by Hugh M. Lewis

The objective of this final chapter is to tie up loose ends of this overwrought manuscript and to offer in a concise way a general theory of archaeological systems.

The hunter-gatherer model is found to be insufficient as a frame of reference for most of human prehistory. It is simultaneously too broad and vague to describe all the variability of patterning that probably existed during prehistory, and probably too narrow as well.

Similarly, the dichotomy of forager-collector, while moving in the right analytical direction, still does not do justice to the probable complexities of the human past.

Nevertheless, these Binfordian frameworks are good places to begin in the reconceptualization and reconstruction of our shared prehistory.

The model that I have developed in the second part of this work can be briefly summarized. The hominid situation that resulted in cultural anthropogenesis was probably a unique combination of selective factors operating in the natural environment upon hominid populations. The complex and polymorphic trait selection that produced the rise and development of cultural systems can only be explained in evolutionary terms that fulfilled the dual biological imperatives of adaptive survival and reproductive success.

The availability of essential proteins for the proper growth and maintenance of human body, coupled with the requirements of trace minerals and high caloric energy requirements, would have been limiting factors that critically constrained the patterning of hominid populations throughout the prehistory of humankind.

This conclusion is reached for the following reasons: all animal populations strive to maximize their reproductive fitness. Human beings are no exception. Humans can be characterized as K-r type species that favors equilibrium but leans towards reproductive growth strategies. As a result, early cultural selection patterns that conferred an advantage to human populations tended to increase local population densities and to put a emphasis upon niche generalization and niche expansion leading to successive dispersion and adaptive radiations. Infant mortality rates would have been high (at least 50%) and generation times would have been relatively short compared to today (an average of 15 years versus 30 years today). Cranial capacity of early hominid populations resemble the cranial capacity of small children. The reproductive and sexual receptivity of females was maximized. Average longevity would have been around 45 years old, thus women would have possibly averaged 15 to 20 offspring in a lifetime.

High infant mortality rates would have been due to the following: 1. Disease infection; 2. Food poisoning; 3. Malnutrition; 4. Accidental trauma; 5. Intentional trauma; 6 Patterns of abuse and neglect.

The pattern developed would have put a premium upon the following:

High protein sources, thus leading to a tendency to feed at higher trophic-niche levels.

High-energy starches and sugars--fat being the select alternative.

Broad-range trace minerals

Human dentition from the time of Australopithecus demonstrates that humans were generalist omnivores that probably competed with bears in taking a range of different types foods. A sub-pattern of speciation towards robust forms (Chimpanzee to Gorilla type shift) showed that lower trophic-levels/higher bulk strategies that are associated with lower energy requirements led to adaptive niche feeding specializations that also resulted in eventual extinction of such groups.

Humans therefore, in order to fulfill their unique nutritional and reproductive requirements, tended to adopt a predatory response pattern that encompasses the entire hunter-gatherer framework. More specifically, they adopted what can be referred to as a Type-III predatory response patterning that involved complex shifting and alternation patterns, and that included herbivorous as well as carnivorous predation. Prey-recognition patterns was an essential part of this, which in hominids evolved into a highly developed form that involved detailed search-image recognition, long-term memory, and symbolic association and displacement from setting to another. Type III predatory response patterns lend themselves to a mixed foraging strategy that embraced optimal foraging, satisficing strategies and risk management strategies.

Because human beings are not naturally selected as predators, they developed cultural trait patterns that provided an alternative solution to this dilemma. Humans developed cultural trait complexes that permitted them to regularly feed at higher trophic levels than they otherwise could have achieved, and thus to maintain on average higher levels of populations density and environmental saturation than otherwise possible within the parameters of their functional morphology and physiological requirements and capabilities. These two factors tended toward a pattern of human beings putting a heavy nutritional load upon their environment, and to an inherently disruptive pattern of established ecosystems--this was the first basis and beginning of cultural selection patterns.

