertaken—finding and recording site locations and recovering
artifacts—and the few professionals then working hoped to insure against the
loss of critical contextual, associational, and stratigraphic data as well as to build
communication networks between the professionals and avocationalists so that
the former knew of the latter’s discoveries (O’Brien and Lyman, 2001).
The fundamental concern with recovery provenience was the purpose of
what is arguably the first true textbook, Robert Heizer’s edited A Manual of
Archaeological Field Methods, a spiral bound volume of less than 100 pages first
published in 1949 (Heizer, 1949). The fourth edition was retitled A Guide to
Archaeological Field Methods and was the first hard-cover textbook; it was
published in 1958 and ran to 162 pages (Heizer, 1958). The most recent edition
appeared in 1997 as Field Methods in Archaeology and at more than 400 pages
shows how the knowledge necessary to be a professional field archaeologist
grew in 50 years (Hester et al., 1997). The growth of Heizer’s Manual is found
in virtually all series of archaeology texts, whether a chronological sequence
of titles by multiple authors is used or a sequence of multiple editions of a single
title by the same author(s) is used. Similarly, the frequency of texts per 5-year
bin meant to be introductions to the field published over the past several decades
has risen over time (Figure 1).
What is often referred to as the “culture history approach” had been practiced by
most archaeologists prior to the middle 1960s but only received its name when
alternative approaches developed (Lyman et al., 1997). Gordon Willey and Philip
Phillips (1958) described the basic methods of culture history in a book not
considered here to be an introductory textbook because only one-fourth of its
pages concern the actual doing of archaeology; the other three-fourths describe the
prehistory of the Americas as it was then known. When approaches proposed as
alternatives to culture history began to develop, other textbooks by other authors
appeared (see Binford [1968a], Deetz [1970], and Flannery [1967] for early
statements on the new approaches). Frank Hole and Robert Heizer’s (1965)
An Introduction to Prehistoric Archeology devoted many pages to describing
methods for the recovery of archaeological materials but also discussed in some
detail how to determine the age of those materials and how to interpret them in
terms of such things as economy, technology, trade, transportation, social organi-
zation, religion, and the like. Reviews were largely favorable (e.g., Jelks, 1966)
and the volume went through three later editions that, along with the seminal
edition, are discussed in detail below.
James Deetz’s (1967) Invitation to Archaeology and Bruce Trigger’s (1968)
Beyond History: The Methods of Prehistory both focused on the culture history
approach, but both also discussed, if briefly, how the archaeological record might
4 / LYMAN
be used as a source of anthropological, cultural, and social information regarding
prehistoric societies. Deetz (1967) devoted only a half dozen of 138 pages of
text to excavation techniques but he did make explicit a previously implicit
interpretive notion held by culture historians. Given that he discussed the
analytical method of seriation of artifacts as a way to track cultural transmission,
he had to describe the interpretive notion that underpinned the method. Deetz
(1967:45-49) noted that an artifact’s form originated in a “mental template” or
a model held in the mind of the artisan of what a proper looking artifact of a
particular category should look like; this notion became known as “normative
theory” (see Lyman and O’Brien [2004a] for a history of this concept). One
reviewer (Fowler, 1968) was not very impressed with Deetz’s effort, finding
it to be more humanistic than scientific, apparently because Deetz identified
what he took to be parallels between units of language (phonemes, allophones,
morphemes, allomorphs) and units of artifact classification or attributes of
artifacts (formemes, factemes, allofacts). Deetz (1968) discussed these potential
parallels elsewhere but his ideas were, so far as I know, not further developed
by him or anyone else.
Trigger (1968) did not describe any methods for recovering artifacts; instead he
reiterated many of the basic culture history concepts (community, culture, society),
analytical units (component, stage, phase), and cultural processes (invention,
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 5
Figure 1. Frequency of introductory American archaeology textbook
titles per 5-year bin, 1960-2008.
migration, diffusion) summarized a decade earlier by Willey and Phillips
(1958). Trigger (1968:xi) stated that the “aim” of his small book (100 pages
of text) was to “provide a discussion of the methodology of prehistory,” which
for him involved “reconstructing and interpreting the history of human groups
for which there are no written records.” A reviewer (Wendorf, 1969:345)
lamented that Trigger’s book “cannot be recommended as a statement of the
methods and concepts in prehistory. Such a book is greatly needed, but it is
not yet available.” That lament is strange in light of Hole and Heizer’s
(1965) recent volume. Whatever the case, the lament would, in the next two
decades, be resoundingly silenced by the appearance of several textbooks by
different authors.
