INTRODUCTION

Chapter Twenty-One

Human Cultural Systems

We have inherited in Anthropology a deep idea of the Culture History tradition, that "cultures" are distinct groupings of people, defined by common traditions of art, religion, etc., that are relatively isolated by and in their culture, have their own unique language, ideas and systems of functioning. This classical view of Culture in the upper case tended to preclude the idea that cultural groupings of people may have come and gone on the world stage, rising and falling time immemorial, and that such groupings were in continuous contact and interaction with other similar or quite different groupings.

A modern view of culture is more one identifying a process, or a set of processes, in the definition of a distinct group of people, and the process of culture is from an emprical standpoint a pattern of sharing that is prevalent or frequent between people who are face-to-face in relationships in which such reciprocities are possible. Certainly, cultures have material and environmental expressions, and it has been the rage of many to see its material manifestations or its environmental relationships as predeterminative of cultural patterning, as defining the limits and frameworks by which other forms of non-material culture become defined and expressed.

The systems based theory of culture and cultural integration of human reality is rooted in the anthropology of knowledge and the understanding that different cultural backgrounds and life-ways have different ways of knowing and different landscapes of knowledge. Whatever these differences may be, we find a fundamental unity of human knowledge and understanding in terms of its structure and function in the mediation of human reality. In this we must understand that systems and systems theory are paramount knowledge systems that are, if anything, about how we know and understand our world in a certain sense and within a certain framework of reference and inference.

The Symbolic Definition of Culture

The definition of cultural systems is central in human systems theory, as these systems exist at the core of what it means to be human and in terms of how humans organize and relate to their environments. We may say that culture defines the world of meaning for human beings, and this meaning has both subjective and objective aspects and consequences. This meaning furthermore is fundamentally symbolic in structure in a manner very similar to that elaborated by Levi-Strauss's structuralism. We can say, in othe words, that human social reality is culturally determined, and human cultural reality is symbolically determined, and human symbolic reality is linguistically and psychologically determined, in a manner that is context-bound to the environment in which it has arisen.

1. All human symbolization is gestalt in design and function involving emblematic figure-ground pattern recognition.

2. Human perception and cognition are fundamentally gestalt in structure and organization.

3. All human symbolization depends upon and involves basic perceptual and cognitive processes of perception, object recognition, symbolic internalization, apperception, projection, cogitative rationalization, etc., which are tied to the same gestalt of emblematic pattern recognition.

3. Language is symbolically structured or "constructed".

4. Basic cognitive processes of memory, cognitive mapping, reason, are indexically organized by linguistic symbols.

5. Cultural reality is symbolically organized and its patterning is linked to the gestalt of human symbolization.

Cultural Anthropology has been foremost the field of inquiry that has managed to foreground and give scope and scientific significance to the problem and definition of culture and its reality. It was this early recognition of the centrality of importance of culture in understanding human reality that attracted me as a student foremost to the discipline, much to my subsequent misfortune. Before the rise of Boasian anthropology in North American and Haddon's social anthropology in Great Britain and abroad, our notions of culture were largely defined by an archaic and largely Eurocentric model of culture history and classical philology. Other views emerged on the horizon in about the same time frame, the views of Marx and Freud, for instance, and of Comte and Durkheim and Weber, that served to some extent to break the strangle-hold of an earlier European rationalism that saw all good things as coming from, and referring to, a continental frame of reference.

A century later, so much elaboration along related lines of inquiry has gone on in the relativization of knowledge, in one field of scholarship or inquiry or another, that the entire framework of critique has seemed to be carried to a logical limit beyond which logic and reason breaks down completely in a kind of narrow solipsistic language game, especially in the face of normal institutions of science that have made tremendous breakthroughs in knowledge discovery and technological advances.

In considering the structure of the development of human civilization, what can be called its cultural evolution, I cannot but help think of the perspective of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock that sees the reel of reality speeding forward at ever increasing tempos with each passing year. The rates and volumes of information communication and knowledge production has been increasing exponentially, and the degree of complexity and sophistication achieved in any one area, the requirements for expertise and specialization so hypercompartmentalized, that many knowledge systems, and the humans that articulate them, are spinning forward divisively and independently without mutual awareness or even the possibility of mutual consideration.