This type of pattern put a premium on high energy strategies of active defense and active pursuit of prey. A secondary and alternative response would have been flight and entrapment of prey. Both responses patterns would have demanded and depended upon relatively high mobility of groups and wide ranges to territory.

Predation was the primary pattern. Entrapment was the second alternative. Scavenging was the third alternative.

Humans depended upon numerical as well as functional responses to their evolutionary dilemma. Their predation patterns demanded group cooperation and cohesion, and hence social dependence that was reinforced by the "domestic" requirements of reproduction. Seasonal mobility (transhumance) of enlarged home ranges and territories would have been critical, and possibly frequent migrations/dispersions to new areas.

On the basis of this model, I will propose an analytical framework of three basic types of subsistence adaptations that have characterized the human past:

First order subsistence patterning was primarily predatory (including plants and animals)

Second-order subsistence patterning is what is found with the domestication of plants and animals, and can be seen as a means of controlled and managed predation.

Third-order subsistence patterning is what is found with mass and industrialized production, especially in the modern historical era.

The discriminating factor in these distinctions was the amount of processing and preparation of food, which provided for long-term storage and which made a wider range of basic and more dependable food resources available. For the first three million years of hominid prehistory, most foods were probably eating in a fairly raw and unprocessed state. Food resources probably were taken directly without a great deal of preparation. Butchering is probably one of the earliest processing techniques. It is likely that drying was an early form of processing, that would have been a natural consequence of meat having been left in the sun for an extended period of time. Fire, cooking and smoking came later.

Intermediate and mixed strategies were the norm, and it seems likely that the first sedentarism developed was not terrestrial, but coastal or at least riverine/lacustrian, and was based upon the capacity to efficiently hunt sea mammals, trap fish and gather shellfish protein resources.

An alternative strategy found in some areas would have been predation of large herds of animals, involving as well the corralling of herd animals, and the developing of an early form of herding pastoralism. Reindeer, bovine, horses and elephants are likely candidates for this alternative form of development.

Social patterning would have been flexible in structure. I speak of a "concertina" or accordion or reticulated kind of social structure in which groups could coalesce under certain requirements, and disperse out over a broad range under other requirements. Early stratification would have been in terms of small multi-familial groups that were part of a larger inter-group system that could coalesce periodically. These larger inter-group systems would have come to share many similar cultural traits, such as, and most importantly, proto-language.

Individuals could operate freely within such systems, and the boundaries were very fluid. I would define primitive social structure as having been oscillatory between minimum and maximum group formations.

Inter-regional and inter-group competition, exchange and frequent warfare would have been a fundamental part of everyday life. At this stage we can see early social formations ranging from the hundreds during the time of Homo erectus, and possibly into the thousands by the time of archaic Homo and Neanderthal man. Intraspecific competition which centered upon reproduction and sexual selection was also important in early social formations. Development of regionally stable systems depended upon ritual and symbolic regulation of people that set constraints and sanctions upon their behavior. Humans did not start off being altruistic--in fact they were not very "pro-social" in this sense until a much later period. They were largely self-interested and manipulative creatures. Humans in fact always oscillate within a continuum of cooperation and competition.

It is possible to look at basic population growth patterns of humans and to project backwards in time a logistic growth curve that reflects accurately the variables involved in the evolutionary situation of our precursors at any period of history.

This curve is actually shortened at the end, and does not reflect the local and periodic oscillations in population growth and bottle-necking that occurred throughout human prehistory.

It is at the stage of the cultural development of regionally or areally stable systems, which appears to have been achieved probably at least during the period of Archaic Homo, that the rise of intercultural conflict. Even before this period of time, it is possible to speculate that human cultural patterning created group boundaries that resulted in some degree of social and reproductive isolation. Cultural groupings in such a context "evolved" as if species, entering into a complex kind of selective game with other cultural groupings. Group boundaries thus would have been increasingly rigid as time went on, and this would have entailed increasing internal regulation and stratification with incorporation into larger systems.

