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Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008) 192200 www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa

Walter Taylor and the history of American archaeology

Corey M. Hudson
Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, 107 Swallow Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-1440, USA Received 11 July 2007; revision received 5 February 2008 Available online 19 March 2008

Abstract Walter Taylors place in the history of archaeology is well secured. Not only is he noted for his uncredited anticipation of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the 1960s and 1970s in his infamous book A Study of Archeology, but he is also well-known for committing professional suicide by short-sightedly attacking numerous key gures in American archaeology for their methodological shortfalls, and yet never publishing a report utilizing his controversial method. Although these statements have inundated the historical literature on American archaeology, they are received wisdom rather than the reality of Taylors contributions to the eld. Many aspects of Taylors conjunctive approach were at odds with the stated aims of processual archaeology. Although Taylor did not live up to his critics (or his own) demands for a grand display of his approach, he did on several occasions demonstrate its potential. The irony of Taylor in the history of archaeology is not that he was uncredited for his prescience or that his attacks on the archaeological establishment were a na ve failure; but rather that he receives too much credit for what he didnt do, and not enough for what he did. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Walter W. Taylor; History of archaeology; Conjunctive archaeology; Culture concept

Most accounts of Walter W. Taylors place in the history of archaeology are pervaded with a deep seated sense of irony (Bennett, 1998; Kehoe, 1998; Reyman, 1999; Murray, 2007). This irony primarily hinges on two commonplace myths. The rst states that Taylor is the uncredited architect of an approach to archaeology that was largely unpopular when it was initially presented in the 1940s and yet eventually became the dominant archaeological paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s. The second myth states that Taylor committed professional suicide in 1948 by publishing a version of his doctoral dissertation in which he attempted to tear down the entire edice of American archaeology (including most of the major personalities in the eld), and presented an alternative version of American archaeology that was completely unviable (the conjunctive approach). This myth is supposedly evidenced by Taylors inability to publish any signicant report using his approach despite having over 40 years to prepare one. In

standard histories Taylor ends up playing the part of either the unsung hero of scientic archaeology or the tragic doctoral candidate, ultimately undermined by his own hubris. My goal in this paper is not to belabor these myths, but rather to point out that they represent the received wisdom and not the real history of Taylors impacts on archaeology. In this paper I disentangle what is commonly known about Taylor from his very real attempts to operationalize the conjunctive approach and positively inuence the eld. In doing so I extricate well-supported statements about Taylors contribution to the development of American archaeology from those that are mythical. The tragic character One of the diculties of evaluating the myth that Taylor is a tragic character in an archaeological melodrama is that Taylor himself is both the proponent and denier of the view that he ultimately could not deliver on a very tall order namely, the complete restructuring of Americanist archaeology. A synthesis of the consensus on Taylors overall

E-mail address: cmhkbd@mizzou.edu 0278-4165/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2008.02.001

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contribution to archaeology is probably no more clearly stated than in a biopic by one of his former students: An assessment of Taylors archaeological career is neither easy nor satisfying. Given his intellectual gifts, training, abilities, wealth, and other personal resources, the fact that he did not have a greater impact on American archaeology is either a minor tragedy or, at least, an unfortunate squandering of enormous potential. Had Taylor published the major report on his Coahuila work and demonstrated the conjunctive approach, he could have overcome much of the rancor that followed the publication of A Study of Archeology. At the very least, he would have silenced those who criticized his failure to produce the kind of archaeological report he advocated (Reyman 1999, p. 697). There are several key statements in this quote that warrant discussion. The most important, in terms of this article, are: (1) In failing to provide a specic report utilizing his approach, Taylor gave his critics reason to believe that it was unviable. (2) Taylor squandered his potential and as a result, the potential of his approach to make a greater impact on American archaeology. These two statements are common, and crucial to the myth that Taylor was a tragic character. However, if it can be shown that Taylor was able to use his approach then his approach can eventually be evaluated in terms of its theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions; and not whether or not he made any use of it. Taylors doctoral dissertation, originally titled The Study of Archaeology: A Dialectic, Practical, and Critical Discussion with Special Reference to American Archaeology and the Conjunctive Approach, and later published as A Study of Archeology was without question his most inuential text. As a doctoral dissertation, it was an ambitious choice. Taylor described his arguments with his advisor Clyde Kluckhohn about whether or not he would be allowed to write the armchair thesis as a dissertation (Taylor, 1973, p. 26). Kluckhohn argued that Taylor should write a dissertation based on his work in Coahuila, Mexico (p. 25). Taylor wanted to write a critical analysis of American archaeology. In 1942 Kluckhohn nally conceded to Taylors intention to write a theoretical/methodological dissertation (p. 26). Whether or not it can be validly claimed that the dissertation came back to haunt Taylor, it can certainly be claimed that had he followed Kluckhohns suggestion he might have saved himself a good deal of grief had he waited to publish it until after he secured an academic position, because following its publication as a AAA Memoir in 1948, Taylor could not obtain a permanent academic or museum position in the United States (Reyman, 1999, p. 687), teaching occasionally at Texas, Washington, Mexico City College, La Escuela Nacional a e Historia before developing the Departde Antropolog ment of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University in 1958 (Euler, 1997, p. 23). This begs the question: What

