by Hugh M. Lewis

Culture history had its basis in a tradition of European philology that derived from a deeply bound scholasticism preoccupied with the interpretation and validation of texts and that was implicitly attached to a Eurocentric worldview. The preoccupation of culture history was to use the examples and evidence of culture to produce historical reconstructions that were accurate. Cultural anthropology, the sibling of Americanist archaeology, developed as a direct result of this preoccupation in terms of ethnology, with the implicit sense that extant traditional cultures could be used as a direct historical analogy, as historical "texts" to past realities. Similarly, the task of Americanist archaeology became the culture historical explanation of the past in terms of the material vestiges of lost cultural traditions. Evolutionary explanation was viewed as inherently deficient for failing to provide a framework for the "determination of the succession of chronological culture events of those earliest periods of mankind." (Schmidt, 1939: 12)

The fields of cultural anthropology and Americanist archaeology were direct heirs to this traditional scholastic approach, principally through founding fathers Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber. Both Boas and Kroeber criticized the culture history method used in Europe, but also adopted many of its central tenets in their own methodologies. The distinction made between ethnography and ethnology in this regard must be emphasized. Whereas ethnography is the "mere description" of peoples spread out spatially, ethnology is the "penetration into the ratio….. of the elements and events of culture (ibid., 14)" Ethnology therefore allegedly gives to culture history the "means to determine the deepest meaning of those ancient times from their correct sequence."(ibid., 14) Ethno-history also emerged as an inheritor of this "school," concerned as it has been in North America primarily with the excoriation of early first and second-hand documents of the proto-historic periods, and I would also assert that ethno-cultural studies, as I have myself developed these in relation to various groups of people, is also an heir and distinctive off-shoot of this tradition.

Within this tradition, influenced by Hegelian dialectics, culture was to be considered not only as a culture-garden, or as a bacterial colony on a spread plate, but as organized like a wheel in which its various spokes, the different aspects of cultural reality, all radiated out from and led back to a central hub, or the Volksgeist or spirit, of the culture, which constituted the central explanation and dynamic of culture process and change. (Gombrich, "In Search of Culture History" 31) There was therefore a deep preoccupation of this approach to describe all facets of a cultural orientation in terms of its central organizing principles. Culture was therefore a "superorganic" entity, a thing that was the composite result of the collective representations of a group of people situated in time and place. This structuralist school originated in European thought, and was a critique arising out of the doctrine of culture circles, which constitutes a complex of cultural elements "not bound together by any inner connections."

Every aspect and trait of a culture therefore also found interpretation and meaning in terms of its central organizing principle that was imputed to it, and did not have meaning outside of this framework. The operational methodology of this approach was somewhat paradoxically tied to the excoriation of knowledge, especially as this was defined within a classical framework. The two sets of operations performed upon knowledge was the hermeneutical and the critical appraisal of its value and importance. In this scholastic tradition, there was a strong emphasis placed, I believe, both upon the internal authority of knowledge and upon its external legitimization and demonstration. The traditional philological perspective, with its culture historical framework, was largely a moribund and anachronistic discipline tied to the study of classical literature, the monuments of classical civilization, and extended systematically to the study and interpretation of trans-Euro-Afro-Asian artifacts by archaeologists and prehistorians.

I believe this culture historical perspective was transplanted to the American context by means of the exchange of information between scholars between the United States and Europe, especially in a direct manner under the influence of Franz Boas as the father of American anthropology, and in an indirect manner by exchanges between American and European scholars, including contemporaneous British archaeologists and anthropologists, and by the preexisting cultural metaphors and intellectual models held by earlier American scholars who were interested in the questions of the archaeology and prehistory of the New World. As is typical of the transplantation and adaptation of knowledge and cultural systems from one regional context to another, there occurred a subtle but profound shift and modification of the culture historical paradigm that has become known as "Americanist." To a great extent I believe this involved a gradual but increasing preoccupation with empirical evidence and the methods used to derive this evidence, and an eclipsing of the use of broad theoretical paradigms for the interpretation of this evidence or for the reconstruction of lost pasts. In cultural anthropology, this shift involved a renewed empiricism and an appreciation of the subjective life-world of the ethnographic other.

This philological study of culture history itself largely died a natural death and came to an end in European Academia by the beginning of World War II. It survived in its transplanted form in both American ethnology and in Americanist archaeology which took the general name of "culture history." These disciplines demonstrated a preoccupation with theory and methodology of culture history that was characterized by a lack of an explicit or strongly unified body of methods or models by its practitioners. In other words, though this paradigm was based, as Kuhn defined a paradigm, upon a shared culture of knowledge among a community of scholars, there was in fact very little agreement as to the correct or best methods or conceptual models to employ. Agreement was forged as common ground over the long run by means of shared exemplars that were deemed appropriate to the articulation of research in the field.