It is evident in this model that humans early one would have been selected for a capacity to both work and play, for efficient feeding and breeding capabilities. Work would have been associated, of course, with food-getting, and play with sexual reproduction and social interaction. We have therefore a model of Homo faber as someone who could get the job done and win the game of life.

The result was a process that I refer to as eco-cultural evolution. It would have entailed a pattern of selection at both the group level and the individual level. Marginal individuals would have had less opportunity to reproduce, and would have been the most likely to disperse.

Many anthropologists are loathe to face and deal with the darker side of human nature. They carry with them a romantic myth that all the others have our own sensibilities and tastes regarding what is right and wrong. This flies in the face of known histories the world over, and in the face of a great deal of archaeological evidence that suggests that humans have been very violent and aggressive in their collective past. The capacity for human violence is there today, and to point this capacity out is not to inordinately overemphasize it in our deterministic models. The Romans considered themselves the most civilized people on earth, and yet they kept entire human populations as cattle and put many people to an ignominiously cruel and bloody death. And the Romans were no exception to the rule of history.

I will venture a very dangerous proposition about human nature in the past: the boundaries of a sense of self did not extend very far socially to embrace others beyond the family kin-group. Even within families, the "other" might often as not have been an object to one's own interest. I would predict that rates of murder, rape and other forms of interpersonal violence was probably on average high in early society. The noble savage was not so noble after all, but just like ourselves.

If humans, by means of their cultural development, became the top-predators in virtually any environment they occupied, and if they simultaneously had the capability of exploiting a broad range of different eco-trophic niches on demand, so to speak, then it makes sense as well to think that the natural proclivity of human populations would be to rapidly expand in numbers to fill whatever habitats that they occupied, and to expand the ranges of these habitats as much as possible by means of adaptive radiation and cultural displacement, which can be considered to be an analogous form of natural character displacement of other animal species subject to the constraints of natural selection. The result would have been, at a fairly early period, what can be called the rise of a dominant human "mono-culture" upon the natural landscapes of the world. I believe we do not need to search for evidence of such dominant monocultures in the holocene, as evidenced by the extinction of the woolly mammoth. I suspect that such mono-culture existed as early as Homo erectus populations throughout the regions of the Old World, and the human impact upon the environment in terms of the loss of species and destruction of habitat may have begun one or two million years before the modern era.

It makes sense that if human mono-culture achieved predominance in any one region, and the peoples of this region were bound from migration by neighboring groups, then the possibilities for procurement of sufficient protein resources would have been based upon obtaining protein resources by means of other groups, or alternatively, by a form of endo-cannibalism. Cannibalism is rare but not uncommon in nature. Enough documented cases of cannibalism in various have been known to occur in recent times to lend credence to the idea that there exists no natural revulsion or instinctual inhibition to eating the flesh of one's own kind. Resort to cannibalism would have been a natural outcome and response to conditions of extreme environmental stress and starvation, particularly protein-calorie malnutrition that is typical of high densities of population beyond normal carrying capacity.

Cannibalism may provide evidence of the lack of internalized instinctual controls influencing human behavior. Humans would have no built in revulsion the cannibalism, especially under mitigating circumstances of chronic food shortage and starvation.

