I have come into the mansion of Archaeology by means of the side-door of cultural anthropology. The two buildings share a common hallway. They are something like a pair of Siamese twins, joined somewhere below the brain but above the neck. Archaeology has a great deal to contribute to the broader field of general anthropology, including the self-possessed, haute' cultural crowd, and general anthropology owes a growing tributary debt to archaeology for its consistent and important historical and scientific contributions of the past and to methodological and theoretical models. There is no ethnographic account that is not historiographic, and there has been no cultural grouping studied by Anthropologists that has existed outside of the contemporaneous framework of modern history, and by their documentation, becoming a part of that wider stream of history. Wide-scale integration and therefore acculturation began in all the major regions of the world by the 15^th and 16^th Centuries, and has continued unabated. Remote regions of the New Guinea highlands, the Amazonian rain forest and dark Africa, were not fully opened up to western expansionist interests until the late 19^th and 20^th Centuries, but a case can be clearly made for these remoter regions of the earth that indirect contact with acculturative influences had been in motion for sometime before any direct European contact had been finally achieved. Warfare, missionaries and trade undoubtedly affected many peoples before the anthropologists stumbled, somewhat belatedly, upon the aftermath. But these peoples did not need our sense of Western History by which to become fully humanized. They had their own sense of the past that was every bit as deep and problematic as anything we could foist upon them after the fact of their "discovery."

I have sought to write this short manuscript dealing with a topic that I would call archaeological systems theory. The principle subject of archaeology is human prehistory, and this subject is inherently comprehensive in that it encompasses human history as a subset of a larger field of knowledge. Human prehistory can be said to encompass the entire range of knowledge that relates to understanding our shared past, whether this past was just an hour ago, or 400,000 years ago. The grand collective "Past" stands in archaeology as much as an ideological road-block to our comprehension of prehistory as much as it might be a dimensionless window onto a lost world of time. We would in an analytical sense do better to speak of many different smaller "pasts" that we like to collect and lump together into a larger whole, as a single entity or a grand system implying some form of fundamental, universal integration. Of course, we know it was never so, and that it was mostly a past of splinters and twisting ropes with fibers of uneven length and width. We would be politically more correct even to refer to "plural pasts" or rather, a plurality of pasts, with the implication that each would have had its own distinct sense of cultural tradition and history, etc. But I will not go so far in this work. Being an average white man it is probably my prejudice to be preoccupied with grander and more general perspectives.

The primary method of archaeology has been of course the systematic use of stratigraphic excavation techniques in the recovery of human remains and artifacts, and the detailed and contextual analysis of these recovered items and their relationship within a larger framework of knowledge. The main challenge of archaeology has been therefore to achieve its principle subject of study by means of its primary method. Of course, most archaeologists do not take to the field with these general kinds of questions in mind. Usually their objectives for any particular excavation or survey effort is restricted to relatively specific kinds of questions relating to a particular time and place or a particular tradition or sequence as this is attributed to recovered patterns in the ground. Even so, in the background of all archaeologists' work, whether they realize or acknowledge it or not, is the general problem of unknown human prehistory and its possible recovery through the excavation and analysis of the remains of the past.

In this work, I have applied natural systems theory and metasystems science as I have developed these knowledge systems in previous works to the challenge of understanding and developing archaeological theory. In doing so, I must emphasize from the beginning several caveats that I have proceeded with:

1. First, I deal with the problem of the patterning of prehistory as something that is archaeologically recoverable, and that archaeological interpretation and problem solving, if done well, will lead to an objective comprehension about this prehistoric patterning. I am not very interested in the ideological and interpretive dilemmas of anthropological knowledge in general to which archaeology is also prone. Archaeology is not all just in the head or the culture historical background of the archaeologist. If it were so in any significant sense, then archaeology would have no sense of a future as an objective and empirical science.

2. Secondly, archaeological systems are a unique subset of a larger framework of knowledge that deal with human systems in general, and as such they share many of the same constraints and considerations as do other kinds of human systems. Much of the explanation pertaining therefore to archaeological systems are logically derived from a more encompassing comprehension of human systems in general.