The general culture historical approach, both as it was transplanted and transformed in America, and as it remained and developed in Europe, had other related concerns with linguistics, philosophy and the rise of a modern science of psychology that affected its subsequent transformations. Particularly important to this perspective, I believe, were the complementary issues of developing a comparative framework by which to classify and order our understanding of human differences, with the implicit assumption of discovering universal structures underlying these differences, and the problem of general cultural and linguistic relativism of cultures, as this was adopted and promulgated in various forms. From this standpoint, I believe, primitive cultures were viewed as largely unchanging and undeveloped entities that existed in a superorganic and institutional sense that was all constraining for its "culture bearers." Cultures became self-consistent entities, bound in place and time and organized on basic themes or patterns, that could be imputed to personality types or configurations, and that could only be understood within the rational framework of the system of belief and behavior that such configurations entailed.

Implicit to this model of culture was the idea of the functional and formal integration of all significant aspects and manifestations of cultural process within a geographically definable area and a particular historical period. This central structural aspect of traditional culture was alleged to be recoverable and interpretable from the archaeological context. Not only were such cultures traditionally defined, but they were thought to be traditionally bound, such that they were inherently conservative and relatively permanent within a given provenience of place and time.

This model of culture was the primary implicit theoretical and operational metaphor of American anthropology for the first half of the 20^th Century, and this included both the field of linguistics during this time, up until the advent of Noam Chomsky, and the field of Archaeology up until the challenge by Louis Binford at about the same time. This paradigm dominated the academic field of anthropology in an exclusive sense for the first six decades of the past Century, and reflected strongly, I believe, the late industrial colonialism and hegemonic relationship between Europeans and the rest of the world.

In so-called Americanist Archaeology, the culture historical model took the form of a preoccupation with site excavation and survey methods and analytical methods of artifact classification and was explicated in terms of its operational methodologies that were tied to the problems of establishing relative temporal chronologies and larger classificatory systems for the organization of archaeological evidence in the New World. This problem was defined by a general lack of great historical or known prehistoric time depth in the New World. This movement became marked increasingly by a rising concern with a data-bound empiricism, which empiricism tended to preclude the development of broader prehistoric reconstructions. The concern of Americanist culture history was therefore not cultural reconstruction of the past per se, but with the possibility and ability for such reconstruction itself in relation to the archaeological evidence in situ.

The culture historical method as this was developed and dialectically articulated by the Americanist archaeologists in the contexts of their American sites and surveys and in the forums of their museums and journals, never really found its way beyond the limitations of its own built-in relativism upon which it had been founded. It came to define in the literature of Anthropology what can be considered to be a well developed doctrine of archaeological relativity. Just as with ethnographic description of various cultures, two different archaeologists can excavate the same site, or interpret the same collection of sherds, bones or stones, and come up with very different models or typologies. This doctrine can be summarized by the following postulates:

1. Culture patterns as demonstrated by archaeological evidence tended to be unique and historically complex to a particular place and period, making the systematic comparison between sites inherently problematic.

2. Cultural change as this was inferrable from the archaeological record was (and remains) inherently uncertain as to its source and outcomes.

3. Archaeological evidence of culture pattern and history that depended upon relative techniques of dating and comparison was thus inherently limited in its ability to infer cultural pattern or cultural change events, especially on a more general frame of reference.

4. There tended to be in the deposition of evidence and in its subsequent interpretation an inherent conflation of categories and alleged influences or processes relating to this deposition.

5. Culture historical interpretation and reconstruction in general was thus also fundamentally constrained and circumscribed by these limiting factors.

This relativist doctrine characteristic of American archaeology was nowhere explicitly formulated, but formed the implicit framework of a dialectical counterpoint that proceeded in the literature of this field during this era. Its preoccupation over the uncertainty of its methods or its empirical results reflected the principal goal and value of the culture historical method in the first place, and that was the achievement of certainty in the development of a cultural based chronology of historical events. The closest and clearest formulations of this critical doctrine can be found in the articles by James Ford (1953), especially in reply to the use of statistical methods by Albert Spaulding (1953).