Although there are a number of topics that might be identified as signifying
steps or eras in the history of American archaeology, I here focus on a limited
number of them. The topics have been extracted from recent histories of the
discipline that are based on primary literature (O’Brien et al., 2005; Trigger,
2006). The topics chosen can be roughly categorized as the adoption of new
methods and techniques for doing archaeological research, and nuanced con-
sideration of fundamental concepts that result in new interpretations and
insights. The new methods include the adoption of probabilistic sampling
(e.g., Binford, 1964; Cowgill, 1964; Ragir, 1967; Redman, 1974; Rootenberg,
1964), the development of ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology, and
middle-range theory as aids to interpretive efforts (e.g., Binford, 1977, 1978;
Gould, 1978; Kramer, 1979), adoption of systems theory to assist interpretive
efforts (e.g., Binford, 1962; Flannery, 1968; Plog, 1975), advocacy of the
hypothetico-deductive and deductive-nomological models of science (e.g.,
Binford, 1968a, 1968b; Fritz and Plog, 1970; Hill, 1972), and an attendant
adoption of the “scientific method” (e.g., Watson et al., 1971). Perhaps the most
fundamental conceptual shifts involve several detailed considerations of the
concept of culture; these include discussions of what culture is and what it does.
The discussions herald increasing variation in the models of human behavior
(and culture) used to interpret the archaeological record and are initially signified
by the appearance of what became generally glossed as post-processual archae-
ology (Hodder, 1985)—a more humanistic (and humane) and less dehumanizing
and less scientistic approach to archaeological research. It includes agency theory,
gender or feminist theory, neo-Marxist theory, critical theory, and poststructuralist
theories (Preucel, 1995). Discussion of these topics in chronologically appropriate
editions (editions published when a topic was prominent in the contemporary
literature) of the textbook series will constitute evidence that at least some
textbook series provide accurate reflections of the history of a discipline. A
nuanced discussion will be equated with a detailed outline of how and when
a new method or concept was developed, along with a description of who
was responsible for the development and why that development was believed
to be necessary.
6 / LYMAN
TEXTBOOK SERIES
Trends such as that shown in Figure 1 are not unusual in any discipline and
thus are not unexpected in American archaeology. The contents of the textbooks
reflect to some greater or lesser degree the evolution and development of the
discipline’s fundamental principles, techniques, and goals. It is precisely that
evolution and development that can help us understand why our discipline
looks the way that it does today. Perhaps more importantly it will help us explain
to our students—the novices we are training—why we now do some of the things
that we do. Without such a historical context, some of what we do may seem
unimportant, incomprehensible, or simply wrong-headed. It will be easiest to
identify historical shifts in thinking and intellectual trends by tracking a multi-
edition book authored by the same individual(s). In the following discussion
of two non-chronologically overlapping series of multi-edition textbooks, I
identify some aspects of disciplinary history and note some general trends in
the evolution of each series.
Hole and Heizer (1965, 1969, 1973, 1977)
Hole and Heizer’s (1965) An Introduction to Prehistoric Archeology is, as
indicated earlier, the first true textbook on American archaeology. In the
preface the authors state that the book “brings together in an introductory way
relevant background material that is not available in any other single publication”
(Hole and Heizer, 1965:v). The book describes what archaeology is, what an
archaeologist does, kinds of sites and how to find them, context and stratigraphy,
preservation and excavation and record keeping, how to classify and describe
finds, and various sorts of technical analyses. Four chapters (40 pages) are devoted
to dating techniques, and the final four chapters describe how to interpret archaeo-
logical data. It is a classic volume not only for its seminal position in the history
of American archaeology, but because many of the methods described are still
in use today, more than 40 years after it was published.
The second edition of Hole and Heizer (1969) appeared four years after the
first. With 400 pages of text (excluding references), it was 60% longer than the
250 text pages of the first edition. The authors indicate that the “revisions consist
of up-dating the technical sections, introducing new and more advanced inter-
pretive theory, [and] expanding other parts of the original text” (Hole and Heizer,
1969:v). They also note that “the spirit of the time” was changing; the “new
emphasis is on methods and theories of interpreting archeological data in cultural
terms. A much more rigorous application of scientific method is now being
made in the selecting of problems for investigation, in the posing of meaningful
hypotheses about these problems, and in the testing of the hypotheses with data
deliberately obtained for that purpose” (Hole and Heizer, 1969:vi). Hole and
Heizer suggest that general system theory will become a fruitful interpretive
framework in the future, and they thus devote considerable effort to describing that
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 7
framework. Further, a growing sensitivity to how science works on the part of
some archaeologists will, they suggest, allow those archaeologists to build and
test “theories of culture process” (p. vii).
Discussion of reconnaissance, excavation, and recovery methods changed little
from the first edition. The four chapters on dating were hardly modified. What had
been a stand-alone chapter on the interpretation of artifact use was subsumed
within the chapter on artifact classification. About 15 pages are narrowly devoted
to general system theory, but the basic notion of culture as a system permeates
much of the discussion of interpretation. What had been a section comprising
four chapters on “Describing and Interpreting Prehistory” is now a section on
“Reconstructing Cultural Subsystems” made up of three chapters (minus the one
on artifact use). The chapter on “Prehistoric Economy” is now titled “Subsistence
and Economic Systems” and is reorganized, expanded, and now includes several
figures. The original chapter on “Prehistoric Society” is now two chapters,
“Patterns of Settlement” and “Social and Religious Systems.” A new chapter
entitled “Analysis of Culture Processes” is added as well, and this comprises a
major change between the first and second editions. What had happened in the
1960s in American archaeology was the emergence of a new approach (O’Brien
et al., 2005). Some refer to that emergence as a revolution in archaeological
method and theory (e.g., Adams, 1968; Martin, 1971) though such a charac-
terization depends on the attributes one chooses to define an intellectual revolution
(Meltzer, 1979; see also Custer, 1981; Meltzer, 1981).