exactly had Taylor said that warranted his (alleged) blackballing from United States academia? A study of archeology: chapter 3 The source of the rancor that Taylor generated seems to be rooted in his controversial third chapter: An Analysis of Americanist Archeology in the United States. In this chapter Taylor critiqued the work of six of the most inuential archaeologists working between 1930 and 1960: A.V. Kidder, Emil Haury, Frank H.H. Roberts Jr., William S. Webb, William Ritchie, and James B. Grin. Taylors criticism of these six archaeologists has been portrayed as either outraged resentment (Woodbury, 1954, p. 292) or as an attempt not to generate ill-will, nor merely attract attention but rather to stimulate examination of and assessment of aim, goals, and purposes by American archeologists (Watson, 1983, p. x). In 1968 with the benet of 20 years of hindsight, Taylor defended his third chapter and regarded it as an objective analysis from an explicitly stated point of view, a critique as detailed and comprehensive and fair as I could make it of archaeological theory and practice, not of men (Taylor, 1968, p. 2). In order to evaluate Taylors claim it seems appropriate to analyze both Taylors critique and the archaeologists that it concerned. Taylors most detailed critique was of the Carnegie Institutions Maya program and its chair A.V. Kidder. Taylor argued that Kidder claimed to be engaged in cultural reconstruction (Taylor, 1968, p. 45), but his body of work reected that he was really interested in the grandiose and the fancy in archeology at the expense of the study of everyday life (p. 55). Taylors portrayal of Kidder forces parallels to the 18th and 19th century antiquarians that Taylor examined in his rst chapter on the history of archaeology. As Taylor presented it, there were three major reasons why Kidder and the Carnegie Institution failed to oer a legitimate reconstruction of past lifeways: (1) Kidders wholesale rejection of hypothetical and theoretical explanations for the relationship between artifacts and culture (p. 60); (2) the Carnegie Institutions interest in typological and chronometric, rather than cultural units (pp. 5051); and (3) problems in the techniques of excavating and reporting the details of the deposits, in particular, horizontal provenience, item association, and the number and proportions of artifacts in their contexts (pp. 4648). In many ways Taylors criticism of Kidder is an elaboration of certain arguments made in three papers by Kluckhohn: The Place of Theory in Anthropological Studies (1939), The Conceptual Structure of Middle American Studies (1940), and (with Reiter) Preliminary Report of the 1937 Excavations, Bc50-51, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (1939). In these three papers, Kluckhohn had argued three main points: (1) anthropologists, in general, had avoided developing strong theoretical approaches to explaining the anthropological record (Kluckhohn, 1939); (2) archaeologists, in particular, had limited the sci-