As a result of the general problem of archaeological relativity, which rested upon relative dating techniques and centered upon the problem of development of local sequences and regional chronologies, any analytical or conceptual framework that was superimposed upon the archaeological evidence was ultimately seen as inherently deficient and fundamentally problematic, being relative to the knowledge system brought to the analysis, unless these models withstood the test of time, or rather, the test of historical consistency. The general failure to achieve either a unified outlook in Americanist archaeology, or a unified chronology of American prehistory, led eventually to the abandonment of the culture historical approach as the dominant and, for a period, exclusive approach to American archaeology and prehistory.

The doctrine of archaeological relativism remains in a fundamental sense to constrain the articulation of archaelogical knowledge today, alongside of the rise of the "new relativisms" associated with post-structuralist critique, but its influence has been overshadowed and ameliorated to some extent by the increasing reliance upon absolute dating technologies and techniques that have permitted the development more refined and empirically robust constructions of archaeological sequences and chronologies. Problems of classification and interpretation of evidence in more general reconstructions remain as centrally problematic to archaeology, but, with absolute dating techniques becoming more refined, Archaeology has managed to establish its legitimacy as an empirical science.

Behind these issues are operating what I believe to be several basic fallacies of culture history as this paradigm has developed in relation to Americanist archaeology and cultural anthropology. To summarize these fallacies in the form of a basic syllogism operating in Archaeology:

1. Cultural explanation is equivalent and substitutable for historical explanation.(cultural anthropological belief)

2. Archaeological evidence is representative of cultural realities. (archaeological belief) and

3. Ethnographic evidence is representative of past cultural realities (cultural anthropological belief)

4. Adequate Archaeological constructions may result in sufficient historical explanations. (archaeological belief)

and

5. Ethnological constructions may also result in sufficient historical explanations if applied to archaeological evidence.

The underlying premises of these fallacies I would call the cultural presupposition that cultural realities (patterns, dynamics, configurations, aspects, etc.) are sufficiently isomorphic with historical realities such that the former can be used as a causal determinant of the latter patterns and processes. While it is true that culture may condition historical circumstances, responses and outcomes, it is not clear that culture and historical developments exhibit any necessary order or causality in their relationship, or that the one process is completely isomorphic with the other. There are obvious correlations between cultural patterning and historical developments, such as can be exemplified by the archaeological record or through ethnographic evidence, but these correlations disguise intermediate determinants and relationships that are extremely complex.

The consequence of the promulgation of these fallacies in anthropological thinking are two-fold, I believe. The first can be said to be a fallacy of confusing correlation with causality, or, of infering explanatory homology of relationship from descriptive analogy based upon similarity of form, position, cooccurrence, function, etc.. This results in working a kind of anthropological vodoo magic on the evidence at hand in a generalized law of contagion and contiguity of form. In other words, things resembling one another must be related, and things next to one another in the ground must also be related (in a culturally phyletic sense). From a symbolic standpoint, this fallacy is understandable as it represents the basic universal structure of human thought when and where exact knowledge is not available or applicable as a constraint. This is the difference between scientific explanation (i.e. historical explanation) and mythology and ideology.

The second fallacy can be said to be the historicity of cultural interpretation, or what I would call the fallacy of the presumption of traditional culture (or alternatively, cultural tradition). Tradition assumes a continuity of form and pattern and a general conservatism that removes a culture from the historical mainstream and somehow preserves its forms and patterns intact through time. Essentially, and in an essentialist manner, tradition is the mechanism, the main argument, we adopt to explain culture as history. Tradition itself embodies what can be considered to be ideal time, but comes to stand outside of real time, such that we can construe tradition as an ahistorical, or historicized, substitute for true historical explanation.

The case of tradition standing in the place of history is clearly represented for instance in Chinese lineage constructions. Rarely, living memory will extend deeper than three or at most four generations past. "Too old will eat the young." Patrilineal reckoning by well established families will maintain detailed record books, and those expert in these may be able to push the lineage reckoning back many generations. But at some point, even this reckoning will break down, such that, after perhaps 7 or 8 generations, the linkages may be less clear and more fictive than factive. Even in well maintained record books, these records rarely go deeper than the a few generations before the time of the writing of the books themselves. It is not unusual therefore for these genealogical reconstructions to trace the lineage directly back to some noteworthy Emperor or other well known historical personage, on the basis of surname agreement alone. At that point, tradition becomes at best legendary rather than historical. This problem does not even deal with the actual realities of the true genealogical record, from which may be excised many true descendants of the line (which lineages are reckoned by isolating kinship models anyway) and which also frequently incorporate many errors or fictions as a part of the record.