The most stark indication that the second edition of Hole and Heizer reflects a
change in the discipline—revolutionary or not—is the addition of the chapter titled
“Analysis of Culture Processes”; in it processes of culture are defined as “how
culture works and how it changes” (Hole and Heizer, 1969:359). The new
approach to archaeology that emerged in the 1960s came at the end of that decade
to be known as processual archaeology because of its alleged interest in cultural
processes (Binford, 1968a; Flannery, 1967). Hole and Heizer’s (1969) book is
exceptional for its clear if terse statement about cultural processes; it is as if
this icon of 1960s archaeology is so well-known—nearly everyone at the time
uses the term “culture process”—that discussion of what exactly the concept
denotes is unnecessary (Lyman, 2007a). Fortunately for students who might
not be clear about what exactly a cultural process is, Hole and Heizer (1969)
think it is a concept that is important enough to be described, though not in
elaborate detail.
The third edition of Hole and Heizer (1973) boasts an additional 60 pages of
text relative to the second edition. Some rearrangement of chapters is evident as
well as some restructuring within chapters. Of four new chapters, one contains a
few small sections from the second edition. The four new chapters (2, 4, 16,
and 21) reflect only partially the shift that took place in American archaeology
during the 1960s. In Chapter 2, “The Structure and Process of Archeology,”
Hole and Heizer introduce the deductive-nomological and hypothetico-deductive
8 / LYMAN
methods—definitive hallmarks of processual archaeology (e.g., Binford, 1968a;
Flannery, 1967; Fritz and Plog, 1970; Watson et al., 1971). Importantly, Hole
and Heizer (1973:36) note that although the processualists prefer deductive
methods over inductive ones, “in truth scientists work with both,” something
that only became generally accepted among archaeologists in the mid-1970s
(e.g., Hill, 1972; Salmon, 1976, 1982; Smith, 1977; Thomas, 1974).
Chapter 4, “Basic Concepts in Prehistory,” contains a discussion of archaeo-
logical cultures modified from that in Chapter 2 of the second edition. It also
introduces the concept of uniformitarianism and equates it with ethnographic
analogy, acknowledging that “human behavior in the past may have no exact
counterparts among modern peoples” (Hole and Heizer, 1973:75). As well, the
authors note that because culture is “learned and transmitted from one generation
to the next, changes in culture can be and often are cumulative.” This is an explicit
statement of what at the time was becoming derogatorially known as normative
theory (Lyman and O’Brien, 2004a). Finally, the discussion in Chapter 4 empha-
sizes that while homonids have evolved as biological organisms, cultural and
biological processes of evolution are not only different but they are largely
independent of one another.
The new Chapter 16, “Concepts Relating to Reconstruction,” focuses on the
interpretive principles and bases of archaeology. In this chapter uniformitarianism
is described in a bit more detail than in it is in Chapter 4, and it is related more
explicitly to ethnographic analogy for which six rules of application (from
Dozier, 1970) are listed. The discussion of ethnographic analogy that appeared
in 1965 and with some minor modification in 1969 is modified a bit more and
expanded in 1973. The term “ethnoarchaeology” appears, but it is described as
“one starts from the present and works back in time, using such historic records
as are available” (Hole and Heizer, 1973:15). Not only is this a description of
the direct historic approach (Lyman and O’Brien, 2001), it is not what the term
“ethnoarchaeology” would come to mean by the end of the decade (e.g., Gould,
1978; Kramer, 1979).
What is a bit less than a one-page discussion of culture systems in 1969 is in
1973 nearly three pages. Chapter 21, “Concepts and Methods of Processual
Interpretation,” repeats the 1969 discussion of system theory and devotes an
additional nine pages to culture systems. Also, Hole and Heizer (1973:434-437)
summarize recent discussions of other archaeologists on the differences between
history and science (e.g., Binford, 1968b; Erasmus, 1968; Sabloff and Willey,
1967; Trigger, 1970). This was a topic of some debate at the time and subsequently
(see Lyman and O’Brien [2004b] for a review). Hole and Heizer (1973) then
provide a brief description of the scientific method, something that would appear
in many introductory textbooks published in the 1970s-1990s (e.g., Thomas,
1974:60-62).