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entic value of their interpretations because of their association of the words theory and hypothesis with the concept of unwarranted speculation (Kluckhohn, 1940); and (3) archaeologists had developed classicatory schemes but did not use them to address theoretical issues or to test cultural hypotheses (Kluckhohn and Reiter, 1939). The detailed, comprehensive and fair element of this multifaceted critique is Taylor and Kluckhohns implicit claim that archaeologists could ask questions and form theories about culture (as many cultural anthropologists conceived of the term) manifest in artifacts, but Kidders typologies and procedures could not. Doing so required that archaeologists develop functional typologies (as conceived by Steward and Setzler, 1938). Using these typologies, archaeologists could determine associations between artifacts and hypothesize about their cultural contexts. Taylors criticisms of Haury, Roberts, Webb, Ritchie, and Grin follow more or less similar lines, with a few additions. In particular, Webb is criticized for doing much of what Taylor suggested, but simultaneously failing to take into account many facets which might have been included on the basis of his excavated data (Taylor, 1968, p. 74) and for relying on nominal scale trait lists rather than interval scale artifact abundances (p. 75). Grifn is singled out for his use of McKerns Midwestern Taxonomic Method, which Taylor argued neither represent a historical entity or a cultural actuality, but rather merely classicatory abstractions assembled from a synthesis of focus traits (p. 84), for his failure to make use of relevant environmental data (p. 82), and for his interest in comparing artifact types rather than understanding cultures (p. 86). If Taylor had been able to predict the repercussions of his monograph, or the impact of the six archaeologists that he criticized on the eld of archaeology between 1948 and 1960, he might have chosen to temper his arguments, speak in platitudes about the general state of archaeology, or limit the number of bridges he burnt. Kidder remained head of the Carnegie Institute (one of the premier funding agencies for Middle American archaeology until 1950) and continued to publish regularly until 1963 (Greengo, 1968). Haury was the head of the University of Arizonas Department of Anthropology and the Arizona State Museum, a major funding agency in the American Southwest that picked up where the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation left o (Thompson, 1995, p. 653). Roberts headed the River Basin Survey, the largest and most successful archaeological project of its kind; held the presidency of the SAA in 1950; and held board and executive positions in the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science Section H, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and was the AAA representative to the National Research Council, all after the publication of Taylors dissertation. Webb and Ritchie coordinated major archaeological surveys and excavations and published highly inuential books (Haag, 1965; Sterud, 1978). Grin was also highly inuential as

the director of the Ceramic Repository at the University of Michigan (Ford, 2002). Grin wrote one of the seminal summaries of Eastern North American archaeology (Grifn, 1967). He was also president of the SAA in 1951 and became a member of the National Academy of Science (Williams and Steponaitis, 1997). Four of these six archaeologists won the prestigious Viking Fund Medal (Kidder, Haury, Roberts, and Grin). They also advised and sat on committees for a huge number of archaeology Ph.Ds. From a historical perspective, Taylor looks either blithely disgruntled or tragically na ve. My contention is that neither is true. Taylor made a conscious decision to criticize archaeologists whose inuence in academic and professional circles has been of the highest (Taylor, 1968, p. 43). The reason Taylor critiqued six of the most important and inuential archaeologists was to highlight how pandemic the problems he saw in archaeology were. In order to make his point that archaeology demanded a new approach, it made rhetorical sense to criticize the biggest names in archaeology to demonstrate that the problem was not with uneducated or lower echelon gures in archaeology, but rather with the leaders and thus the entire eld. Criticizing multiple leading archaeologists illustrated how widespread the problem was. The trouble with Taylors critique, and a possible cause of his future employment troubles, was the timing and nature of the criticism. Kluckhohn had addressed many of the same points that Taylor would eventually make; and even Tozzer, who was on Taylors dissertation committee as well as a teacher of Kidder, Haury and Roberts, had unfavorably portrayed the archaeological research being done in Middle America (Tozzer, 1937). The dierence is that, unlike Taylor, Tozzer and Kluckhohn had already secured positions at Harvard when they leveled their attacks. Further, they had a corpus of research that they could be proud of and there was no indication that they lacked experience or ability, or that their criticisms were ploys for notoriety. The second major problem with Taylors criticism is that it was unnecessarily trenchant (Greengo, 1968, p. 324). Taylor admittedly attacked select archaeologists on the points of their greatest perceived success. Kidder, for example, had helped orchestrate a major pan-scientic study of Mayan history; Taylor implied that Kidder had done neither science nor history (Taylor, 1968, pp. 4648). In numerous places Taylor cites the self-proclaimed goals of these archaeologists and then demonstrates how they failed. Grin, for instance, wished to eliminate the use of subjective groupings (Grin, 1943, p. 3 in Taylor, 1968, p. 82), yet Taylor portrays his approach as begging questions and unfounded speculation (Taylor, 1968, p. 83). Tozzer attacked the failure to know how pieces are to be tted together, which was an admitted pitfall of the program (Tozzer, 1937, p. 159). Kluckhohn argued that archaeologists working in Middle America ignored the categories methodology and theory (Kluckhohn, 1940, p. 44). This was clearly the case in these studies. So