Cannibalism as a human trait appears to have occurred at low frequencies throughout the human past. It appears to occur as a form of social deviance in normal society, and sometimes as a counter-cultural development. Under conditions of stress, as for instance in pre-Romanic Europe, evidence reveals that cannibalism may not have been an uncommon recourse. Historiographic evidence in China reveals that cannibalism as a cultural institution took several different forms, some of which were quite elaborated in terms of processing and marketing of human flesh. Cannibalism was known to occur in 15 to 25 year cycles that corresponded with periods of famine and warfare, and to have been recurrent pretty much throughout the recorded history of China. This pattern can be understood in the context of a great agrarian state that kept most peasants bound to the land, and that suffered periodic droughts and floods, as well as remittent political instability and corruption that was associated with a political dynastic cycle. Cannibalism in China has been documented as a medicinal remedy, as an act of filial piety of daughters to their parents by the cutting of the flesh of their thighs and feeding this to the ailing parents. About fifty percent of these young women died from infection. Vanquished enemy would sometimes be eaten, and often prepared in various ways for consumption by the emperor himself. At the same time, enemy beleaguered and enduring a long siege would in a city or fortress would have final resort to cannibalism before their final collapse. Human flesh was known to have been marketed as meat-balls in some city markets. Evidence of various forms of cannibalism can be found throughout the world, and all provide enough evidence to conclude that there is no natural repression or built-in constraint that prevents human beings from eating flesh of their own kind. Much archaeological evidence is suggestive of human butchering of bones and especially of skulls, which again lends credence to the perspective that consumption of human flesh was not an uncommon practice in prehistoric times. That it is almost universally taboo in modern human cultures, and appears as a normally reviled social custom, accounts for why cannibalism is not more common and frequent in occurrence in the world than it really has been.

I believe it is vitally important to construe the problem of cannibalism in a human ecological context. We should not attribute moral values to the facts of its occurrence in our human record. The possibility of cannibalism must be understood in the framework of human nutritional needs, especially when relatively high densities of populations put stress on local resources. People resort to social forms of cannibalism because they value the living more than they value the dead. If eating human flesh of deceased victims of hunger assures the survivorship of those remaining, then it can even be construed as a kind of sacrifice and sacrament that is taken for the good of the group.

Cannibalism is known in nature to occur widely in a variety of animals as an anomalous pattern, though rarely as a distinct behavioral trait of specific animals, and to fluctuate in intensity greatly over time. It is recognized as a mechanism of population control, removing competitive individuals from the environment under conditions of food scarcity. In short, it represents an extreme ecological solution to the problem of survival under restrictive life-boat conditions. On the other hand, it is seen at the same time as a self-defeating energy solution, because it violates the second law of thermodynamics in which feeding at the same trophic level reduces efficiency of the ecosystem in general.

The critical rejection of the reality of human cannibalism on the basis of a surfeit of direct eyewitness evidence to the fact of cannibalism flies in the face of both reason and the bulk of evidence which clearly demonstrates the low frequency prevalence of various forms of cannibalism worldwide throughout human prehistory. This is an clear example of the rejection of evidence out of hand that has great relevance to the problem of interpretation and theory building in archaeology. The fact that cannibalism is nearly universally abhorred means that its acceptance offends the tastes of some scholars, who would rather deny the logic of the evidence than accept something that might deromanticize an image of humankind as something other than a noble beast. The truth of human nature is that human beings have long been, and remain, culturally modified predators who are in general opportunistic in their ways. Poor human beings do not have a corner in this market simply by attributions of inferior genetic endowment--rich people share in the predatory opportunism of the rest of humanity, and seem in general more successful at it. The case of the post-modern rejection of cannibalism points up the unreasonableness of some archaeological claims that refuse to admit other forms of evidence, to even to build cases of theoretical histories, simply because it cannot be found in solid form in the ground. This is not meaning either that we should fly to the other extreme and read anything we desire from a limited amount of evidence. The claims and evidence and case-histories of cannibalism are substantial and significant enough that they cannot be safely ignored in our theories about humanity.