What here is treated analytically as a fourth edition is technically not a new
edition but instead is, in the eyes of the authors, an extensively reworked,
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 9
rewritten, restructured, and briefer introduction to prehistoric archeology than
that provided by the third edition (Hole and Heizer, 1977:vi). There are indeed
fewer text pages (375 in 1977 versus 470 in 1973). Although there is some
extensive reorganization, restructuring, and combining of chapters (21 chapters in
1973, 15 in 1977), the content of the 1977 edition is similar to that of the 1973
edition. One obvious change is that in 1973 some 35 pages are devoted to survey
and excavation techniques, but in 1977 only 25 pages cover these topics. Other
obvious ways the 1977 volume is shortened involve omission of discussion of
several chronometric techniques (e.g., much of 1973’s Chapter 15, which includes
astronomical dating, sequence dating, and cross dating). On one hand, unlike
the 1973 edition, in the 1977 edition Hole and Heizer (1977:23) provide an
accurate description of ethnoarchaeology as “the study of peoples specifically
for the information they may give on archeological matters.” But on the other
hand, Hole and Heizer (1977) do not mention deduction and only briefly mention
hypothesis testing, what at the time were extremely important hallmarks of
the state of the art (e.g., Hill, 1972; Salmon, 1976, 1982; Smith, 1977). Further,
through all four editions of their book, any mention of sampling does not include
discussion of probabilistic techniques but rather only that by sampling is meant
that less than all of a site is excavated or fewer than all of the artifacts in a site
are recovered.
Hole and Heizer (1965:8) provide a terse description of culture that is effec-
tively glossed as shared ideas while at the same time noting that archaeological
cultures are represented by “repeated associations of [kinds of] artifacts” and
in a restricted geographic area “groupings of sites with similar assemblages [are]
cultures” (p. 66). This brief characterization is greatly expanded in 1969 when
Hole and Heizer (1969:40) note that adopting the culture notion makes archae-
ology a behavioral science. They argue that this is so because culture is learned,
transmitted principally through symbolic communication, is adaptive, and is
patterned or a system. The transmitted characteristic of culture makes it uniquely
human in their view.
Hole and Heizer (1969:41) cite Kluckhohn and Kelly’s (1945:97) definition of
culture as “historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational,
irrational, and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides
for the behavior of man.” Again, this is readily glossed as shared ideas and reflects
what was then becoming known as normative theory (Binford, 1965), a label
that became derogatory when used by processual archaeologists (Lyman and
O’Brien, 2004a). An important thing to note, however, is that Hole and Heizer
(1969:120) clearly and effectively identified social transmission as the cause of
similarities between artifact assemblages, something that was only then being
made explicit and put to distinctive analytical use (e.g., Deetz, 1965; Longacre,
1964). Yet Hole and Heizer (1969:43, 328) caution that an archaeological
culture (replicate assemblages of artifact types) is not the same as an ethnog-
rapher’s culture. But likely because they are anthropological archaeologists (as are
10 / LYMAN
virtually all archaeologists trained in the United States; their university
degrees are in anthropology) who hope to do more than map the geographic and
temporal distribution of artifact types, they provide nine general statements
about culture (e.g., human cultural “behavior is patterned”) that they suggest
provide a “framework within which archaeologist can operate” with respect
to interpreting the archaeological record in anthropological terms (Hole and
Heizer, 1969:361-363).
In reading through the various statements on culture in the 1969 second edition,
one gets the distinct impression that Hole and Heizer are struggling to make
explicit for the first time what had until then been largely implicit notions about
the relationship of a static archaeological record to a dynamic cultural system. This
struggle is less apparent in the 1973 third edition where much of the 1969
discussion is repeated, if using different wording. With respect to the latter, for
example, the definition of culture proposed by Kluckhohn and Kelly is repeated
(Hole and Heizer, 1973:79) as are the properties of culture as socially transmitted
by symbolic communication and as adaptive. But Hole and Heizer (1973:80-82)
perfect the linkage between culture and replicate artifact assemblages when they
note that by saying culture is patterned they mean that its parts (as in a system) “fit
harmoniously” together; this translates archaeologically into replicate artifact
forms (types) and site structures. They add “change” to their list of properties of
culture, noting that change is the result of imperfect social transmission and
learning, diffusion, invention, and accidental discovery. Finally, their nine general
statements about culture from the 1969 edition are reduced to six that are explicitly
focused on culture as a system and culture as adaptive; for example, “a culture
system consists of sets of behaviors and the interrelations among them” (Hole and
Heizer, 1973:451-452). There is virtually no change in the discussion of the
culture concept from the 1973 edition to the 1977 edition.
In sum, Hole and Heizer’s (1965, 1969, 1973, 1977) four editions provide some
accurate reflections of what happened in the discipline during the 13 years
represented. The inclusion (initially in 1969) and expansion (in 1973) of discus-
sion of systems theory is a major indicator of change in this series, and lesser
indications are the shifting definition of ethnoarchaeology (from 1973 to 1977)
and the brief mention of hypothesis testing and laws (1969, 1973, and 1977). Their
discussions of the culture concept nicely illustrate their and others grappling
with the shifting meaning of this key notion in U.S. anthropology (e.g., O’Meara,
1997). There are also some aspects of history that are missing, including mention
of deduction and probabilistic sampling.