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even though Kluckhohn referred to Kidder as a stamp collector, Kluckhohn was not attacking Kidders ability to do what he said he was doingMayan history (p. 45). The conjunctive approach Challenges to Taylors conjunctive approach focused primarily on two interconnected issues. The general sentiment was that since Taylor was too inexperienced to justify his criticism, and since he was so thorough in his attacks on the establishment, it was incumbent on him to demonstrate that his conjunctive approach could do what the other approach (which Taylor referred to as the comparative approach) could not. This led several reviewers, friendly or otherwise, to argue that Taylors claims could not be suciently evaluated until he proved that his approach was viable. As James Watson stated: Whether he [Taylor] hits the high mark he sets for himself is for time and actual testing to tell (1949, p. 55). Richard Woodbury stated: Is it too much to hope that when he reports in full on this expedition [to Coahuila] we will have an application of the conjunctive approach so that it can be appraised on a rmer basis than promises (1954, p. 296). Paul Martin argued: I think Taylors ideas would have been far more favorably received and more widely accepted if he had rst put out an archaeological report embodying his ideas. . .. I still await with pleasure Taylors publication on his archaeological work in Mexico (1954, p. 571). Taylor, by his own admission, was never able to achieve that goal (Taylor, 2003, p. xv). There are two possible reasons for Taylors pessimism about the success of his approach: (1) the conjunctive approach didnt and couldnt work; and (2) as a direct result of the professional reception to his criticisms of contemporary archaeology a set of unrealistic goals was established for the sucient demonstration of his approach. What is the criterion for identifying a workable approach in archaeology? The question is somewhat arbitrary because if one were inclined to survey a number of archaeologists, a number of responses could be obtained. For purposes of this paper, I adopt Taylors criterion; namely, the extent to which the nal results of empirical research measure up, or do not measure up, to the aims stated or implied by the various researchers themselves (1968, p. 43). Taylors conjunctive approach had the explicit aim of determining cultural context (1968, p. 30). Cultural context, for Taylor, was the information necessary to attain understanding of culture and its workings (p. 111). Beyond cultural context, Taylor outlined an ethnological goal (comparison) and a wider anthropological goal (the nature of cultural workings), but ultimately the implied aim of the conjunctive approach was cultural context (pp. 151, 178). Quantitative data and conjunctives (otherwise known as correlations or anities) were his means of methodologically monitoring cultural context (pp. 170171). Taylors conjunctive approach involved a dedicated

attempt to connect the interrelated or conjuncted patterns in the archaeological record to patterns of culture, which according to Taylors writings are properly conceived of as the mental templates that instruct people on the correct ways to behave in and understand the world (p. 109; Taylor, 1972b, p. 69). Examples of the conjunctive approach The question of whether Taylors approach and mentalistic ontologies, in general, are possible, given the nature of the archaeological record and the training of archaeologists, is a valid one and served as the nexus of disagreement in the BinfordTaylor debate introduced in the next section. My concern here is not with the validity or reliability of either the conjunctive or processual approaches, but rather with the consistency between the results and the implied aim of the conjunctive approach. Taylor used the interrelationships between archaeological materials to form at least three hypotheses about patterns of cultural thought, exclusive of the inferences from A Study of Archeology. The rst hypothesis that Taylor formed, using a broadly dened version of the conjunctive approach, concerned the pattern of water ceremonialism in Mayan ornamental art (Taylor, 1941). Taylor hypothesized that three elements of Mayan ornamental artthe Ceremonial Bar, Bar Pendant, and Frieze-maskactually represented a single ideological complex (p. 48). To support this hypothesis, Taylor analyzed the design of these three elements in terms of their conjunctions with each other, the architectural placement of their representation, and their conjunctions with other features of Mayan ceremonialism. The Ceremonial Bar was a bar-like object, straight or curved, which is clasped to the breast of certain anthropomorphic representations in Maya art. The Bar Pendant was a horizontal pendant which hangs from the neck of, or appears apparently unsupported on the breast, of many anthropomorphic and other gures. And the Frieze-mask was a large, full-face mask seen about the doors on certain buildings (p. 48). In his 1913 A Study of Mayan Art, Spinden had treated these three classes of artifacts separately (p. 48). Taylor found that numerous ceremonial elements (feathers, criss-cross designs, serpent spots, plaited designs, and dots on the collar panels) were associated with both the Ceremonial Bar and the Bar Pendant (p. 49). Furthermore, certain motives could be seen in the Ceremonial Bar and Bar Pendant and the Frieze-mask (pp. 49, 52). The Bar Pendant was also associated with shells and serpents, both considered by Spinden to be Mayan water symbols (p. 52). This led Taylor to explain the conjunctions between these attributes in the context of an artistic complex of water symbolism (p. 52). Taylor then used the Mayan chronology to explain the spread of this artistic complex and the eventual loss of certain features as Mayan high culture shifted northward (pp. 5960). Taylor also hypothesized about the relationship between water territoriality and patterns of cultural conservatism.