I tend to see the process of archaeological reconstruction of the past in the same light. At some point we must accept the fundamental inadequacy of cultural explanation, not only in its own terms, but in terms of the past realities and sense of history it may seek to deal with and represent. Cultural explanation if divorced from its historical context (which automatically happens with the deposition of cultural artifacts into the ground) becomes ahistorical, and this is precisely what happens when it is used as a substitute or basis for history rather than as a product of history. Depositional history of the artifact in the ground is not the same as the prehistory that led to the deposition of the artifact in the ground in the first place. Buried in the ground, the artifact has effectiely been removed from the stream of history that created it in the first place and left it where it lay.

Behind this second fallacy as well is what one can call the illusion of cultural reality, that it is something hard, tangible and that can be gotten firmly ahold of on the ground, so to speak. It is an easy leap to make therefore to use archaeological artifacts as the basis for culture, or, even, as the key representative of a past cultural reality that cannot otherwise be represented. Cultural reality for its bearers tends to be transparent and invisible. We only realize cultural realities through cross-cultural (and trans-historical) parallax, and this only comes when other people's models of belief and behavior do not correspond to our own. The reasons are rarely clear-cut or complete in the anthropological imagination.

Translated into the archaeological context, it can be seen that what all archaeologists are working with are the fragmentary remains of past cultural patterns embedded in a broader and more complex prehistoric outline. Usually, this evidence is under the best of circumstances very limited and subsequently affected in its condition and arrangement by the natural processes of depositional time. Furthermore, material evidence is intrinsically constrained in that it cannot directly speak to us about the minds and intentionalities of its original makers and users. Even first-hand historical documentary evidence is insufficient to the reconstruction of history in any but the most general of senses, as most events pass unrecorded and unremembered. In our so-called historical reconstructions, we do not even get a genuine or accurate history of the artifactual thing in itself, the history of a penny, so to speak.

To some variable extent, it can be said that depositional history reflects in a partial manner the history that created the depositional pattern, and this is a natural history with some sense of human culture sprinkled in and about. The stratigraphic record that any site bears will demonstrate the rough outlines of cultural change and continuity associated with a particular piece of real estate over a given frame of time, be it a few decades or tens of thousands of years. The depositional history is only partial and fragmentary at best, heavily influenced by stochastic natural processes. We cannot from this history judge how much may have been there on location, but did not become deposited, or how much may have been deposited, but did not survive the wheathering effects of time. If a site spans a period of 350 years for instance, we know that it could at most incorporate 13 to 14 human generations of time. It is clear that few such sites were genuine isolates that had long-term continuity uninterrupted by the influence of the outside world on some level or another. Humans are just not that sedentary. They are restless and restive. Though we know that the site may span 14 generations, it may comprise only 5 or 6 clear stratigraphic layers, and yet how can we tell if layer 1 spanned 2 or 5 human generations and layer 6 only 1, and possibly another strata, 2, had no occupation whatever associated with it.

Americanist, or American archaeological culture history, has come to be distinguished in the literature by certain key methodological concepts and their associated techniques. Lyman, O'Brien & Dunnel highlight the distinction between essentialist and materialist models of typology, and usefully distinguish, I believe, between continuous, discontinuous and cyclical models of time. In their trilogy of works, they detail the basic methods and methodological models that came to most inform the Americanist paradigm of culture history. These concepts emerged and were worked out over time in a dialectical manner through their development and application to various field sites. I present an outline of these concepts as I believe they fit within a larger methodological framework of Americanist culture history, in terms of their conceptual underpinnings and implications, and then in terms of their relativistic considerations:

Culture Areas & Culture Dynamics: Culture area emerged as a critical concept to the regional organization of archaeological knowledge that was derived primarily from the ethnographic evidence of the distribution of cultures upon the American landscape. (W. H. Holmes, in Lyman et. al, 1997: 39-41) This concept was tied to the age-area hypothesis as this had been worked out in various fields. Culture areas became well defined, as for instance by the Drivers, and this model was extended worldwide and became the basis for the development of George Murdocks' Human Relations Area Files and a hologeistic approach to comparative anthropology. The age-area hypothesis itself is linked to models of diffusion and culture contact or transmission (acculturation models). The culture area concept reflects the culture circle approach, and also was derived from an earlier ethnological preoccupation with environmental determinism and led into cultural ecological models. It breaks down primarily because it is a relatively ahistorical model, failing to reflect the changes of cultural distributions of people over time, and because it fails to take acculturative processes and patterns fully into account in the complex and often selective relations between different peoples.