Worldview has become a critically important, even strategic, concern of the 21^st Century. The worldwide web emerged on the scene in the last decade of the 20^th Century just in time to create a challenge of control and freedom of information in regard to what can be considered a rising global hegemony of ideas by large nationstates and multi-national corporations. Needless to say, the worldview of the world is at best fragmentary and disparate, lacking in either wholeness or in sufficient depth. We cannot speak of a single worldview, but only of many competing worldviews, all of which are in themselves incomplete and insufficient as worldview. Worldview is perhaps the ultimate aim of any knowledge system that claims coherence and a distinct identity in the world. Of course, there are institutions, individuals, groups, corporations and even entire nation states that systematically and deliberately take advantage of the fractured state of worldview to manipulate and persuade people, often with misinformation, into some agenda of action or some relation that is assymetrical or exploitative. At times, it seems, that there may even be a majority of people in the world whose function, it seems is to be part of a larger conspiracy to manipulate and dispossess people's worldview and hold upon a sense of reality.

There have been many competing definitions of culture. The one I have come to prefer, though grounded in Anthropology, surprisingly is situated more in the field of the sociology of culture, and concerns how humans symbolic construct meaning in their lives, and construct the world in a symbolic manner.

The fact of human cultural reality that has not been easily explained or even directly dealt with is its vast continuity of culture from its origin until the present. There have been no permanent discontinuous states in human evolution that has been marked by an absence or a total loss of cultural context. Individuals may become more or less dissociated from the cultural stream of humanity, and many cultures may find themselves in isolated backwaters, but culture remains continuous and for the most part forward flowing with time.

This continuity of culture has assured an unbroken string of cultural transmission from generation to generation from the first inception and rise of culture, much as protocultural forms have been observed and studied among Chimpanzee groups in the African rainforests. It has been a part of the human heritage, and its continuity assures a common foundation of structural patterning whatever its divergent manifestations may become in one instance or another. Humankind has depended greatly upon this sense of fundamental continuity, so much so that we have evolved in such a manner as to become culturally dependent creatures who do not do well outside of the fold of its structure.

As a cultural anthropologist, a deep and fundamental appreciation of culture and its central place in our world is profoundly important and well abided. Of course it is not the only facet of our knowledge and meaning that can be used to characterize humankind and to differentiate people from one another, but without it, all other knowledge systems run the risk of falling into their own ideological conundrums and horizons.

I employ readily the concept of culture, and especially, of knowledge culture, as a mechanism for mediating between, and possibly even integrating, different and divergent knowledge systems in the world, as well as the social realities that underlie these systems. This brings to the foreground one of the central functions of culture in our lives, and that is in the mediation of stress and conflict of people in relation to their natural and social environments. Culture as a mediational concept and construct is vitally important to the application of cultural knowledge systems to various kinds of problem sets in human reality, and even beyond in the larger natural world.

The mediative aspects of culture have rarely been addressed as such, much less for its broader implications in relation to the articulation of worldview and different kinds of knowledge systems in the world. We can find in this the foundation for the integration of worldview and of different, disparate knowledge systems, and through this we can seek to achieve a new form of synthetic integration of these systems in a functional and efficacious manner in our world.

The Psychic Unity of Humankind and the Science of Cultural Anthropology

The hypothesis of a universal structure underlying the pattern variation of human culture and history has been both proposed and opposed vehemently in the literature. Some scholars would impose a completely relativistic model upon anthropological study of humankind, claiming that there are no universals by which to anchor and define a scientific paradigm of human reality. Furthermore, it is clear that human reality is exceedingly complex and multi-factorial, and, many would say, underdetermined from even a biological point of view. True exceptionless universals have been hard to find.

I propose that the universal basis for a genuine science of anthropology is in the recognition and realization of the true scope of the psychic unity of humankind, which suggests that it may not be the case that all people think the same way, but it is possible that all people may, at least in theory, think alike. Such a claim demands an empirical hook and anchor to some objective, empirical data in reality that would support such a claim.

It is in the brain of humankind that we can find, upon a deep level, structural patterns that recur in varying form across cultural boundaries, but which occur structurally in a similar manner in all cultures. If this is the case, as it appears to be, then a strong case for the psychic unity of humankind as a scientific universal can be made. One form of evidence for this strong claim is in the potential intelligibility of all natural human language--or what might be called its "inter-translatability."