But the lesson that a past of human cannibalism might have to teach us is more important than this example of the post-modern denial of objective realities because they offend sensibilities and because they are not presented prepackaged as perceptual forms of evidence. The example of cannibalism is important because it demonstrates something fundamental about the human ecological relationship to nature, and the extent to which the requirements of nature and its constraints can influence and determine the outcomes of human behavior under unusual circumstances. It demonstrates furthermore that human cultural behavior can shape and in turn be shaped by functional biological drives and ecological requirements and constraints. Many forms of human sociopathic deviance demonstrate this relationship, such that cultural symbolisms, in distorted form, can give expression to very basic impulsive drives to aggression. As mentioned previously, when normal cultural constraints breakdown in unusual circumstances, either in individual cases due to some form of psychotic dysfunction, or in social circumstances of extreme stress, then human behavior does not come to resemble that of other animals, so much as it resembles what we in our psychoanalytic imaginations would call pathognomic or monstrous in form. The breakdown of social order in the face of extreme crises and stress is indeed akin to a breakdown of personality in a psychotic episode of an individual. In such stressed social circumstances, many otherwise rational and normal human beings can be induced, out of consideration of shear survival and panic, to do things that they would not otherwise think themselves capable of doing.

The low-intensity prevalence of cannibalism in the human record points up another important factor to consider in relation to archaeological systems theory. Because human beings in general are omnivorous predators who occupy a number of trophic levels and eco-trophic niche profiles, their impact upon the environment tends to be felt unusually heavily. Because they are culturally adapted, they do tend to increase in population and group size to limits unusual of predatory animals. Human beings have an intrinsic need to consume protein to gain essential amino acids that they cannot obtain by any other means. They will satisfy this need, this hunger for adequate nutrition for bodily maintenance, function and repair, entails that they will adopt diversifying strategies of protein acquisition in their environments. Because local densities of human populations tend to be relatively high compared to natural protein resources available to such groups through such means as hunting and foraging, it is evident that human populations will tend to periodically undergo protein-calorie stress and malnutrition due to either or both local overpopulation, degradation of the environment, and depletion of locally available protein resources. Cannibalism is but one possible solution to this general situation that human populations are prone to in larger ecological contexts--it is hardly if ever the best solution.

It is therefore in this sense worthwhile to consider other alternative solutions to this eco-evolutionary situation of human population that cultural groupings would be prone to achieve over the course of their social history. These include cultural innovation and adaptation, migration, warfare, social reorganization, development of broadened networks of exchange and reciprocity, and the development of cultural sanctions and institutions that might serve to regulate human population within its natural context.

Given this somewhat adumbrated and unpleasant recount of basic human systems, it is important I believe to rehash in a more detailed and systematic way what I believe the origins of human language might have been, since language became the basis for group cooperation and coordination of productive and reproductive activities.

I see language as having been rooted in a set of different prelinguistic modes of communication:

1. Calls--warning sounds, but also beckoning

2. Cries--screams, wailing

3. Gesticulations--uttering

4. Coos, Moans and Groans--baby sounds

5. Social Ululations--chatter, social songs

6. Gestures--especially hand and hand-to-face arm motions, pointing, waving

7. Facial Expression--humans are unique in facial expression

8. Body language--posture, action, decoration, jumping, dance, bowing

Human language would have arisen as the result of the complex interaction of these variables and in the selection for systems that would have enabled these factors to be integrated in a efficient and expressive manner.

In understanding human proto-language, the nomic function of language as the foundation of both semantics and syntax should be emphasized, including the emblematic encoding of symbolic awareness, and these encodings, if they resemble early primary acquisition, would take the form of prototypical sounds overextended in reference to a range of similar environmental forms. This provides a reference point for determination of "basic relational categories" of terms for systematic linguistic comparison.

Human language facilitated not only communication and social coordination, but also social cohesion and sense of belonging and fusion of identity of self and the group. It also, perhaps more importantly, facilitated "problem solving" in the natural environment. Problem solving in this case being related to complex symbolic pattern recognition and adaptation.