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Taylor stated this hypothesis explicitly in three articles Some Implications of the Carbon-14 Dates from a Cave in Coahuila, Mexico (1956), Tethered Nomadism and Water Territoriality: An Hypothesis (1964), and The Hunter-Gatherer Nomads of Northern Mexico: A Comparison of the Archival and Archaeological Records (1972c). Taylor used radiocarbon dates to establish the long site chronology for Frightful Cave in Coahuila, Mexico (9540 bp 550 to 1770 bp 250, although due to a possible inclusion of incorrectly associated samples it may have been more realistically 8870 bp 350 to 1770 bp 250) (1956, p. 219). Changing relative frequencies of bone artifacts/projectile points and brous/wooden artifacts suggested a shift from hunting to gathering (pp. 227228). This change correlates with increased aridity (p. 228). Taylor noted the persistence of one sandal type associated with 8000 years of cultural material, which coupled with the continuous, rather than abrupt, change led him to postulate a single cultural complex (p. 231). Taylor explained the persistence of this cultural complex across such a wide stretch of time through his theory of tethered nomadism and water territoriality (1962). The brunt of this theory states that water accessibility is the primary limiting factor for groups in Coahuila (p. 200). Taylor made this claim on the basis of archival information from the protoand early-historic period indicating that the availability of food was not a limiting factor (1972, pp. 272273). He then speculated that as aridity increased, it became necessary to develop exclusive ownership of reliable water sources. As groups tethered themselves to these sources they developed a sort of cultural conservatism, resisting pastime pursuits, social activities and cultural diusion (1968, p. 200). Taylor expected that these people were probably strongly ethnocentric and lococentric, which was the ultimate cause of the 6000+ year persistence of this cultural complex (p. 202). This work demonstrates Taylors attempt to oer conjunctions among characteristics of the natural environment and cultural traits. Taylors third hypothesis concerned the cleanliness of the people who once occupied Frightful Cave. Taylor had studied the sandals of this cave for a number of reasons: (1) they could be stratigraphically ordered; (2) the variation was (thought to be) culturally sensitive; and (3) they were directly conjunctable to people as biological beings and to the local landscape (2003, p. 48). Taylor then argued that sandals were indicative of human occupation, that a greater proportion of sandals were indicative of more intense occupation, and that the place from which they were excavated was the place in which they were deposited (p. 65). Taylor found two distinct patterns in the distribution of sandals in the cave. Using an artifact density measure called the Master Maximum Method, which measured the observed frequency of sandals relative to an expected frequency and scaled by cubic meters of excavation, Taylor found that during the Middle and Bottom levels of occupation, there was a strong tendency to deposit sandals in the farthest recesses of the cave (p.