The proposal of a scientific basis for anthropology being founded upon universal patterns of brain organization and function, in conjunction with other uniquely human traits, does not preclude an equally strong argument for the anthropological relativity of human knowledge and attitudes. Such a proposal also, to be complete, requires its systematic extension, in an empirically consistent manner that is equal to that stated for human cognition, to an accountable explanation of social and cultural patterning and behavior by people.

My claim is that a certain class of methods, referred to as symbolic framing devices, lends itself to a certain manner of interpretation of a wide range of human behavior patterns, the logical explanation for which leads to the conclusion that cultural patterns and differentials are tied to different patterns of thinking in the brain. Rather than support a relativist claim, this evidence strongly supports an argument for the deep brain-based psychic unity of humankind, and the influence of this noetic patterning, upon all that we see, think and do.

Definitions of Culture

Culture has been the traditional forte' of the cultural anthropologist. At the time that cultural anthropology has been elipsed as the result of ethno-political economies, the concept of culture and recognition of its importance in understanding human reality has emerged in other disciplines as a central defining dogma.

Culture as a concept of human order and social organization, as a descriptive label referring to both the style and pattern of human integration in the world, has been widely defined and there is very little close agreement as to its appropriate denotations or determinations. My own research has led me to see culture as more ofa dynamic process shaped in terms of a tradition, but made real and vital in the present, than it is a static and unchanging reality that is superimposed, like a set of rules, upon human reality. Culture is embodied in the behavior, beliefs and very being of its participants, and it is enacted and reenacted at every minute upon many different stages of social performance. Cultural process is therefore an on-going production of forms and symbolisms, materially and behaviorally manifest, that reshapes the tradition and fits it to the needs and purposes of the future.

The remarkable aspect of culture is its tremendous transparency in our own lives, and its tremendous obviousness to ourselves in the lives of people removed from us. We do not normally see it in ourselves, in what we do and how we behave, because it is so much a part of us that we take it for granted. It is expressed in the clothes we dress in, in our speech, in our attitudes and in our social relations. It is expressed in our habits and routines and in the manner that we conduct ourselves and our business both in polite society and otherwise. We find it so easily in others because it forms the basis of the differences in others that are so marked in implicit contrast to ourselves. It is clear therefore that cultural variation overlaps and is often confused with individual variation of pattern, so that it is impossible sometimes to tell the difference between the one and the other unless we have some social frame of reference for common comparison.

The notion that culture is shared is important to the definition of culture, but culture as merely frequency patterning belies some of the dynamic and variable components of culture. To a great extent, we can even say that individual variation is a form of cultural variation of pattern. Culture is often contested and the result of compromise as much as it has been a matter of sharing and agreement. Agreement implies an unconscious component of culture, and it is indeed upon an unconscious level that we find most of the agreement occuring. It is as often as not this unconscious level of conformity that individuals are reacting to in a deliberate manner when they seek to be different or to express themselves in a culturally non-conformist manner. It represents an attempt to escape the psychological constraints of culture as these serve to shape and possibly frustrate their lives. Culture becomes contestable when it is realized that different versions or patterns or models of culture come into competition with one another, when one person's construction is somehow contradictory to another's. This happens more than we may know or realize, and it is clear that culture, to be effective, cannot be a straight-jacket or even a military uniform. It is referred to as a concept of the organization of diversity, rather than as the replication of uniformity. It is also the source of a tremendous paradox about cultural patterning, for though it comprehends all individuality and individual variability of patterning, it does not invade every private space or every nook and cranny of a cultural defined reality. We cannot strictly say that individual behavior is dependent upon culture, or cultural patterning is dependent upon the expression of individual behavior. We can say that these are interdependent in a partial way but not in an incomplete way.

Cultural variability is an inbuilt function therefore of cultural pattern, and reflects the fact that culture is acquired and learned, constructed and created, in a social environment. Individual variation is a natural extension of cultural variability of pattern. In this regard, cultural pattern can be said to be the substrate and ground for individual action and choice. It defines the range and directions that individual variation will proceed in, and sets constraints or limits beyond which such variation will be defined as abnormal or anomalous. It is a logical consequence of the fact that any cultural pattern that defines a group of people over time and place comprehends a broader range of phenomena than is expressible by any one individual or even a group of different individuals. We can say that culture in this sense is a corporate and institutional reality that extends beyond the boundaries of individual variability. It is, in other words, larger than life, and it becomes symbolically so expressed.