Reconsideration of human proto-language invites also a brief speculation about what a so-called "primitive" Worldview would have consisted. To call such a worldview as symbolically "undifferentiated" begs the question. The world was prelinguistic. Language did not mediate, except in the forms mentioned above, our relations or conceptions of the natural environment. And yet, distinctions and differentiations of the natural world were certainly made, and probably of a kind and to a detail unrealized by anyone today. Ideas, as social constructions, were as yet undeveloped. I would like to think that feelings were direct and response immediate and at least "honest" in the conveyance of feeling, but I know that manipulation and prevarication has long been a fundamental part of human behavior. I would call early human response and worldview, if nothing else, almost entirely "organic" --beyond the cunning and planning of reason, for some short-term goals, there may have been little distinction between the thought and the deed. No need to feel guilty or even ashamed, perhaps only a little "embarrassed."

Partitioned and variable, long term memory structures would have entailed that a form of imprinting would have been a life-long aspect of human consciousness. I find long term memory structures and immediate recognition even in animals like dogs and moose. So much more the case is it in humans and the Great Apes.

I have offered what I believe to be a very general and basic model describing human cultural systems within both an evolutionary and an ecological framework. The rest, so to speak, is history, and yet there is the rub, for in our unknown histories there remains so much to be learned, so much forgotten and so much to speculate about. I have sought to explain the source of human complexity in the world, and not its results.

This work is incomplete because it has many loose and short ends and many missing pieces to the larger puzzle of archaeology. The problem of history has been one big piece I have left out.

I find archaeology and history to be entirely complementary to one another. It is clear in the conduct of historical research relating to the North American fur trade, that archaeological research, properly done, can yield valuable information to the historical record. The historical record in turn can provide numerous clues to the location of important archaeological sites, long since covered over and otherwise lost, as well as a means of interpreting what is found at these sites.

In a sense, archaeology becomes history at the point that its radio-carbon dates and other absolute dating techniques provide for us a definite and fixed chronology that can be associated with "facts"--whether these are artifacts or other kinds of informational bits and pieces. History, in turn, becomes a kind of archaeology, when the surfeit of dates leads to analytical frameworks attempting to reconstruct broad and general social histories attached to regions on the earth.

Archaeology also supplements the historical record by fore-grounding it with a sense of prehistory. Archaeology in this sense relates to both an analytical and a synthetic frameworks of history, in terms of dynamics and broad period sequences that may or may not be very useful in any real sense.

It is not my concern here to delve into the problematics of historical particularism and relativity. Cultures are historically relative in a similar way that they can be said to be anthropologically relative. It is clear in this regard that Archaeology can provide an important kind of explanatory bridgework that otherwise separates synchronically oriented ethnography from diachronically arranged history. Cultural systems, portrayed in conventional anthropology as frozen in time, as synchronic and timeless realities, are like a dream that never was. At the same time, simple narrative recounting of dates and events in history seldom explain the motivations and situations for why people did what they did, and how things came together or fell apart over time.

We are left to reconsider, and perhaps redefine, what we mean by culture and civilization in light of the historical and cross-cultural evidence. Culture and civilization stand as "local/Grand" traditions, and suffer the same constraints as this kind of dichotomy. A static, spatial view of culture has always considered it tradition-bound, well defined by its boundaries, primarily endogenous and well-integrated as an historical isolate and social segregate, as primarily conservative in its resistance to change. Implicit in this view has been a paradoxical notion of change and conservatism and a sense of an ideal, non-relative base-line from which change and cultural evolution could be measured.

Both culture and civilization must be considered as the differential consequences of the same historical processes. In this regard, civilization as a process has always been occurring along side the development and divergence of many cultures. Ideas were the currency of historical civilization--no society could keep a secret for very long, and thus no human group has ever long maintained an exclusive monopoly upon knowledge. We can speak of the transformational, indeed revolutionary consequences of new ideas and their diffusion from multiple points of origin. Humankind, once having achieved fire, the bow, the boat, the wheel, the arch, was no likely to lose it again.

