Scientifically conservative continental archaeologists have shied away from synthetic reconstructions of the past, especially those focusing upon human maritime and waterway adaptations. The cumulative consequences of these tendencies toward conservatism are the implicit undervaluing in inductive, ground-up reconstructions as well as of the potential human capacity for civilization. Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture implicit in such conservatism, there is also an a-theoretical rejection of counter-factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.

Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis, as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.

Archaeological fallacies begin with an understanding of the archaeological construction of reality, and the basic problem of reification of conceptual systems that all human knowledge is prone to. It begins with site reconstruction, and ends with attempts to reconstruct the Human past. The naturalization of symbolic projections is an inherent aspect of our need to make our constructions seem as if they are a function of natural law and process. The beginning of science rests in the recognition of the ideological limitations of our own constructions. Its theory or knowledge base cannot advance otherwise. The paradox of the construction of reality is that this theory is a form of functionalism rooted to an objectivist point of view--humans have constructed their worlds, this construction is cultural, and its end products are what archaeologists dig up in the ground. Archaeologists thus are left to deconstruct the reconstructions of human constructions. Reification of knowledge is a common informal fallacy that is tied to the misplaced concretization of abstractions--the positing of a priori or factive "truth" to mere conceptualizations.

The conservatism of conventional archaeology is expressed in several ways: 1) its "nothing but" analytical orientation; 2) its "data-boundness;" 3) its "as late as" evidentiary caution; 4) its spatial "locationalist" and "localistic" bias; 5) its "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomization; 6) its lumping/splitting tendencies in categorical constructions; and, finally, 7) its exclusive "territoriality."

The cumulative consequences of these tendencies are its implicit undervaluing of the potential human capacity for civilization in its inductive, "ground-up" reconstructions and the professional devaluation of the logical role of counter-factuality in hypothesis construction. It is argued that the orthodox rage of "scientific" consensus in the professional identification of the field systematically precludes the historical role of Archaeology as a heterodox "humanity."

1) Jaquetta Hawkes delivered a critique of the encroachment of scientific reductionism in archaeology in her 1971 John Danz Lecture "Nothing But or Something More," based upon her sense of distrust in the systematic narrowing of the rational "beyond its true meaning of the reasonable until it excludes subjective experience, a great part of what it means to be a human person..." (p 3). The analytical emphasis of such reductionism represents the single minded extension of a methodology of the physical sciences to more humanly problematic enterprises of anthropology until it becomes a worldview--a "totalitarian ideology," characterized by the reduction of the whole as "nothing but" the sum of its parts. It is a reduction to basics in which humankind is nothing but a complex bio-chemical mechanism, and a reduction to origins in which, if we prefer, "there is nothing in man which was not first in the amoeba." (p. 6)

Against this urge to "nothing but" reductionism, Hawkes poses the "something more" of a "universal reality of hierarchy" in which multiple levels of organization that are "two-faced" and that are structured both from below by its component elements and above by its relationships with higher levels of integration, and from which new properties emerge at each level not present at lower ones. Furthermore, such universality of hierarchy can be demonstrated experimentally as well as theoretically.

Her critique of reductionism, when applied to "analytical archaeology" that restricts itself to graphs, statics and histograms, is the attempt to define humankind as nothing but technical, material and economic--as next to a "mosquito" in evolutionary terms and without the free will or consciousness which has played such a determining role in history. Left out is the sense of the "human will to meaning" and value that has been such a part of the human creation of civilization.

Hawkes summarizes a trait list of shared characteristics of the independent pristine civilizations of the old and the new worlds, noting that while the Mesoamerican civilizations had developed a ball game with score keeping, mathematics and a calendar, they had not developed technological features of a wheel, an arch or a metallurgy. These are that a materialist hypothesis would logically lead one to suspect as being the point of convergence between civilizations. (ibid.: pg. 25)

2) "Data-boundness" is a general bias of attitude and orientation that I have noted especially among many archaeologists and physical anthropologists whose primary researches are concerned with the minutiae of analysis of bones, teeth, and, in the case of archaeologists, chipped stones and pot sherds. It is an attitude of near exclusive preoccupation with the analysis of the artifact or the physical specimen rather than with the conjecture of the history which these material items may represent. There is an atheoretical, method bound fear of counterfactual conjecture and restrictiveness of interpretation--focus often becomes concentrated on the development of componential analysis aimed at establishing the internal/external provenience and "validity" of the "objet d'homme."