Culture is an historically transient phenomena. As conservative as we expect traditional tribal cultures to be, from generation to generation and from century to century, it is likely that the epigenetic profile of the cultural landscape will shift and evolve continuously, in part as different casts of characters happen upon the stage, and in part because outside forces are steadily impinging upon those people to shape and erode their patterns of culture.

Culture is therefore an instantaneous phenomenon that exists in the present. Its reference to the past is as a sense of heritage and tradition that connects to the present in institutional and ritual religious forms and symbolisms.

My desire to escape a definition of culture as something that is only shared and fixed is rooted in the idea that though a basic consensus is vital to cultural transmission, this transmission is never complete nor perfect, and its information is always subject to distortion and mutation over time. Transmission can only be understood in this regard as a temporal and therefore historical process, or rather as a series of events that can be chronologically ordered and that can be attributed some form of efficient causality or determination. People are bound within a cultural system, but through their lived experience and the embodiment of culture, in their everyday production and reproduction of the cultural symbolisms and forms, they come to have a transformative effect upon culture as a whole, gradually altering the pattern of culture beyond recognition of what can be considered its original or baseline form.

This process suggests that culture in this case is anything but shared and fixed by tradition. It suggests that its sharing is not a function of its conservativism, but it dynamics, via the various mechanisms of transmission that are recognizable in the study of culture. There have been very few baselines or original cultures on earth in the past 30,000 years at least. There have been founding cultures, and abrupt hiatus of cultural vacuums that are then filled by new forms brought by new people. Original primordial hominid culture probably dates back to as deep in time as there are recognizable tool assemblages. Granted, cultural isolates occur that seem to have been frozen in time, or even to have regressed by the loss of previous cultural traits to a more primitive condition of cultural development. We cannot say that these tools or the soft culture that they represent was invented at anyone place or time, but they were repeatedly transmitted all over the place most of the time by many different individuals. These forms evolved ever so gradually out of even more original and basic forms of proto-cultural pattern upon which some model or another of anthropogenesis has been built. If we want to recognize these proto-cultural patterns, we can find them with the use of different kinds of tools by native Chimpanzee groups in the rain forests and fields of Central Africa. These patterns are recognizable by their transmission and their variation, and they lead to the conclusion that proto-cultural development in humans may have proceed relatively early in hominid evolution, possibly as much as 5 or 6 million years B.P.

If we want to apply any kind of gene-culture model of coevolution, we must recognize that this model may have worked on two levels. Culture provided a carpentered context in which some kinds of genetic patterns would have been positively selected, and others, negatively selected. At the same time, genetic selection would have led to the creation of phenotypes that were culturally dependent creatures, which can be seen in the relatively slow and advanced phases of human ontogenetic development. There is obviously no strong linkage between genetic and cultural information, nor of their modes of transmission. Whereas the first can be thought of as being genetic and biological, the second can be considered to be at best historical and social. These forms of information are only linked indirectly in terms of the human embodiment of culture and its evolved organic basis in human development.

Human beings can be said therefore to have become, sometime early in our hominid evolution, culturally dependent creatures. We cannot now survive without reliance upon cultural habits and means of adaptation. Cultural dependency is a unique mark of humankind and constitutes the basis for the paradox of cultural constraint in our lives. It is the basis for both our individual variability and for our basic requirement for cultural conformity, even in our anti-structural disconformity. We can find individual variability of personality even among different members of the same reptiles, for instance, where obvious differences of temperament and response are evident. If we refer to canines, it is apparent as well that dogs show an enormous range of expression and variability of personality traits, more than just the kinds of root emotional responses of a snake. So much more so is it for human beings.

Culture exists as a collaborative project. We can say therefore that it is constitutive of reality in the sense that it is made up of many different things at the same time, and different kinds of things through time. A culture cannot be created by one person alone--culture is created socially in the group as a result of sharing and variation of common patterns. Culture as a group process emerges with time, and is subject to the constraints of time.