Civilization as process can be construed as basically a trans-cultural process that entailed the transformation of the exogenous cultural contexts in which local cultural developments became constrained and configured. We may find the Hoa Binhian or Dong Song civilization widespread, but occupied or possessed by a wide variety of culturally distinct peoples, just as today the world possesses the artifacts and some of the symbolic accouterments of modern industrial civilization, though the cultural diversity remains great. Once begun, the traffic in ideas and new things was usually, probably irreversible, if only because it was strongly motivated by human factors of interest and unrest. In time, such traffic new few boundaries that could not be overcome. Civilization has always been rooted in an historical intercultural context. Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or interference that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral. The mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration.

Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also. Not only has it long been occupied by very ancient peoples and their cultures, but strong evidence also supports the idea that it has been a seat of sui-generis civilization and the point of origin for the peopling of the Pacific.

Evidence also points to the suggestion that the patterning of many of its basic exchange networks and interregional contacts may have been as complex in the deeper prehistoric phases as they remain in the later proto-historic era. These were relations that have undoubtedly left an indelible mark upon the character of Southeast Asian civilization.

Civilization has always been rooted in an historical inter-cultural context. Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or interference that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral--the mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration. Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also.

This leads to a view of historical processes and patterns of civilization as being not just chaotic but as being also complex. What may have stood as background noise in the form of destructive interference for one cultural grouping, may have from the standpoint of other cultural groupings constituted information that served as constructive interference.

We may consider a "micro-system/macro-system" model in the regional integration and development of Southeast Asian civilization, as a dynamic, dialectical tension between locally oriented, tradition bound cultures and open, regionally defined civilizational complexes.

This brings us to a systemic view of history as information and to a basic hypothesis that the historical structure of the long run will tend to always follow a normal distribution governed by the greatest background probability. If something is possible, no matter how unlikely, it will eventually happen if given a long enough frame of time. A corollary of this is that the most probable course will tend to always outweigh the least probable, and, though events may be interdependent and conditional in probability, the main pathways of historical developments will tend to follow a rather stable and expectable patterning of change, whatever our local intentions or knowledge.

History as regulated by a principle of unintended consequences is only history from a biased point of view that does not know, and therefore cannot take into full account, the many factors and variables that have entered into its production.

Human civilization has time immemorial been a kind of background chaotic possibility in the context of any cultural grouping. For the longest time, it was probably for most peoples minimum, and therefore a negligible source of noise. But its presence was irreversible, and it would not go away. In the long run, it grew such that in came to incorporate more and more different peoples and traditions within an increasingly complex web of historical conditionality and entailments, from which few if any peoples could really escape.

The rise of human civilization has been the rise of a critical system of interrelated cultural elements--a self-organizing system that has reached and surpassed a critical threshold of systemic stability. Civilization at any given period and place has been but a single historical moment of stability in this vast historical system.

It has been my implicit contention and intention in this work to demonstrate how archaeology is a knowledge system and how archaeological systems theory is really about how we use a particular form of knowledge, knowledge of the past, to inform us about our selves, our reality and our current situation in the present. If we tend to do this through cultural and social colored glasses, it does not change the central epistemological function and status of archaeology in the world.

Archaeology conceived and practiced in terms of archaeological systems theory is both a science and necessarily an archaeology of knowledge. As such it is concerned with the problems of knowledge at different levels and in different ways, problems that uniquely characterize and serve to set apart the discipline of archaeology from any other area of human understanding. It is concerned therefore with the knowledge that early human beings had or needed, and the knowledge that is implicit to the cultural systems they created. It is concerned about the knowledge of prehistory and history, and the knowledge of contemporary cultural systems. It is concerned foremost, with the knowledge of the archaeological record itself, and the problems associated with its excavation, analysis and interpretation. It is concerned finally about the other kinds and frameworks of knowledge that we bring to archaeology at all its levels of articulation.

