Authors:
Warren R. Deboer
Abstract:
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the type I and type II processes, that is, processes intervening between behavioral and discard assemblages and between archaeological and sample assemblages, respectively. These two processes conform to the now familiar C-transforms of Schiffer (1976:14–15), that is, cultural processes responsible for the formation, destruction, and sampling of the archaeological record. Behavioral archaeology continues to be an imposing feature on the archaeological landscape and, judging from the publication progr (...)
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the type I and type II processes, that is, processes intervening between behavioral and discard assemblages and between archaeological and sample assemblages, respectively. These two processes conform to the now familiar C-transforms of Schiffer (1976:14–15), that is, cultural processes responsible for the formation, destruction, and sampling of the archaeological record. Behavioral archaeology continues to be an imposing feature on the archaeological landscape and, judging from the publication program of the titular founder of the new archaeology, it makes a strong claim to be the normal science of contemporary archaeology. From its inception, behavioral archaeology has been allied to the general goals of anthropological science, namely, to explain (understand) regularities and differences in cultural behavior. In the case of archaeology, these goals are pursued on the basis of observations made of the archaeological record, which itself consists of the residues of cultural behavior. In practice rather than in terms of stated general theoretical goals, behavioral archaeology has prospered on the unexamined optimism of this tenet. Its practitioners have emphasized that the archaeological record is a complicated transformation of past behavioral systems, that the nature of this transformation has not been adequately made explicit, and that such explication is a methodological requisite for any reliable inferences relating behavior and its material residues.
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