3. Third, archaeological systems, as part of a larger range of human systems, can be classified as a special kind of natural system. As such, like other kinds of human systems, they can be understood in the same general form in which all natural systems can be construed. Some of the models used to describe all natural systems include:

a. Natural systems generally obey some kind of mechanical principles that can be said to be structurally regulated by rules and laws that apply isomorphically to all similar kinds of systems under similar sets of conditions.

b. We may identify various defining aspects of natural systems based upon their mechanical structure.

1. All natural systems known obey the principles of thermodynamics.

2. All natural systems, as isolatable systems, perform some kind of work that permits them to maintain overarching order over tendencies towards disorder.

3. All natural systems are capable of performing work in a functional manner by the organization of a system by means of informational rules and relationships that have a predictive structure.

4. All natural systems are by definition underdetermined systems with order derived from complex pattern-processes. All such systems are thus variable in their phenomenal event patterning.

5. All natural systems follow therefore variable state-path trajectories and all such systems have a life-span of origination, growth, stability or maturity, and then regression to the eventual end or demise of the system as such.

4. I define an archaeological system as representing a particular problem set that can be delimited by temporal and spatial determinants, and that in itself represents a particular "civilizational complex" that can be tied to a stream of historical events and cultural patterning as these are articulated by the people who were an original part of that context. I refer here to a "civilizational complex" without the implications of "Great Civilizations" or of imperialism that these usually entail. Rather, I see the San bushmen of the Kahahari of the last few centuries at least as comprising part of a special civilizational complex of humanity, as might be the Palian peoples of the central highlands of South India, and this would be in many ways similar but separate to the kind of civilizational complex that has been elaborated by the Australian aboriginal peoples, or of the New Guinea highlands, of or Micronesia or of the Melanesian islands, and so forth. Such a complex may be of rather limited scope and duration, or it may be widespread, complex and long-lasting.

An archaeological system can be said to have had its own structural patterning of relationships. In terms of its cultural patterning, we can expect that many systems actually were represented by complex relationships obtaining between more than one kind of cultural grouping. Archaeological systems tend on average to be culturally heterogeneous systems.

The object of archaeological inquiry therefore becomes the challenging of figuring out the kind of archaeological system that occurred in a particular phase of place and period, or in other words, of elucidating and explaining the larger framework of which any particular strata, site or even artifact was a part as a piece of a larger puzzle. This is a puzzle solving problem in a very real way, except that, unlike a normal jigsaw puzzle, not all the pieces are always available. We may have only ten percent of the total number of pieces to complete the puzzle, or only 5% or as much as 90%. Still, we cannot know how big or how many pieces in total belonged to the entire puzzle in its original state.

There are cases in which archaeological systems, as I have defined this in terms of a civilizational complex, may occur at a junction or cross-roads between two or more different civilizations. In such a case, we may refer to "inbetween" or hybrid kinds of systems that may share affinities with one or more other complexes, or alternately, that may appear completely anomalous and share few affinities with any other system. It would be expected that the former hybrid kind of system would be archaeologically transitional or ephemeral--here yesterday, gone tomorrow. It would be expected as well that anomalous and isolated systems would be in effect "anachronistic survivals" from a by-gone framework.

5. We may say therefore that archaeological systems, as natural systems, are constrained to obey certain kinds of principles that govern their particular pathways of development, and that such systems will follow pathways regardless of the relative and limited input or influence of any particular individual or person to the problem in the first place. Individual human beings may through their actions exert a critical influence upon the subsequent train of historical events, as perhaps a Napoleon or a Hitler may have done in recent history, but we can claim that the structure of these events and their agents and circumstances are largely prestructured by background and encompassing controlling principles or factors that make possible such events and agencies in the first place. Rome did not fall in a day, and no effort by Caesar or by Hadrian or any other Emperor could have reversed this process of its eventual decline and collapse.

a. We may say that any and every instance of an archaeological system that can be described in a coherent manner in the record must share certain structural characteristics as both archaeological and more general human systems, and these characteristics can be described and elucidated in a meaningful and interesting way. Each archaeological system that we encounter or are able to describe based upon our evidence would represent in a significant way an exemplification of the larger ordering processes governing such systems.

b. It follows that if two or more systems are found to be similar in basic pattern, then we must seek an explanation for these similarities in terms of the underlying structures involved as well as in the framing conditions that affect those structures, with the obvious prediction that two similar kinds of systems, under similar sets of conditions, should more or less behave in a similar kind of manner.