There have been several critiques of methodological orientations implicit in this work. These have been to argue for an expanded role of counter-factuality in hypothesis construction, a critique of the taxonomic tendency that uncover a central root underlying homologically related patterns and elements, and a suggestion of an alternative network which does not implicitly deny the inherent complexities of the remoter past and which allows for the possibility of reconvergence and reversibility of cultural process of development, a network pattern which is rooted in an hypothesized "correspondence/covariance structures" between polythetic sets of characteristics that is rooted in basic, prototypical cores, and alternative systematic methodology for inference formulation, testing and decision-making regarding the confidence of diverse sources of different kinds of data, the problem of "inter-translation" and credibility and the use of dynamic "equivalence structures" in explaining the organization of diversity in processes of constructive integration, and the problem of congruence and correspondence of the mechanisms and structure of symbolic mediation which are rooted in basic thematic contrasts.

An archaeological construction of reality is in fact and practice a reconstruction of past realities. This may be a myth or only a fiction to some, but it may be also seen as a senseof reality, however reified, to others. It is unfortunate to the modern state of affairs, especially in the social sciences, that the model of the social construction of reality should be so misconstrued and itself misinterpreted. In its original formulation by Berger and Luckman, it was an objectivist, scientific accounting of a functional model of the integration of human reality. The term "construction" derives from how human beings literally, culturally, and in fact quite materially, have constructed theory realities in a manner that, while it must succeed in nature and therefore articulate with nature, it is not bound by nature in the sense that natural selection would have entailed. Thus humans are both blessed and cursed by a fundamental sense of "world openness" that allows them the behavioral and "phenotypic" plasticity to reshape the world to their own choosing. This is not a very anti-archaeological proposition or worldview to have, as it is the products of past human construction efforts that archaeologists are always digging up and fussing over for their entire lives. Human construction efforts (and archaeological efforts at reconstruction) depend therefore on a kind of knowledge and information that genetics and natural selection alone cannot provide. The first challenges of human cultural and social constructions are to the primary purposes of social production and reproduction--in other words, human beings must eat and procreate to survive. Everything else, from a functional standpoint, follows quite literally and figuratively, from this first set of biological imperatives. Again, this is not far-fetched from a conventional archaeologists point of view.

The general problem of the archaeological construction of reality is unique to the discipline of archaeology. It is to devise a general theory that explains in a basic sense the rise for human cultural systems, if these are seen as fundamental and important to human patterning in reality, and that should provide an operational and experimental framework for the investigation and interpretation of all kinds of archaeologically important sites in the world. This is not to claim that the preoccupation of most archaeologists isn't or shouldn't be the immediate and middle range theories that tie local assemblages to larger regional sequences, etc.. But it is to provide them with an objective and systematic framework for approaching a range of different problems in a manner that allows both an analytic and synthetic understanding of different human systems of the past to be developed within a coordinated framework.

The problems of archaeologists only begin with the recognition of a general framework of the archaeological construction of reality. The real problems of archaeology remain rooted to the ground. Any archaeological record is only a small fraction of the original complexity that produced the patterning in the first place. Archaeological facts covering entire eras and civilizations are often "threadbare" at best. And natural processes tied to deposition and taphonomy do not make the original patterning any less noisy or problematic. The earth in time will heave to the ceiling of the world organic debris originally deposited in the depths of the seas. Moles, rat holes, wind and rain will finish the job that humans started and nature took over. Depositional issues tie to issues of "site formation" which seems itself to be a prehistory all its own separate from the cultural patterning that produced these results.

Archaeology is confronted therefore with fundamental dilemmas and cold hard facts that it alone must bear in the world--most of the past is unrecoverable and what is recovered is the bare bones of lost worlds. All the analysis and synthesis in the world, however systematic and objectified, however experienced and wise, will not bring back the past to its original shape and conformation. And why therefore do people continue to do archaeology. I would like to think that the problem of the past is a great unknown, and we are pushing the envelope to its recovery a little bit at a time. We are curious creatures and we are gold-diggers and that has been both our greatness and our downfall. The greatest depositional dilemma remains the unknown, the unexcavated past. We can be digging a small site in a particular place, unaware that the edge of an entire lost civilization may be just a few feet away.