The consequences is that when and if they do generalize, they end up taking a grand leap of faith and falling off into a chasm--they are not very good at doing what they have little practice with. There is a consequence of theoretical naïveté' and historical blindness in the superimposition of the researcher's own values and preconceptions upon the "origin" story of the data--the classic case is the interpretation of all "Venus figurines" as cult fetishes and fertility symbols with "pendulous breasts," steatophygic buttocks and pronounced labia. (S. M. Nelson, "Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic 'Venus' Figurines and Archaeological Mythology." in Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropology Association 1990 pg. 11-22)

There is a predisposition to view the hidden history behind the material data with the same general sense of material objectivity as is embodied in the data itself. History is firmly rooted to the ground. Perhaps this kind of theoretical caution is safe (especially when it comes to setting confidence limits), perhaps too safe, and therefore perhaps it is also inevitable and unavoidable.

When we hold an ancient flint chopper or scraper in our hands, we can conjecture how its maker may have held and used it. We can turn it over in our hands to find the most suitable grip and the clearest cutting edge. We might even go so far as to try to make one ourselves, or to attempt to use it in various tasks--and if we did this enough we might even become good at it and develop a "feel" for the object that we would not gain through the microscope.

3) "As late as" evidentiary caution, versus "at least by" evidentiary conjecture, has an understandable reason in archaeological interpretation. The peopling of North America can only be as old as the oldest fossils yet discovered, the stratigraphic level of a site can only be as early as the latest artifact found at that level, unless it is known to have percolated from a higher or lower provenience.

From a scientific standpoint this is supremely sensible. We are wed to an empiricist tradition which holds that an unseen, unsounded tree fallen in the forest could not have fallen. It is also extremely safe--let someone else stick their professional neck out on the block to build mansions on ground that is not there. Ever since Piltdown and Lysenko, the scientific community loves to "falsify" and chastise.

The problem with this general attitude and approach is that it is extremely conservative and entangled in a long tradition which wishes to confer upon humankind only the most shallow and recent history possible--perhaps no later than the flood. (Margaret T. Hodgen Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1964)

The general trend of evidence has been to push in unprecedented fashion our sequences and reconstructed trees and dates back further and deeper into the past than anyone would have been daring to admit. It was thought incredible that humankind could have an origin of several hundred thousand, or even a million years, but when Lucy was found to have a tentative history of 3.5 to 4 million years, it all seemed astonishing. Even in the archaeological and paleological record, things eventually fall into place, and dates, sequences and trees eventually stabilize--at least enough to permit more confidence and consensus of reconstruction, or at least until something unexpected is dug up.

"At least by" daring should not be so much a mark of professional incompetence, as it should be a measure of the willingness to search beyond what exists to see that even the artifacts themselves must have had precedents and a history other than what we ascribe to them. The human capacity for culture that led to the creation of the artifact must have been in place and preceded its creation and humankind making its own history must have been more of a continuous process than a stratigraphy.

4) The spatial "locationist" bias is the tendency to see cultural processes of the past as self-contained groupings, segregates, as units or as little culture gardens that can be clearly demarcated on a map. This bias tends to under emphasize the importance of human movement, migration, trans-cultural communication and transmission and of regions of great cultural overlap, interaction and multiple diffusion.

The consequence of this kind of bias inherited from the gemeinschaft culture area approach is the implicit tendency to see groups as locally rooted and embedded in time, as fossilized artifacts standing for distinctive peoples, cultures, phases and horizons whose boundaries are clearly marked and exclusive. (Jacob Pandian The Other in Us: An Essay Concerning the Function of Anthropology in the Western Intellectual Tradition [unpublished manuscript] 1982 )

Time is implicitly frozen in this view of the past as a static, predictable and linear measure of absolute distance from the present--historical and cultural distance is directly translatable into geographical distance. (Johannes Fabian Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object 1983)

We can imagine the original owner of this skull, standing here in this place, ten thousand years ago when this place was not a hole but a hill, surveying the boundaries of his property--the same land of his ancestors and of his progeny. History has significance because it is continuously and contiguously linked with the here and the now.

This tendency to isolate "segregates" in time and space on the historical map of the world overlooks both the likelihood that the greater part of Human prehistory must have been marked as much by human movement and people getting around and going places and mixing it all up as by the archaeological stasis implied by stratigraphic provenience, and by the fact that the earth itself, and everything on it, has had its own natural history.

We have no good idea how far "primitive man" must have traveled or the distances spanned during seasonal perigrinations or over a brief life-span of survival, but there seems to be little sound reason for presupposing that the more ancient the people, the more local and homebound their travels and orientation.

5) The "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomy is perhaps rooted in the secret desire to discover the last lost pristine civilization of the world, buried somewhere in the vast emptiness of a desert or underneath a tropical forest canopy or in some hidden mountain valley.