c. Each archaeological system would also be considered to be a unique assembly or arrangement of pattern, like all other complex natural systems that occur as unique instances. Thus, no two archaeological systems that can be described are completely alike, and most such systems, at the level of human systems, would be relatively dissimilar to one another.

d. Archaeological systems can be said to be inherently stratified systems. We may seek their explanation and description at multiple levels of their articulation simultaneously. From a strictly archaeological standpoint, we may seek to understand systems in terms of the artifacts, attributes and relations obtaining between artifacts. On another level, we may seek to understand systems in terms of patterns available at certain stratigraphic phases of a particular site, and then on another level we may seek to analyze correlational information between a set of sites that can be related on the basis of sharing the same stratigraphic phases and/or artifacts. On an even broader level, we may seek to understand relations and differences between different phases and between different areas or even regions.

Archaeological systems also stratify analytically on the basis of scale of measurement and size (geographic difference and temporal period) alone. For instance, we can describe as an archaeological system a particular civilizational complex, for instance the Aztec civilization that was first contacted by the Spanish forces under Cortez, but we can also see this civilizational complex as but a subsystem of a larger regional system that can be defined archaeologically as "Meso-American" and that would encompass not only the Mayan civilization, but the earlier precursor groups, as well as the broader range of Native American cultures and peoples who occupied this region during this general prehistoric framework.

This relates to a fundamental aspect of all natural systems theory. All systems in nature can be said to be systems that are composed of smaller subsystems, and that in turn, are themselves subsystems of larger "supersystem" structures. This is as true if we are studying atoms and their subatomic structures or their derivative molecular structures, or if we are concerned with the interrelationship of various civilizational complexes within a larger continuum of place and period.

It is with this in mind that I will make a fundamental statement about the central ontological problem confronting the significance of archaeology in the world, and I will state simply that the primary problem of archaeological systems theory, in the explication of civilizational complexes and their transcultural/transhistorical processes, is what I will define as the explanation of the integration of human reality, or, alternatively, how human reality hangs together and creates a sense of order in a background of chaos and disorder. Integration is a problem that is intrinsic to a systems model. It is somewhat of a functional tautology to claim that a system is such because it is integrated, and that a system achieves integration of reality. We may furthermore state that this integration tends towards holism and tends, in one form or another, to encompass all facets and levels of analysis in human reality. We may speak of psychological integration, social integration, cultural integration, historical integration, ecological integration, economic and structural integration--all of these forms are relatable within a general model of human reality, and from the standpoint of gaining a sense of past, archaeology has a critical concern with all aspects of the general problem of integration.

Archaeologists, for methodological and mental health reasons, may draw a strict line around their current area of interest, say a certain site at a particular stratigraphic depth, and profess no other concern for any larger frame of reference, but Archaeology as a whole discipline, in terms of its systems theory, must of necessity involve itself with the stratified interrelationships between systems at different levels of their articulation. In the larger context of systems science, any boundary line we identify in relation to archaeological systems must be seen as ultimately relative to the constraints superimposed by the archaeologist.

Of course, natural barriers of time and place can be found--oceans, mountain chains, vast deserts, to name a few. These allow us to identify very broadly defined "archaeological realms." If we call ourselves a North American Archaeologist, this is usually something different from a Meso-Americanist or a South American Archaeologist. If we are working in Africa, our primary focus is not likely to be in North Asia or in Alaska. Not only is it much easier to work sites that are in one's backyard, so to speak, but it human nature that most people do not like to mix their apples, oranges and peaches in the same basket.

This brings up a central contention and conclusion of this work. If archaeology is to logically follow a systems approach, then it must strive to achieve what can be called a comprehensive perspective and framework in relation to such systems, and this includes, among other things, adopting a global framework of World Archaeology that would entail general knowledge of and even expertise of the archaeological record and of archaeological systems from all archaeologically definable regions and realms of the world. I would like to call this approach "hologeistic" archaeology, or at least "comparative" archaeology, with the "trans-historical and cross-cultural" implications for research, but I will stop short of this grand objective with the caveat that if we are only or primarily interested in archaeological systems from the perspective of our backyard, then we are bound to view any system in very limited and narrow terms of a limited event horizon--through a straw so to speak.