The fundamental challenge of all cultural orientations is that of its survival and reproduction in time and place, and this challenge is related to the fundamental dilemma of cultural patterning, and that is the problem of achieving cultural integration. It can be said that relative integration depends upon the extent and depth of cultural sharing or transmission. Cultural patterning that is highly coherent can be said to have achieved a relatively high degree of integration. Of course, this concept of cultural integration is a slippery one to get hold of. Coherence of culture can be assumed to be achieved through symbolic consonance and reiteration of common forms. It is the case though that there can be substrate or structural sharing reflecting a high order of systemic integration, while at the same time the degree of variability of surface pattern in the expression of culture can be quite high.

Cultural Indeterminancy and Anthropological Relativity

The anthropological definition of culture is imprecise and from a scientific standpoint leaves much to be desired. There are in fact many competing definitions of what is culture, and hence, no single received definition that is agreed upon by all anthropologists. In fact, implicitly or explicitly, definitions of culture are a big bone of contention among most anthropologist.

From a human systems standpoint, I offer the following definition of culture that is tentatively scientific:

Culture is the sum total of the integrated patterning of the human experience, both in terms that are individually subjective and collectively objective, and in terms that are both ideal in form and material in expression. It includes the language, behaviors, attitudes, institutions and symbolic systems created and maintained by human beings.

This definition is necessarily general and somewhat vague as far as the explication of specific aspects of human culture, such as various institutional manifestations in legal systems, in politics, economics or religion. Its emphasis is not in the detail or particulars of cultural life as this is experienced, but in the totality of culture as a system that is integrated, and that serves the function of integration, of human reality. I have privileged culture as something that has a central role and a pivotal force in the life of humanity, that plays a critical part in the organization and expression of that reality. Others surely would take issue with this argument. I have offered it here, as an anthropologist, from the standpoint that we cannot seek a genuine vision or version of human reality without somehow eventually coming to terms with the definition of culture and the realities that are represented by it.

And yet, culture remains an inherently difficult and slippery concept and sense of reality to get hold of. It is not enough simply to dismiss this problem to the explanation of inherent complexity of pattern, which is true but by itself rather empty of import. Nor is it enough to consign the vagueness of culture to the reflexively kind of paradox that it presents to us as culture bearers--rather what is known as its subjective transparency and invisibility in our own lives and the critical role it plays in shaping our lives.

I invoke the principle of the critical indeterminancy of culture to explain its inherent sense of difficulty in definition and explanation. I invoke the concept of cultural indeterminancy as a fundamental condition of our reality in part to demonstrate that the principle of cultural relativity, to which it is related, is not and does not imply cultural determination or determinism. Culture is not an inescapable background tyrant controlling all we think and do in the world. As Herskovits wrote, it is not even a high fence preventing us from seeing into other's cultural backyards. Culture can be said to be inherently underdetermined in our lives, because it is not inherent or biologically preprogrammed. We do not inherit it from our genes. We learn it from our social environments, and it is transmitted socially between people on a daily basis. And yet, not unlike the weak but ubiquitous force of gravity, culture does have a compelling influence upon all of us the broader dimensions of which we cannot escape completely. It keeps our feet in our shoes, and our shoes on the ground.

Cultural indeterminancy can be accounted for mainly by the fact of the social organization and patterning of culture, which entails that it is not so much a "thing" that exists as a material object in the ground (an archaeological version of culture as artifactual or textual expression) so much as it exists as tendencies and frequencies of patterning in the background of our lives, as certain predispositions, habits, reflexes, appetites and aversions that we share in the world with one another. It can be said to exist in some abstract but applied statistical sense, like the 2.5 kids in the average family, even though there may be no clear-cut demonstration of its reality in actual historical happenstance. Neither is it only an "idea" that gains some physical manifestation in the real world, rather it is a field of meaning, socially constructed and communicated, that lies behind the expression of the "idea" itself. It can be seen therefore that from the standpoint of cultural indeterminancy, neither "things" nor "ideas" are sufficient by themselves to a definition of culture. These things are products of culture, and stand as symbolic representations of culture, but they are not culture itself.