We end up with a stratified pyramid of sites hieratically ranked from High to low and from Grand to little. The archaeologist is as local a figure as the site s/he can claim. We tend to see in the stratigraphy the same sense of site stratification--rather than a continuum of process and change, there is a clear spectrum of categories and prototypes ranging between the poles of Grand and local.

Of course, ancient monuments and high art are always crowd pleasers while pot shards and fragments of bone or stone are at best boring museum pieces, though the latter type of artifact may in fact be more informative about a bygone age than the former.

What can we really say about this "Great Divide" except to see in it the romantic reflection of our own "Core-periphery" prejudices and selective perception, and a tendency to see in the "primitive mind" of the makers of the latter types of artifacts the cultural and civilizational deficit of the "Genius" of the makers of the former type? If this is true, then we must conclude that the original artists of the Lascaux caves constitute the first clear evidence of pristine human civilization that antedates state-development in all other regions by some ten millennium.

6) "Lumping/Splitting" tendencies are perhaps as much the consequence of a spotty and incomplete record, in which the number and size of gaps far outweigh amount of available evidence, as it is our own categorical predisposition to label everything we find. Splitting comes from the tendency to recognize in every newly discovered artifact a new type, a new category, a new species, rather than merely a variant of previously known groups. Thus we get a proliferation of periods and peoples in direct proportion to the number of discoveries and discoverers. Lumping is the reverse tendency to reduce all variation down to a single common theme--to have one basic archetype, one type-site for all cases unearthed.

The question underlying these tendencies is how much variation of a small sub-sample is enough to be theoretically predictive or historically significant of the true population. Our small sub-sample may be skewed, or else the original population may have been skewed in ways not evident in our sample. What lumping and splitting does indicate is a preoccupation with the relations between the data rather than with the relations between the data and the gaps in the record. Any gap, of whatever size, can become the basis for splitting the sample into two or more sub-samples, or else it can become the basis for filling in between two samples to create a union, for lumping differences under a single category.

The gap is either absolute and unbridgeable, or else nonexistent and easily spanned by the imagination. Either way, we tend to systematically exclude the unknown and perhaps the unknowable as well, from our analysis of what is known. This represents a somewhat anal preoccupation with boundaries and a fear of the unknown as something uncertain, to be covered over or cast out.

Lack of evidence should not be counted as counter evidence but as space available for plausible hypothetical counterfactuals.

7) Territoriality is perhaps directly proportional to ego--my site, my area, my people, my specialty, my provenience, my phase, my horizon. We seek to monopolize and drive out competition such that our authority can be seen as the final authority. The borders we mark out around the material manifestations of our work the boundaries of our own interest, character, and professional investment. We possess the ideas, the knowledge, the data, the history, the authority, as these things possess us. We must defend them at all cost from any threat that looms upon our horizon. In so doing we seek consensus that comes from perfect order and stability, and drive out all dissonance and difference. A period in history, a place in time, a people becomes our own private preserve.

Perhaps such territoriality is rooted in a need for control, which itself may be rooted in deeper needs and insecurities. Such control manifests itself in two kinds of way--the need to control the site, the type, the data, the artifact, the conclusion, for the sake of "science" and the need for political control over the information, the understanding, the resources of that part of the profession.

The combination of these kinds of biases is symptomatic of a conservatism in archaeological interpretation. Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture that is implicit in such conservatism, there is also an a-theoretical rejection of counter factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.

A model of rational parsimony of explanation is not necessarily the most reasonable or realistic rationale for representing the phenomenal complexity of human historical patterning--we cannot systematically reduce these complexities to the level of first principles or component parts without a loss of fidelity to the "facts" in place.

Furthermore, general confusion exists between the deterministic strength of historical cause-effect relations and the inference strength of logical conditionality, and underlies the consistent over-rating of material datum and the under-rating of interpretive counter factuality. Modus tollens type fallacy that cannot strictly apply in logical argument--arguing from the consequent to the antecedent--may apply in a known historical relationship. The difference in this case is between strictly deductive inference; and abductive and inductive methods of inference;. The latter types of reasoning are not strictly provable from a logical standpoint, but they are useful ways of deriving inferences when dealing with causal determination (i.e. history).

In inductive inference in which generalization is based upon a limited sub-sample, the conclusion may be falsified by a single contradictory case. In abductive logic, unlike deduction, there may be more than one conflicting inference derived from the consequent, though only one conclusion may actually be true. (James L. Noyes, Artificial Intelligence with Common Lisp: Fundamentals of Symbolic and Numeric Processing 1993: pgs. 296-303.)

Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis-- as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence. (Giles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 1985: pgs.81-142.)