It is certain that archaeological systems, as all human systems, deal with a certain level of complexity of natural patterning that tends to defy the simplistic formulation of governing rules or principles in any general way. Such patterning tends to be so complex and of such a derivative nature that the fundamental rules of science applied upon more specific levels are insufficient. There is almost no principle that can be stated in the human fields of inquiry that holds true without exception, and those few that seem to hold true appear as well to be equally insignificant as far as a structural understanding of human systems is concerned. Numbers and equations do not go very far in these scientific fields that remain primarily and mostly a conceptual problem solving endeavor. The reasons for this are evident to a philosopher of knowledge, for it is factitious at best to assign a strict one-to-one correspondence between a number and the thing the number represents in reality. It may be less obvious to an archaeologist whose hands are dirty in the ground searching for a scientific set of reasons in his work.

The question of archaeological systems theory has come to the foreground as something important and worthwhile of consideration from the general perspective natural systems theory as I have been developing this in relation to other works and areas of knowledge. Archaeological systems can be defined centrally as those knowledge systems that deal with and relate to the problem of the human past, especially from an artifactual foundation. Whatever else archaeology may or may not be or become, all archaeological research shares as its common foundation a concern with the survey, excavation and interpretation of material evidence of human presence, activity and culture patterning in a larger context of knowledge. This larger context of knowledge reaches across different regions and locations of the archaeological landscape, as well as across different disciplines that have some critical relationship with archaeology, including but not limited to geography, geology, anthropology, botany, paleontology, zoology, history, and ecology. Often, expertise from each of these or other related areas is critical to the successful interpretation, or even recognition, of evidence from a given site or complex.

It is well said that archaeology deals with fossilized cultures, or, more accurately, with depositional remains of cultural patterning. More precisely, the cultural patterning is implicit to the behavior of the people who produced ultimately the things that resulted in a depositional pattern. The inferable cultural pattern, or at least behavioral pattern, is not the same as either the actual hypothetical pattern that must have once existed, nor is it necessarily the same as the actual depositional pattern that is discovered to exist in or on the ground.

Drawing an analogy from cosmological theory, we may liken the depositional culture with which archaeology directly deals as a part of its observable universe with which it deals. At the same time, we may liken the behavioral patterning that led to the depositional pattern as the inferable universe. Finally, we must recognize that behind the inferences of human behavior that can account for the patterning of the deposition, there occurs a background cultural and historical patterning that lies just beyond the horizon of inference, in what we may call the hypothetical universe. The first observable universe provides the empirical foundation for archaeology as a hard facts kind of science. The second inferable universe can be arrived at inductively from a careful analysis and through analogical relationships that can be established in a larger world order. A great deal of inherent uncertainty is always associated with this second form of inductive inference, but all science has only been built upon the results derived from such inference. The third hypothetical universe can be said to be "deducible" from the kinds of general frames of reference that we employ to interpret the evidence as an entire and coherent system of relationships. It can be said to be theoretical, and is only valid scientifically in so far as its conclusions may be some how experimentally testable.

What is described in this approach is an attenuated form of conventional scientific method a la archaeologie. Little mention was made of the role of interpretation, construction or even speculation, as in truth all these processes play a part at all three levels of archaeological method just described. To ignore the role that conceptual and ultimately arbitrary constructs, typologies, definitions, and frames of reference play in our ability to observe and interpret what we see even in a concrete perceptual sense, is to risk the reification of reality upon a fundamental level as something other than the contrivances of the theoretician and her students. Just the same, it is possible to hold this kind of bias in check so to speak, by introducing certain specific forms of methodological controls. We may mention a few of these controls:

1. Comprehensive and detailed examination of evidence.

2. Careful, precise and accurate measurement of physical attributes.

3. Explicit discrimination of qualitative features.

4. Application of statistical methods of description, knowledge representation and probabilistic determination.

5. Denotative terminological explication and application.

6. Systematic approximation and competition of applied alternative frames of reference.

7. Systematic comparison and correlation of all known or describable features or traits across all known sets of evidence.

8. Rigorous and exhaustive application of the constraining principles in systems theory relating all possible systems within the same metasystemic framework.