Thomas (1979, 1989, 1998; Thomas and Kelly, 2006)
Picking up largely where Hole and Heizer’s (1977) final edition leaves off,
David Hurst Thomas’s (1979) volume simply titled Archaeology is a clear reflec-
tion of the processual archaeology that was at the time the dominate approach in
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 11
the United States (O’Brien et al., 2005). At 453 pages of text divided among 13
chapters, the length of the volume falls between Hole and Heizer’s last two
editions (470 pages in 1973, 375 pages in 1977). Hole and Heizer (1973:13-14)
mention the increasing pace of “salvage archaeology,” altering the term to
“cultural resource management” a few years later (Hole and Heizer, 1977:25),
in both cases emphasizing that the archaeological record is being destroyed at
an alarming rate. Thomas (1979:146) writes about “conservation archaeology,”
expresses concern for the destruction of the archaeological record, summarizes
important federal legislation that had been passed to protect the record,
and states the qualifications of a professional archaeologist established by the
Society of Professional Archaeologists. Both Hole and Heizer (1977) and Thomas
(1979), then, highlight some of the socio-political context of late 1970s archae-
ology in the United States.
Thomas (1979:vi) clearly states in the Preface that the “scope of the book
can be defined [as] contemporary American archaeology” and that this means
what is going on “right now” in the “brand of archaeology currently taught
and practiced at major universities and museums within the Americas.” For him,
this means “a single theoretical framework” characterized by “three hierarchical
goals: construct cultural chronologies, reconstruct past lifeways, and under-
stand cultural processes” (Thomas, 1979:vii; see also Binford, 1968a; Deetz,
1970; Dunnell, 1978). At least one reviewer largely finds that Thomas “has
managed to present contemporary archaeology as a logically integrated, cohesive
discipline consisting of a sequence of interrelated research goals that are generally
shared by the profession” (Smith, 1980:635). That Thomas’s approach is
unabashedly American is found in the fact that he devotes over 40 pages of text
(all of Chapter 3) to answering the question “What is Anthropology?” Unlike
in the Old World where archaeology grew out of antiquarianism and history
(Trigger, 2006), American archaeology originates (today, and historically) in
anthropological inquiry:
One simply cannot understand the trends and directions of contemporary
archaeology without a solid grounding in the specifics of contemporary
anthropology. The practical archaeologist needs to understand the major
questions in modern anthropology before attempting to provide answers
to these questions. . . . I firmly believe in the old adage that “archaeology is
anthropology or it is nothing.” [Thus] we must understand how major anthro-
pological strategies operate before we can place archaeology in its proper
anthropological perspective. (Thomas, 1979:viii)
Thomas describes and exemplifies the scientific method that underpins the
(newly explicit if not simply new) approach to American archaeology, empha-
sizing the role of hypothesis testing and mentioning the writing of laws of cultural
process, something only a few earlier archaeologists claimed they were doing
(e.g., Meggers, 1955) but that by the 1970s was part of the mantra of processual
12 / LYMAN
archaeology (e.g., Binford, 1968b; Watson et al., 1971). Thomas distinguishes
but does not elaborate on cultural processes as both synchronic and diachronic,
respectively involving the mechanisms by which cultures operate and those by
which cultures evolve and change (Lyman, 2007a). He provides more than a
dozen pages on ethnoarchaeology as not only a useful but a mandatory interpretive
aid, and includes several pages on experimental archaeology as well. Unlike
Hole and Heizer, Thomas describes probabilistic sampling in some detail and
includes a discussion of differences in sample unit size and shape. Also unlike
Hole and Heizer’s later editions, Thomas does not discuss systems theory
but does characterize culture as a system that makes up humankind’s adaptive
mechanism and implies that as a system culture is made up of functionally
and structurally inter-related parts. Finally, unlike Hole and Heizer, Thomas
devotes no text to describing how to excavate a site, how to recover artifacts,
or the critical importance of recording recovery provenience. But there is
a 15-page glossary which suggests that Thomas recognizes a key to learning
a new field of inquiry (or subject matter of any kind) involves learning
the terminology and jargon of the field. Hole and Heizer (1977) also include
an 11-page glossary in their final edition, though they do not include one in
earlier editions.
The initial chapter of Thomas’s book concerns the history of archaeology; the
focus is American archaeology, whereas Hole and Heizer’s historical sketch
includes both the New World and the Old. Thomas’s (1979) second chapter
discusses science and the scientific method, while the third presents a detailed
discussion of the scope of anthropology, reflecting the fact that the so-called
“new archaeology” that emerged in the 1960s thought of itself as a major con-
tributor to anthropology rather than just a hand maiden that could only add
time depth to various cultural traits and processes (Lyman, 2007b). Chapter 4
identifies the objectives and underscores the values of modern archaeology.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss archaeological chronometry. Chapter 8 covers how
to reconstruct prehistoric subsistence practices; chapter 9 focuses on settlement
patterns; chapter 10 covers social organization; and chapter 11 discusses ways
to reconstruct past ideologies. The last two chapters discuss ways to decipher
the processes that form the archaeological record and “General Theory in
Archaeology,” respectively, with the last focusing largely on mechanisms
of cultural change within the three-level framework of cultural materialism:
technological at the base, sociological at the middle level, and ideological
occupying the top tier (Thomas, 1979:119). This ecological-functional inter-
pretive framework fairly characterizes much of processual archaeology at the time
(e.g., Price, 1982).