Time & Chronology: It is perhaps needless to reiterate the central importance of the problem of time to Americanist culture historians, and the challenge of developing chronological sequences and general chronologies that were good for wider areas became the overriding concern of most archaeological work at this time. Chronology became the framing system by which all archaeological knowledge was ultimately to be organized.

In this regard, chronology was largely a cultural chronology, or an alleged sequence of cultural development or replacement, culture being inferred from or represented by the typical artifacts alleged to represent a people during a specific period and place in the stratigraphic record of archaeology. For a chronology of cultural sequences, there is invariably a conceptual dependency upon the types and classifications used to construct these sequences, and an explanation of continuity or replace of one culture by another without an exact or clearcut explanation of the actual processes of transformation or the periods of transition between or during any cultural phase.

To get at the problem of the past, it was necessary to develop evidentiary frameworks for local, areal and regional chronological sequences without the benefit for the most part of a known historical time-line. Real time as an historical phenomenon (times arrow or continuous non-cyclic time) must be distinguished from what can be conceptually called cultural time (often cyclical, historically variable, legendary or even mythical) and especially archaeological or stratigraphic time (non-cyclical and non-linear) which is sequential but discontinuous. These imply different kinds of data-types in our analytical models.

The problem of chronology therefore reflected directly the Americanist culture historians preoccupation with the determination of time based upon the archaeological record. There was therefore and attempt to use inferrable sequences of artifact pattern, derived either seriationally or stratigraphically, or both, to construct what can be called at least archaeological if not fully culture historical chronologies of the past relative to the location and period in question. That this was usually a disparate and divided attempt reflected the degrees of uncertainty and lack of information underlying these various chronological constructions. In other words, the wide disagreement of chronological frameworks tended to reflect the relativity of the knowledge base upon which such frameworks were built.

The general baseline was a known historical event-horizon, and the attempt to trace down and backward from this the reverse sequences leading up to this event period. The problem of dating was for the most part only solvable in relativistic terms, with implied sequences of earlier or later than within given site matrices or intersite distributions.

Classification & Typology: The construction of chronologies in archaeological strata, sequences and distributions between sites, depended in turn upon making explicit the data types, traits, forms and relations between artifacts and their features as these were discovered or inferred from different periods and places. Development of areal distributions across place and through time required as well the ability to group and sort patterns found in the artifactual data into a systematic method of comparison based upon recognizable forms, functions and materials. Various classification systems emerged, especially in reference to several different regional areas of archaeological study, with the type concept at the center of such schemes. Hence trait, periods, phases, clusters, complexes, focus, tradition, horizon, all are variously described in the archaeological literature of the time and all came to take on rather specific kinds of meanings within a larger framework that could be defined as the basis of a genuinely archaeological concept of culture embedded materially in the earth as a function of time and place.

Designation of types and the construction of typologies and classification systems remain a central interest in archaeological method and theory. In general, the problem of types is the fallacy of misplaced concretization, or the reification of absract categories as if they were natural parts of reality. When the term comes to stand in place of the thing, the conceptual system can obscure the reality in the archaeological record more than it enlightens us about the record, and it can create "false positives" in the archeological record when it leads us to interpretations that have no empirical basis in the record to begin with.

Stratigraphy & Stratification: Stratigraphy has been the backbone of all archaeology, and its central method. Needless to say, everyone does stratigraphic excavation and analysis a little differently, and remains as much an art form as a scientific methodology. Thus the problem of stratigraphy represented the problem of chronology and classifcation directly in terms of the natural or superimposed layers of deposition containing cultural material artifacts. The basis for the use of stratigraphy in development of relative chronological sequences was the principle of superposition which was generally considered unexceptionable unless natural or human made processes of resulted in depositional disturbance. Mixing, percolation, taphonomy and noncultural or incidental means of transmission or portage has tended to skew and complicate the reading of natural stratificaition of deposition layers and their contents. In general, things at a higher level were at least deposited at a later time than things lower down.

I would claim that another important principle exists in the articulation of stratigraphy that is important to analysis and reconstruction of its evidence, and this is the principle of natural depositional distribution. For the most part, it can be said that cultural processes underlying and contextually relating any particular site or level or strata to a broader sense of culture history in fact ceased at the time of its final deposition as an archaeological stratum. The same human ordering processes which led up to the final deposition event no longer held true following that event. I would suggest that the same rates and kinds of changes processes affecting the artifactual complex before its deposition was different from those that applied subsequent to deposition. Natural and largely entropic processes, including subsequent human interference, even by the final archaeologists who excavate, tend to affect the natural depositional distribution that the archaeologist uncovers or discovers in the process of excavation.