We must separate clearly the problem of the people who produced the original artifact patterns of which the depositional remnants are the primarily surviving source of evidence and information, from the problem of the depositional remains themselves. Conflation of these two problem sets, and their resulting confusion, is too frequently the case in archaeological analysis and interpretation, and always leads to the same sorts of biased results.

*****

As an anthropologist looking at archaeology, I strive to approach the anthropological implications of archaeology, and the archaeological implications of anthropology, with an open and unfettered mind. I have never sunk my own hands in the soil with the idea of finding an artifact somewhere below. I've never taken the opportunity to enjoy the changes in weather working and living at an archaeological site. Archaeology in this regard has always had numerous social and political implications that are not quite the same in ethnographic fieldwork, though the politics of ethnography have emerged at the foreground of anthropology today. Therefore, tending to be a-political myself, I have sought to avoid in my anthropological work arenas that become overloaded with political and ideological implications. But, if we are to believe Marxist types, politics may in the end be unavoidable no matter what we strive to do or fail to achieve in the larger world.

Through this work I have sought to define a broader (and I hope rehabilitated) vision of Anthropology that is more than merely or even mostly cultural anthropology, especially of the kind that we most think of in terms of Margaret Mead. A part of this general vision of Anthropology is archaeology, inseparably so, as well as psychology, linguistics, sociology and even, dare I say it, history and other parts of the humanities. I would include human biology and ecology as a part of this larger formula for Anthropology, as well as human geography. But of course I have always been of an eclectic and synthesizing spirit, and I have resisted overspecialization and pidgeon-holing of my research interests all my life.

This work therefore concerns primarily archaeology, but it is an archaeology that opens out onto a larger world of knowledge than that found in an excavation of the earth. It is a perspective that encompasses facets from many different fields of knowledge, and that is critical to the articulation of archaeology, if we are to take into account this discipline more fully and completely as systems theory.

*****

I have chosen as an outline for this manuscript a different approach than I usually take in writing. I would have preferred a brief, concise, thematically well organized monograph on the subject. Lacking the degree of sophistication this requires, I have chosen to adopt primarily a collected essay style, as I believe an essay style to be the most appropriate, upon occasion, for dealing with anthropological subjects. Essays demand an emphasis upon style, brevity and conciseness that longer article or journal approaches lack. At the same time, I have sought to organize and string together the essays in a manner not unlike how many archaeologists must attempt to organize their data derived from their years of excavation and scholarly exploration. In this sense I have sought somewhat, as I usually do, to create what Gregory Bateson referred to as a kind of "metalogue" in which the style and context of the text refers back to the subject of the text itself. I have decided to place this work into six major parts that reflect the divisions that, at this time in my own archaeological development, represent the various main facets of the field.

It has been my intention in this work to both step back from the usual archaeological arena of debate and central issues, with the idea of understanding the play of ideas and knowledge against a broader background in anthropology and a cross-disciplinary perspective. I have deliberately sought to apply to it what can be defined as a "natural systems approach" as this approach has been developed via other recent works. I see archaeology therefore as a human systems model, not unlike ethnocultural studies as I have developed this alternative line of inquiry. Where ethnocultural studies finds the "other" (and the self) at the central play of ideas, as the actor and bearer of the news and goodwill and ill of the world, archaeology substitutes the artifact in the assemblage as the central point of articulation for the understanding of the movement and ballet of the world.

In this matter, I see archaeology as possessing a natural provenience in the landscape of human knowledge with its own territory and techniques marked out on the map of collective human consciousness. I have come to the conclusion in my life that the primary value of archaeology is as a science, and that any other purpose to which archaeological knowledge may be put, is of secondary though not inconsequential importance. In other words, archaeology, like its mother Anthropology, is a science or it is nothing. I make this claim not out of some anal-compulsive rage for restrictive order in my data-sets and categories, but because, in spite of my own somewhat loose habit and nature, I recognize a fundamental need for systematicity, communication and puzzle-definition by which a sense of progress in our shared knowledge may be achieved. I can and have written poetry and verse, and I can write novels and other stories. If I were to do archaeology, this would not be ethnography, which I have also done, nor would it be history, which I have done too. If I do archaeology, I am not doing biology nor chemistry either. Archaeologists must ultimately do what archaeologists are supposed to be trained to do. Everything else is only icing or ingredients for the archaeological cake.