At 575 pages of text, the second edition of Thomas’s book (1989) is 27% longer
than the first edition. In the Preface, Thomas explains how and why the new
edition differs from the original. First, examples are updated and new illustrations
are included. Second, historical archaeology is included, and the gender bias
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 13
recently identified in archaeology (Conkey and Spector, 1984) is confronted.
Third, three new chapters on field methods—a noticeable lacunae in the first
edition—are included. And, the chapter on anthropology is significantly modified
to include a new discussion of “critical theory” and the application of Marxian
ideas to modern events and circumstances (e.g., Leone et al., 1987). The discus-
sion of processes that create and form the archaeological record in the first
edition (Chapter 12) was 33 pages long; in the second edition it (Chapter 5) is
42 pages long and the title is “Middle-Range Research,” reflecting the growing
importance of this actualistic means of interpreting the archaeological record
(e.g., Binford, 1977). Non-invasive and non-destructive techniques of archaeo-
logical research such as remote sensing, resistivity, and ground-penetrating
radar are described, reflecting the heightened awareness that traditional
archaeological practice, like industrial-age modification of the landscape, can
be excessively destructive of the archaeological record. Similarly, the chapter on
“General Theory in Archaeology” grows from 29 pages to 38 pages. Rather than
discuss “Technoecological Change,” “Sociopolitical Change,” and “Ideational
Change” as in the first edition, Thomas (1989) now describes theories about
hunter-gatherers as optimal foragers (a theory that would come to guide much
research in anthropology and archaeology in the 1990s [Winterhalder and
Smith, 2000]), domestication, origins of the state, and the evolution of ideology.
Many other modifications reflect slight shifts in emphasis and technological
and methodological developments rather than major alterations of the basic
Americanist approach.
As Thomas (1998:ix) notes, the second edition pretty much “maintained
the basic processual agenda” of the first edition. Not so with the third edition.
At 609 pages of text, the third edition is just a bit longer than the second
edition. The structure and content of the third, however, differ considerably
from the second. Although what was becoming known as the “postprocessual
critique” had begun to emerge in the 1980s (e.g., Hodder, 1985, 1991), and
Thomas (1989) acknowledges that emergence in the second edition, he
finds in the middle 1990s that “Americanist archaeology today is neither
processual nor postprocessual. It usefully employs modified versions of both”
(Thomas, 1998:x; see also Hegmon, 2003). As in earlier editions, he begins
the third edition with brief historical sketches of some major archaeologists
before turning to a description of anthropology and the scientific method.
However, in a new twist, Thomas (1998) distinguishes scientific and humanistic
approaches, the latter a reaction to the ultra-scientism of processualism of the
1960s and 1970s that was thought by some to have dehumanized many lines
of inquiry.
Another notable difference in the third edition is a chapter devoted to
“Levels of Archaeological Theory.” Low-level theory concerns making obser-
vations and recording data about the archaeological record; middle-level
theory links archaeological data to human behavior; and high-level or general
14 / LYMAN
theory provides understanding and explanations of humans and their cultures.
Here, cultural materialism and postmodern (postprocessual) interpretivism are
presented as exemplifying some of the variation in high-level general theory.
Some of the discussion of general theory echoes the earlier editions, but the
discussion of interpretivism includes new nuances and insights. Discussion of
archaeological reconnaissance and survey changes to reflect new site-discovery
techniques, as does discussion of excavation techniques. Thomas (1998) does
not change his description of how one determines the ages of archaeological
materials much at all. A new chapter on bioarchaeology takes up some
30 pages, likely reflecting the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act. Although the discussion of foragers appears
in new form (chapter 14), much of the discussion there had appeared in
earlier editions. So too with the chapter on “neo-evolutionary approaches.”
New content appears in chapter 16 on the “Archaeology of the Human Mind:
Some Cognitive Approaches,” chapter 17 on “Archaeology of the Mind:
Some Empathetic Approaches,” and chapters 18 and 19 on historical archae-
ology. Also, while discussion of conservation archaeology occupied fewer
than eight pages in the second edition it now takes up 19 pages (a more
than 100% increase). Thomas (1998) concludes the volume with a chapter on
applied (forensic) and ethical archaeology, topics that had grown during the last
decade of the twentieth century with American society’s advocacy of politically
correct behavior.