65). In the Top level, Taylor found that most of the sandals were deposited in the center of cave. Taylor suggested a conjunction between the proportional artifact location and density with beliefs about hygiene and cleanliness. The decrease in bat guano in lower deposits suggested to Taylor that occupation had been more or less constant in the lower levels and increasingly intermittent in the upper levels (p. 68). This correlated with a known increase in local aridity. Taylor then argued that change in the length of stay at the site aected ideas about waste and trash. In the lower levels there was a tendency to create dumps in the recesses of the cave in order to keep a clean and orderly living oor. In the upper levels these ideas about waste and trash receded and people became less formal in their ideas about cleanliness, depositing not only sandals, but inordinate amounts of feces and dead bodies in their living area (pp. 6769). Taylor bases numerous premises on hunches or what he feels is obvious. He also gives contradictory interpretations. And his monograph on Coahuila sandals, though published in 2003 (originally slated for publication in 1989), failed to reference any of the archaeological research from the proceeding twenty or so years on archaeological site formational processes (e.g., Schier, 1987). Taylors research did nevertheless accord with the aim of the conjunctive approach. He did, on at least three occasions, make cultural inferences on the basis of conjuncted materials. His approach may have had critical aws, but it did meet its stated objectives. He had developed an approach to studying cultural context in the archaeological record. Although it was applied piecemeal, a careful reading of Taylors work reveals multiple examples of the conjunctive approach, and his contribution to culture history and to the generation of hypotheses about cultural thought and behavior. That Taylor was able to use the conjunctive approach as he conceived it is a fact that has not been previously recognized in the history of American archaeology. If there is any irony in the history of Taylors archaeological investigations, it is not that he committed professional suicide for an approach that he never made use of, but rather that his attacks on the archaeological establishment necessitated a predictable call for a grand demonstration, which he did not deliver. However, had his approach been evaluated in terms of his answers to small problems of some archaeological signicance, rather than the complete understanding of the totality of a particular archaeological cultural context, it would have lived up to any expectation. The unsung hero One of the diculties in determining the place of Taylor in relation to the development of New or processual archaeology is his own oscillation between presenting himself as the (1) unseen progenitor and (2) as the developer of a unique and distinct program of study. In two articles

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Taylor forcefully argues that he originated most, if not all, of the basic premises of New Archaeology: Personally, I nd nothing wrong about this point of view [that of the New Archaeologists]and I also nd nothing new about it as an archaeological perspective. . .. The systematic view of culture has been a basic premise of American anthropology, including archaeology, certainly since Malinowski, if not since Boas, and as for Binfords other tenets, I can point to passages in A Study of Archeology covering each of them, even that of testing hypotheses (pp. 155, 165, 186, 197).1 What the Binfords have produced in this book is not an exposition of the theory and practice of a new perspective, but an explicit restatement of an old one, with some new and modern additions, together with some very pertinent, cogent, stimulating examples of current archaeological research resulting from it (Taylor, 1969, p. 383). Therefore, despite mutterings of denial from some of its practitioners, I allow myself the presumption of looking upon much of the new archaeology as practical application of a basic conceptual scheme, the earliest more or less complete expression of which was the conjunctive approach. When progeny will not own their parentage, it becomes the undignied and distressing but incumbent responsibility of parents to claim their posterity as they understand it (Taylor, 1972, p.30). Taylors claims of parentage are not the earliest claims that New Archaeology owed directly from the conjunctive approach. The paper that initiated the phrase New Archaeology (at least as applied to the 1960s, since the term had already been applied and employed to describe other archaeologies (e.g., Mason, 1888 and Wissler, 1917)) established Taylor as instrumental in calling for the construction of cultural contextsfor attention to the interrelationships that existed within each cultural entity (Caldwell, 1959, p. 304; emphasis in original). The important distinction here is between the bold, mythical claim of Taylor as the architect or parent of New Archaeology and the justiable claim that he was inuential in shaping some of the major ideas of the New Archaeologys primary personalities. The boldest claims for Taylors place in New Archaeology are some of the most commonplace. Robert Braidwood refers to Taylor as the John the Baptist of the New Archaeology (Braidwood, 1973, p. 34). Braidwoods statement is a campy use of rhetoric. It calls into question both the novelty of New Archaeologys big ideas, and begs the question: If Taylor is the New Archaeologys John the Baptist, then is Lewis Binford New Archaeologys one messiah? (p. 34; see also Quilter, 2003, p. viii) Other writers refer to A Study of Archeology as a forerunner of an archaeological revolution (Dyson, 1993, p. 196), a pre1

Pagination comes from A Study of Archeology (1968).