1. To some minimal extent, natural deposition will reflect some degree of prior cultural order, or alternatively, cultural destruction. This can be referred to as a third principle of cultural depositional distribution that is at least implicit to the definition of an archaeological site.

2. This minimal cultural ordering preserved in a stratum is the basis of archaeological information in culture historical construction, but it is fundamentally affected by the second kind of entropic or natural disorder which can be said to be overlaid and disturbing of the first sense of order.

3. While the latter sense of order may be said to be largely a form of noise and therefore fundamentally random, it may exhibit stochastic patterns of isotropism or isomorphism of structure that can be conflated with the first sense of order.

4. It is important to uncover and analyze both sense of orders to any given archaeological strata.

We may say in general that the older a site is, the greater the amount of natural depositional disturbance to the original cultural context, and the more conflated the results.

Seriation & Inter-correlation: Seriation was in a sense a complementary method to stratigraphic analysis, and involved generally the determining of the pattern of relationship between artifacts both through space and time, based upon alleged degrees of similarity and variation of pattern. The aim of seriation was to establish for the most part the changes of the pattern of distribution of artifact types in relation to one another, and this method depended heavily upon the typology used to classify artifacts. The organizing principle of seriation was the principle of popularity and the prediction of a natural unimodal curve in the changing distribution of an artifact over both place and time. Seriation in Americanist Archaeology as divided into two broad types, heritable seriation and similiarly seriation, with the distinction being the degree to which homology versus analogy was inferred or inferrable from the data.

Seriation in the American context was first used by A. Kroeber and took the form of frequency and occurrence seriation, which methods were extended statistically and in terms of larger surveys. It was originally developed in British archaeology as a form of heritable or phyletic seriation in relation to Egyptian funerary practices.

The basis of frequency seriation was to establish chronological sequences from the total percentages of distinct types of artifacts in relation to one another within sites and between sites, as these percentages varied in a systematic manner through time and over space. The basis of what was known as occurrence seriation was to establish presence or absence of particular types or traits of artifacts in a similar manner. Phyletic or heritable seriation purported a historical and genealogical connection of traits based on form or type and its systematic variation through time. The presumption of this form of seriation was that seriation could reveal, in a relative way, hisorical connection between types, though there is no non-arbitrary way within the system itself for empirically proving the connections that are inputed to the sequence distributions. At its peak, the seriation method was considered to be equal in power for the development of chronological sequences to the method of stratigraphic analysis.

Index Types & Provenience: The development of key index types that could be used to designate even entire strata depended critically, I believe, on the notion of provenience or archaeological site context that served to link together evidence and chronologies derived from different site complexes. The rise and use of index types depended upon the development of context in archaeological excavations and constructions, the widespread occurrence of relational associations between a given type or form and a given strata, area or period, and the gradual rise of time-tested, historically valid chronological sequences. Determination of valid and reliable index types is not as straight-forward as many archaeologists may want us to believe. Such types may be more of a gloss disguising inter-site variability of form and pattern than they are diagnostic to a site or a strata. They also invite the problem of inter-correlational analysis between sites and different strata, and therefore invite the problem of mixing apples and oranges in our seriational constructions.

Provenance is a concept that was implied in the literature of Lyman et. al., but nowhere explicitly addressed. Nevertheless, the principle of provenience remains central and critical to all archaeological excavation, interpretation, analysis and construction. It addresses directly the challenges of relativist interpretation of evidence in situ, both in relation to the site in which it is unearthed, and in relation to the larger body of knowledge that defines its framework for understanding. Provenance is the key methodology by which to distinguish between culturally meaningful data and noise in a given archaeological site. Even artifacts themselves become essentially meaningless if they are divorced of their original depositional and wider archaeological context. Of course, again, provenance is a relative tool and itself is incapable of determining what may be unique to any particular site compared to what may be only anomalous about the site in some stochastic sense.

The Direct Historical Approach & Evolutionary Schemata: The direct historical approach reflected directly the goals and interests of culture history and the convergence of anthropology and archaeology in the use of ethnology and ethnographic examples for historical explanation of prehistoric peoples.

Evolutionary or developmental schemata of culture is implicit to the direct historical approach in comparing historically contemporaneous or at least extant cultures with those inferrable from the archaeological past. Though during the culture historical era of Americanist archaeology evolutionary frameworks developed during the previous era were largely abandoned, but the implicit framework of evolutionary development of humankind, especially in a broader sense of distinguishing "primitive" or "barbarian" peoples from more advanced culture systems, never really went away. It underwent a more sophisticated concern with evolutionary and geological history, as well as with the increasing information relating to human culture history.