Thomas’s (1998) Preface to the third edition is enlightening. He notes that
he always viewed his role as textbook author “to be one of cutting through the
hype and self-serving bluster, to demonstrate how the various pieces—‘new’ and
traditional—fit together into a workable discipline of archaeology” (p. viii). The
first two editions indeed successfully wed traditional (culture historical) and
new (processual) approaches; the third edition is necessary because of major
changes in the discipline that could be attributed to the emergence of so-called
“post-processual” approaches. But here, too, Thomas (1998:x) successfully weds
the various and varied approaches by noting that “most of the underlying issues—
science and humanism, objectivity and empathy—have concerned thoughtful
archaeologists for more than a century.” He demonstrates this with his historical
examples of archaeological practice, and notes that the “vast majority of those
practicing Americanist archaeology fall somewhere toward the middle” (p. x).
An icon of the age during which the third edition is published is the fact that
in the text pages there are numerous “Archaeology on the Internet” boxes that
provide URLs for on-line additional discussions of topics and examples of sites,
artifacts, and protocols.
The fourth edition, published in 2006, includes discussions of the scientific and
humanistic methods that are similar to those found in the 1998 third edition, but it
also includes new examples of each of those methods (Thomas and Kelly, 2006).
Chapter 3’s “Structure of Archaeological Inquiry” reiterates the three levels of
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 15
theory and provides an extended discussion of what has by now become known as
“processual plus” (e.g., Hegmon, 2003)—the wedding so successfully crafted by
Thomas in the third edition has now become commonplace. One noticeable
difference between the third and fourth editions is the inclusion in all but the
first and last chapters (1 and 18) of a one-page box on “Archaeological Ethics” in
the fourth edition; this addition clearly reflects the social context of the time of
being morally and ethically thoughtful when studying and reporting the cultural
heritage of particular social or ethnic groups—something Thomas alluded to in
the third addition but which now holds a prominent role.
Thomas (Thomas and Kelly, 2006:xxi) asked Robert Kelly to join him as
co-author of the fourth edition because he (Thomas) felt that “one person just
couldn’t adequately cover the field anymore.” This latest edition, like the pre-
ceding ones, nicely captures the state of the art in the first decade of the third
millennium. The scientific and materialistic, and the interpretivist and humanistic
are given equal time, as in the third edition. The new perspective is apparent in
an explicit discussion of the differences and similarities of ethnographic analogy
and middle range theory (chapter 10), the latter a topic that by now has seen
much consideration in the literature but which seems to have been misinter-
preted by many commentators (Arnold, 2003). Another reflection of a new
perspective is the shift from a discussion of the principle of superposition,
stratigraphy, and stratigraphic excavation in earlier editions to a new chapter,
chapter 7, on “Geoarchaeology and Site Formation Processes.” This chapter
integrates what has by now become standard operating procedure in American
archaeology in response to the fact that the archaeological record has a geological
mode of occurrence (e.g., Waters, 1997). Geoarchaeology was a single index
entry in the third edition; in the fourth edition it has its own chapter. That the
fourth edition is up-to-date is reflected by discussion of new chronometric tech-
niques (chapter 8).
The fourth edition of Thomas’s book continues the tradition set by the first
three; all editions are engaging presentations of what is going on in American
archaeology “now,” at the time the text was written. An excellent marker of this
is found in Thomas’s treatment of the culture concept across the different editions.
In the first edition, Thomas (1978:103) suggests that archaeologists “need not
be overly concerned with attempting to find the ultimate definition of culture.
What is important to know is how culture works.” He finds Tylor’s (1871) seminal
definition of “that complex whole [of] capabilities and habits acquired by man as
a member of society” to be “too general” (Thomas, 1978:103), preferring instead a
definition that makes cultural behavior visible today and also that which occurred
in the past. Toward that end, he follows linguist David Aberle (1960) and
distinguishes three components of culture: the idiolect (individual version of a
culture), shared culture (modal), and cultural system (in which individuals par-
ticipate and is basic to cultural adaptation; Thomas, 1978:104-105). The last is
where White’s (1959) definition of culture as humankind’s extrasomatic means
16 / LYMAN
of adaptation resides; this definition is the one advocated by Binford (1964) and
adopted by many processual archaeologists. Thomas (1989) shortens the dis-
cussion of culture in the second edition, adds a brief description of the emic and
etic distinction, but otherwise does not change the basic message. In the third
edition, Thomas (1998) changes little of the basic discussion, likely because the
1989 discussion was sufficient to capture shifts in the archaeological conception
of culture from something participated in to something that is constantly created
by human behavior and interaction (e.g., Watson, 1995). By the fourth edition,
Thomas and Kelly (2006) have discarded the linguistic metaphor and charac-
terize culture as learned, shared, and symbolic. That culture can ontologically be
ideational (normative) or adaptive (extrasomatically) is retained from earlier
editions. Overall, the history of Thomas’s discussion of the culture concept nicely
captures the history of that concept in American archaeology (Lyman, 2008;
Watson, 1995).