cursor of the major theoretical advances of the 1960s (Fagan, 2005, p. 177), the essence of New Archaeology (Jennings, 1986, p. 58), and have described Taylor as exactly twenty years before his time (Watson, 1983, p. ix). These kind of bold statements are not points of comparison, they are rhetorical platitudes, and they dovetail into and perpetuate the myth of Taylor as the unsung hero of New Archaeology. If Taylor was so instrumental in the development of New Archaeology why wasnt he recognized as such? The consensus, even by Taylor, is that there was a dedicated attempt to deny him his due credit (Daniel, 1981, p. 188). This is the fundamental essence of the Taylor myth; he was denied credit for his pivotal work either because of the egos involved or because archaeologists failed to recognize that the authors whom they did credit had commandeered some of the most basic and distinctive ideas of A Study of Archeology (Taylor, 1972a, p. 29). Processual and conjunctive archaeology involve fundamentally dierent approaches to understanding and explaining the archaeological record. Here, an approach is dened as the implicit or explicit aim of the archaeologist. No matter what eld or analytical methods are utilized, if the stated or implicit goal of research is dierent, then the approach is dierent. If two archaeologists excavate two sites using equivalent techniques but with dierent goals for explaining the archaeological record, there is no reason for postulating equivalency in approach. Taylors stated objective for conjunctive archaeology was to determine the cultural context of a specic archaeological culture (Taylor, 1968, p. 30). The stated objective for processual archaeology was the understanding and explanation of cultural processes, or the operation and structural modication of [cultural] systems (Binford, 1962, p. 217). The diculty in analyzing the similarity between conjunctive and processual approaches involves teasing apart the dierence between a cultural context and a cultural process. Taylor dened cultural context as the relationships between and among cultural and noncultural phenomena in which relationships or conjunctives serve to connect the meaning as well as the construction of archaeological contexts (Taylor, 1972a, p. 29). Standing behind the empirical objectications of culture was a number of non-empirical ideascultural normsthat could be understood only through inference (Taylor, 1968, p. 109; Osgood, 1951). According to Binford, Process, as I understand it, refers to the dynamic relationships (causes and eects) operative among the components of a system or between systemic components and the environment (Binford, 1968, p. 14). Systems were denable as a complex set of relationships among people, places, and things whose matrix may be understood in multivariate terms (Binford, 1965, p. 209). By isolating the inner workings of cultural systems and subsystems, processual archaeologists sought

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to explain the processes that maintained them (Flannery, 1967, pp. 120121). The determination of cultural context involved collecting large amounts of archaeological information in order to better explain the cultural meaning standing behind the artifacts. An understanding of cultural processes involved the creation of testable archaeological hypotheses (not a distinct feature of processual archaeology) using observations from known contemporaneous systems. The implications of this analysis were that since change in one part of a system necessitated change in other parts of the system and in other systems, even the imperfect archaeological record could be useful for identifying and explaining cultural processes that were previously thought to be indeterminable (Binford, 1968). The dierence between these two approaches was rooted in a basic dierence in their respective denitions of culture. This dierence fueled a debate between Taylor and Binford in the 1960s and 1970s. Taylors denition of culture is complex. It includes both holistic and partitive components. The holistic component involved dening culture as a separate entity from natural phenomena, and distinguishing it as uniquely mental (1968, p. 96). Patterns of behavior were not culture, but rather empirical manifestations of culture (p. 99). Much of this perspective on culture is probably attributable to Cornelius Osgood, whom Taylor credited with being responsible for much of the manner in which I look upon archeology, and who dened the empirical manifestation of culture as cultures percepta and the patterns of ideas as cultures concepta (Taylor, 1968, p. 8; Osgood, 1951, pp. 210213). Included in Taylors concept of culture was an argument that culture is not necessarily shared and may be idiosyncratic (Taylor, 1967, p. 222). Culture as partitive comprises a historically derived system of culture traits which is a more or less separable and cohesive segment of the-whole-that-is-culture and whose separable traits tend to be shared by all or by specially designated individuals of a group or society (Taylor, 1968, p. 108). Following Leslie White, Binford dened culture as the extrasomatic means of adaptation for the human organism (1964, p. 440). The dierence in their denitions of culture is not an issue of triing importance. Taylors partitive view of culture led him to attempt to reconstruct the context and anities within an individual culture. Binford argued that this approach was inappropriate for three reasons. First, treating artifacts as the objectications of normative mental behavior required archaeologists to take on the role of paleopsychologists (1964, p. 204), and the normative view portrayed culture as internally homogenous rather than internally dierentiated (1964, p. 205). Second, the archaeological record represents a massive palimpsest of derivatives from many separate episodes (Binford, 1981, p. 197). Third, because the relationship between archaeological conjunctives and preexisting cultural correlates was contingent on preservation, Taylor was skeptical of the ability to learn about the past (Binford, 1981, p.