This approach, while perhaps not first developed in an explicit sense in the US, had special and important implications when applied to the American context of the Native Americans and their past. This sense of past was conceived orginally in a fairly shallow sense, and was seen as being largely interrupted by a sense of the present, rather than being integral and continuous with the present. Enough information survived the contact phase of the proto-historical period to permit the direct use of living or historical ethnographic examples to a sense of the remote past. Thus this method was used, perhaps in an uncritical manner, to valorize and lend credence to the hidden presupposition of traditional cultures (largely ahistorical constructs) that stood behind the culture historical framework of Americanist archaeology.

Implied in all historical analogies to the past is the uncritical presupposition that cultural processes are systematic and universal and hence discoverable in relationships and comparisons between cultural patterns. Again, this presupposition reflected the essentially ahistorical character of Americanist culture history. Cultural explanation became therefore largely a substitute for true historical explanation. Even as I work in ethnocultural studies in relation to the North American fur trade, it is evident how ahistorical many ethnographic description of Native American tribes has been. During almost the entire period of contact, these tribes have undergone frequent and almost continuous historical transformations and dislocations that were frequently quite destructive. If one were to read an idealized ethnography of the "culture" of these peoples, one would not have a clear sense of this long trail of historical transformations that only becomes evident in the historical records themselves. This is a problem that visits Americanist culture history as well, as long as cultural models and metaphors were used in place of actual history or the succession of events over the long past.

These concepts and their dimensions form then the corpus of Americanist culture history as a central operating paradigm, not only for archaeological excavation and reconstruction of prehistoric life-ways, but for anthropological ethnology and cultural explanation as well. Each of the concepts has its own history of dialectical interpretation in the record, and collectively, they came to define a general relativist methodology about which archaeologiests could identify themselves. I maintain that this paradigm lay at the heart of American anthropology during the first six decades of the 20^th Century

The concerns that characterized the first half century of archaeological culture history in America do not appear in the same manner in the subsequent history of American archaeology, though the fundamental issues remain problematic and unresolved. Concepts that defined this method remain fundamentally important today, especially the problems of stratigraphy and chronology. Other concepts like seriation and culture areas have largely fallen into disuse. The problem of seriation, I believe, was its dependence upon inter-site and inter-layer continuities of particular artifact patterns, as well as upon a sufficient sample number of such artifact patterns to be meaningful in their analysis. So long as Archaeologists were primarily preoccupied with pot-sherds and pottery forms, as these were scattered across various focal areas and classified in various museum cabinets, seriation was depended upon as a reliable and central methodology for culture historical reconstruction and chronological development. But the capacity to apply this method with consistent results to other kinds of features or types of artifacts across different sites and areas probably put a constraint over its general utility in broader archaeologial contexts, especially in situations where pottery did not clearly exist as key defining units.

It remains a matter of conjecture and open debate how much influence anthropology and archaeology has had upon one another. The historical fact of this influence seems to me to be undeniable. It is obvious that people like Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber and even R. Radcliffe-Brown probably had a considerable and critical effect over the development of archaeological theory and method within a larger anthropological framework. This influence is explicit in the case of Boas sending out archaeologists to do important research in the Southwest and Meso-America, and in the case of Kroeber's own work as well as the work of those under his influence in anthropology, linguistics and archaeology.

What has been interesting to myself is the apparent extent to which archaeological methods and techniques of data sorting and analysis may have actually had an important influence on the development of cultural anthropological thinking and theory during the same era and subsequently in later periods. This is apparent to me for instance in the development and application of the culture area concept to extant distributions of culture within an historical framework. It is also apparent in the manner that methods of sorting and organization of archaeological data may have influenced the management of ethnographically related data, either directly as in various common pile-sort methods, or indirectly through such techniques as the HRAF or through the use of seriational principles to understanding distributions of shared traits. It is apparent as well in the careful analysis of the data and in the calling into question the hidden implications and presuppositions that lie behind our schemes of data organization and manipulation. This was the inheritance of the hermeneutic-critical approach in traditional culture history to both Americanist archaeology and cultural anthropology.

I believe that probably this mutual relationship between anthropology and archaeology during this period of their development was critical to the identity and trajectory of both fields, and probably remains so today regardless of disciplinary fractionation, hyperspecialization and cultural or areal cleavages that have also developed. The anthropological identity of Americanist archaeology gave to the culture historical approach a decidedly ahistorical but particularistic cultural character. Archaeologists searched the evidence for signs of cultural patterning and dynamics that would enable them to develop laws of cultural change and stasis, especially within the archaeological context. This was perhaps a propos to the American archaeological context especially, for besides the historical records of the pristine civilizations that came late in decipherment, the Americas have been largely ahistorical cultural affairs. There is a sense in my mind that anthropologists and archaeologists have been searching in different ways and in different places for many of the same kinds of answers to similar kinds of questions about human culture and its patterning in time and place.