DISCUSSION
The fifth edition of Thomas’s book was delivered to my office in early March
2009 as I was finishing the first draft of this article. Interestingly, the publication
date in the volume is 2010, indicating that this edition will be “new” for nearly
2 years (the remaining 9.5 months of 2009 and all of 2010). Interestingly, the
order of authorship is reversed from the fourth edition (Kelly and Thomas, 2010).
I considered including this most-recent edition in this discussion, but decided
not to for one simple reason. The hypothesis I examine here has been sufficiently
tested with the volumes reviewed and inclusion of this newest edition would
merely add length to the discussion rather than additional tests.
Both series of multi-edition textbooks examined provide accurate reflections
of the history of the discipline during the time span covered by each. There is a
bit of temporal lag on some key issues, but that is to be expected. The author
of a textbook has to keep pace with developments in the discipline as he or
she writes, and sometimes it is unclear which of several newly appearing
developments will be significant and which will be but flashes in the pan. Better
to ignore the unknowns and focus on what seems to be standard practice at
this point in time and keep the publisher happy by meeting deadlines (McKenzie
et al., 2009). There are also some aspects of the history of the discipline that are
not reflected in each series. That, too, is to be expected in introductory textbooks;
they are not intended to be exhaustive in their coverage but rather to be extensive
and at a level that is readily grasped by the novice (thoroughness can be had
in volumes intended for graduate students and professionals). I conclude that
each series nicely tracks some of the major themes of their time and thus each
series—Hole and Heizer’s, and Thomas’s—provides a general perspective on
the history of American archaeology. My hypothesis is not refuted, and the
demands of publishers for up-to-date discussion are met. My suspicion that
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 17
textbooks will provide broad-brush general histories rather than nuanced ones is
confirmed by identifiable trends and the omission of some significant historical
events, nuances, and details.
Two next steps in the analysis of chronological sequences of textbooks as
revealing disciplinary history are possible. One would be to examine another
series of multiple editions by the same author; two possibilities exist here—Brian
Fagan’s twelve(!) editions of In the Beginning (1972, 1975, 1978, 1981, 1985,
1988, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2008 [only the first edition is listed in
the references]), and Robert Sharer and Wendy Ashmore’s three editions of
Archaeology: Discovering Our Past (1987, 1993, 2003 [only the first edition is
listed in the references; an earlier version was published under the title Funda-
mentals of Archaeology in 1979]). The other step would involve examination of a
sequence of volumes, all written by different authors. Such a sequence is easily
constructed for American archaeology; in chronological order, the volumes are
Smith (1976), Knudson (1978), Rathje and Schiffer (1982), Bower (1986),
Webster et al. (1993), and Price (2007). I suspect that the history of the discipline
will be a bit more murky with multiple authors than with multiple editions by a
single author; this is so because of idiosyncrasies across multiple authors and
their idiosyncratic take on disciplinary history.
CONCLUSION
The hypothesis that series of textbooks reflect the history of a discipline is
confirmed by the two series of volumes on American archaeology reviewed here.
Both series highlight some, but not all, aspects of the history of the discipline that
were more or less contemporaneous with the time when a particular edition was
published. Both series highlight the scientific method, the concept of culture
process, and cultural resource management or conservation archaeology, all
of which reflect significant developments in American archaeology during the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In addition, Hole and Heizer chose to emphasize
systems theory, whereas Thomas chose to focus on hypothesis testing, ethno-
archaeology as an interpretive aid, and probabilistic sampling, all of which
also reflect significant developments in American archaeology during the 1970s
and 1980s. Thomas’s later editions also reflect the growing importance of the
myriad approaches to archaeology that fall under the banner of postprocessual
archaeology.
Perhaps the two series of multi-edition textbooks examined here provide good
historical reflections of the evolution of the American archaeology because the
authors were particularly attuned to that evolution, and thus the series are not
representative. This could be tested by examining other series, both by a multi-
edition series by a single author or by a chronological series each volume of which
was authored by a distinct individual. Regardless of the outcome, what is clearly
revealed by the two multi-edition series examined here is the fact that each of
18 / LYMAN
those series, at the time a particular volume was published, exposed students
who read it to a sampling of methods, techniques, norms and goals of the discipline
(to borrow Hagen’s [2008] wording). As a practitioner and teacher of American
archaeology, but also as someone who has not taken on the task of writing an
introductory text, I take comfort in the simple fact that at least some of those
who have written an introductory text are deeply familiar with the state of the
discipline. That makes my job as teacher much easier.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe R. C. Dunnell, M. J. O’Brien, M. B. Schiffer, and the students in my
history of archaeology class for prompting my understanding of the history of
American archaeology. Comments on an early draft by two sympathetic and one
not so sympathetic anonymous reviewers forced me to rethink several issues.
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Note: The preceding article was subjected to formal peer review prior to being
accepted for publication.
Direct reprint requests to:
R. Lee Lyman
Department of Anthropology
107 Swallow Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
e-mail: lymanr@missouri.edu
TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 25
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