197). Binford argued that focusing on the adaptive nature of culture and on cultural processes circumvented these problems by shifting the scale from ideas in their immediate cultural contexts to more long-term cultural processes, and since change in one part of a system necessitated changes in other parts of the system and in other systems, preservation was no longer a signicant problem but instead an analytical issue to be overcome. On contrast, When he [Taylor] discussed culture it was a mental phenomenon, not a material-based organization of behavior. It was something to be inferred from material remains, not something to be understood organizationally. Although Taylor wanted us to consider the relationships between things, these were simply new traits to be added to the traits list. He wanted behavioral reconstructions, he wanted the past to live, but this was to be done through interpretation (Binford, 1972, p. 8). Taylor defended his attempt at determining cultural context and argued that Binfords processual approach and his appeal to strictly empirical standards was itself fundamentally awed. Taylor chastised Binford for ignoring the fundamental Boasian insightthat the features of culture could not be understood without an understanding of the contexts in which they existed (Taylor, 1972a, p. 31). Ignorance of this fact led processual archaeologists to ignore some of the most necessary and relevant features of culture. Taylor argued that the processualists ignored these features because of an unnecessary shibboleth of proof (p. 32). Taylor claimed that not only was the determination of past cultural context an appropriate goal, it was absolutely necessary for explaining the archaeological record. Binfords cooption of Whites denition explained what culture did, and not what it was. The evolution of cultural processes was a dynamic explanation of culture, which Taylor said was inappropriate given the static nature of the archaeological record (p. 33). Processualists focused on cultural evolution and cultural processes and demanded the writing of cultural laws (e.g., Fritz and Plog, 1970; Watson et al., 1971). The problem, as Taylor saw it, was that evaluation of the validity of these laws demanded cross-cultural analyses, and the possibility of independent development based on these laws precluded cross-cultural comparisons (Taylor, 1973, p. 68). Taylor had reformulated and reiterated the basic Boasian dilemma (e.g., Boas, 1886). For the laws of cultural evolution to be tested, the classes of phenomena had to be comparable. But, Taylors view of culture held that the empirical archaeological units were, at best, proxy measures of the cultural concepta. Since equivalent percepta may have independently developed concepta, the laws of cultural evolution could not be tested using the comparability of the empirical units. For Boas and Taylor, the comparability of culturally meaningful units demanded recourse to a general theory of cultural transmission and dissemination, not simply a

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comparison of empirical traits (Boas, 1891, 1911). Ultimately, for Taylor, it came down to the fact that at the most basic level, the conjunctive and processual approaches both demanded an understanding of ideas and mental templates. For him, the conjunctive approach was cognizant of the conceptual leap between empirical units and mental inferences, while the processual approach was not (see also Bennett, 1998, p. 306). Conclusion The point of addressing the dierences in the stated aims of the conjunctive and processual approaches, their denitions of culture, and the TaylorBinford debate has been to evaluate the myth that Taylor is the unsung hero of processual archaeology. My analysis suggests that this myth is indefensible. Binford referred to Taylors writing as inspiring (Binford, 1972, p. 451). Patty Jo Watson called A Study of Archeology tremendously inuential (Watson, 1983, p. ix). But, this does not mean that the ideas of the processual archaeologists came directly from Taylor. He may have been prescient in his explications of techniques and methods of excavation and analysis, but his goal for explaining the archaeological record was fundamentally dierent from that of the processualists. There is no reason to believe that he was a precursor of the major theoretical advances of the 1960s (Fagan, 2005, p. 177), or that the essence [of his work] was reissued serially by many authors of the 1960s as the new archaeology (Jennings, 1986, p. 58). There is a major dierence between inuence and anticipation, and being inspired and plagiarizing. The popular assessment of Taylors place in archaeological history is oddly contradictory. He is chastised or pitied for not making use of his approach, and he is lauded for predicting the future course of the eld. In reality, Taylor is given no real credit for what he actually did, and too much credit for what he didnt do. The true irony for Taylor is not in the persistent myths, but in the historical representation: the disjunction between never receiving deserved praise for making use of an approach that very few thought would actually work, and yet receiving unwarranted accolades for fathering the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. Acknowledgments Thanks to Lee Lyman for his immense help through every stage of this paper. In addition, thanks to John OShea and two anonymous reviewers who made several valuable comments, including pointing me to a number of sources. References
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