Just as Archaeology and Anthropology have shared over time some of the same techniques and themes, it is perhaps inevitable that they also can be said to have shared some of the same headaches and problems, especially concerning the dragon of relativity. Part of the problem of relativity is the dependence of the thing known, the "artifact," to the categories and constructions of the person who does the knowing. Another part of this problem is the contextual dependence of such knowledge to the framework in which such knowledge was derived. It is extremely difficult, if not completely impossible, to entirely lift and remove an object, with all its archaeological implications, from its exact and unique depositional provenience, without doing untold damage to the potential identity and significance of that object in situ. The conduct of archaeology, even more perhaps than anthropology, is an inherently destructive affair. At the same time, it is impossible to interpret an object outside of the background context of the archaeologists own sense of culture history and knowledge systems that have their own social history and culture.

I believe the beginning of the end of Americanist culture history was planted in the seeds of its first efforts at stratigraphic analysis and interpretation. Among a host of other factors that contributed to a changing world of which archaeology was a part, it can be said that there occurred gradually emerging recognition that any site, any artifact from a site, any complex or cluster or horizon, represented not so much a thing that might be called culture, or even a cultural trait, so much as it represented a hidden reality that was tied to the naturalistic contexts of the site itself, contexts characterizable more by the entropic effects of nature and time, than by human organization and order.

The tradition of Americanist culture history has all but broken down, and its deposition in the culture history and methodology of Archaeology remains to be recovered and reexamined by people like Lyman et al. Stratigraphy, chronology, classification and indexing are still central methodological concerns of most active archaeologists in the world today. Of much less concern are seriation and the development of typologies and culture area distributions, though even these remain as possible conceptual and methodological tools of the archaeologists growing tool-kit.

Any scientific knowledge forms a community and a culture (i.e., it is paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense) that is clearly definable in terms of several key traits:

1. A sense of its own history.

2. A specific set of methodological tools and techniques.

3. A sense of paradigmatic community and culture as reflected in shared attitudes, conceptual models, metaphors, shared exemplars and a common technical language.

4. A delimited set of interests and objective bases of empirical knowledge.

In this regard, Americanist culture history can be seen as a discipline, rooted in a culture historical tradition and a humanistic preoccupation with idealized forms of culture, striving to define itself as a legitimate and credible science of the human past, not only vis-a-vie its anthropological counterparts, but within a larger academic framework and world. Unlike the European or Asian archaeological context, it had a shallow historical baseline from which to build, and what at first appeared to be scant and somewhat enigmatic forms of evidence with which to build.

Archaeologists for the most part have moved on to greener pastures of dialectical debate and development, though the underlying issues that plagued the earlier general dialog of culture historical archaeologists remain central to this debate to plague the newcomers to the field. There are chronic and continuing dilemmas of the interpretation of evidence, development of context, and the ever-fleeting goal of reconstruction of the human past. This recurring fate teaches us clearly the lessons most important to culture history--those who forget the lessons of the past are bound to repeat them.

In every era of its praxis, Archaeology has borrowed the metaphors and models of its defining anthropological framework and sought to apply these to the understanding of the past through their data. This is perhaps inevitable and unavoidable, as but very few people seem capable of sufficiently transcending what Francis Bacon so long ago defined as the idols of human understanding and to devote to an exclusively empirical and inductivist approach.

I do not yet give up on the potential of archaeology to tell us something anthropologically significant about human culture and human nature beyond the problem of chronological and historical reconstruction. The entire problem of the ethnographic description and ethnological explanation of culture is essentially, to myself at least, an historical and diachronic problem that is tied critically to a sense of the past. History as we experience this in our own lives and in our own world is usually a history of unintended consequences that are the result of the best and the worst intentions, or of no intentions at all. It is played out in day-to-day interactions between different people occupying different positions and statuses in the world. At the same time, cultural dynamics do present interesting possibilities of universal structures that might underly the variable patterning found in culture history. Culture stands as a human solution to the problem of history, as a means of keeping historical changes in check and in at least partial control. Culture often as not stands in the way of history and interferes with it as much as it may facilitate and promote history. Thus history is what happens when culture fails or is absent. The notion of culture history may therefore be something of an oxymoron.