I would argue at length for the reality of culture that is independent of our own imagination and construction, but I am not sure that this is necessary any longer, and it is clear that other anthropologists have argued these issues at great length, repeatedly, to no final consequence. From a strictly scientific perspective (from, in other words, a human systems approach) we would have to say that "culture" must exist as an independent reality, else we could not conduct experiments upon it or arrive at any testable conclusions about it. Either this, or failing to falsify our definitions, throw the concept of culture out as something that just did not work from a scientific perspective. This problem may not be so much a problem of the definition of culture, which in all its indeterminancy is also therefore "indefinite" in outline or key forms. It may be more a problem of the model of the kind of science that we seek to apply to an understanding of culture. Clearly the scientific model directly adapted from the phyiscal or biological sciences may be ill-suited for a systematic explication of cultural realities.

The issue of culture and its indeterminancy I would state in relation to scientific method and theory, as something like this: Where physical science play heavy emphasis upon the "objectivity" of their empirical data-base and measurement of phenomenal reality, social scientists place an equivalent form of "inter-subjectivity" in their observational descriptions and reasoned explanations. What is "objective" from one standpoint that tends to occlude the identity and role of the observer in the process of observation, becomes "intersubjective" when this identity in the process of observation is implied and confirmed, and its social and communicative aspects are also emphasized and not ignored.

We must qualify this altered criteria with one set of limiting conditions, and this is the fact that inter-subjective substantiation or validation is achievable, at least in theory, by only independent means. By independent from a human point of view, I would include a broader but relative sense of psychological, ideological and even social and cultural independence. I would call it symbolic and behavioral independence, and this implies on some level at least what can be called both trans-personal and cross-cultural agreement.

In specifying these terms for the scientific definition of human culture, it can be seen that we have not come very far after all from a conventional definition of science that is tied to its empirical methodology and rational philosophy. And we can see that were we have arrived at is not so very different from where Thomas Kuhn arrived in his argument for the socially paradigmatic structure of scientific revolutions. Even if we more or less reject Kuhn's central thesis about how scientific knowledge becomes articulated in exclusive scientific communities, we must at least acknowledge in some minimal sense the role that scientific culture and community plays in shaping the direction of knowledge that this culture achieves by means of its normal and routine-operational praxis and its received views of the world.

Cultural indeterminancy is a critical concept underlying human knowledge systems, including those that are scientific, and the phenomenon that I have come to generally label as anthropological relativity of knowledge. We may say that culture is an inherently underdetermined pattern that prestructures both our world and our worldview, and that all knowledge we construct or derive about the world, is constrained by and grounded to the same cultural patterning. It perplexes our knowledge with a kind of existential uncertainty--we can attribute this sense of uncertainty to the fact of death and marginality of some experiences in our lives, but we can just as well apply to it the idea that cultural indeterminancy underlying our knowledge systems of whatever kind leaves us with rather shaky ground to stand upon.

The criteria of independence of observation and measurement upon which the notion of scientific objectivity (and its methods) is based, is the criteria of what can be called relative non-arbitrariness of our knowledge. In other words, if our knowledge or information or conclusions can be said to have been arbitrarily arrived at, by some means fair or foul, then it cannot fulfill the criteria of scientific objectivity. Non-arbitrary knowledge is information which exists and is confirmed independently of our own judgement about it. If a biologists runs an experiment expecting to find one kind of results, but in the course discovers another, totally different kind of result, that person is obliged then to report the result that was discovered and not merely what was expected. Of course, all too often, especially in statistical applications, expectations can have a way of influencing discovery and conclusions in ways that essentially represent a manipulation of the data in arbitrary ways. What is arbitrary can also be either unconscious or else just plain implicit to the social context of the experiment or the language within which the description, the experiment and its explanation, were derived. This is especially true when we commit in our train of thinking certain informal or even formal fallacies of logic, such as the hypostatization or reification of formal categories or typologies and the misplaced concreteness of culturally defined meanings. An entire theoretical paradigm, especially in the social sciences but even in the stricter physical sciences, can run aground on the rocks and shoals of unquestioned initial presuppositions and preconceived classifications and terminologies, especially when these notions and their implications are not carefully and critically thought out beforehand, but merely taken for granted as is.

Thus, arbitrariness or nonarbitrariness is itself a relative concept. If our knowledge were totally non-arbitrary, there would be no need for scientific curiousity and inquiry in the first place, much less the serendipity of scientific discovery. We would immediately and directly apprehend the total truth about natural reality, or else we would just be satisfied with our experience of this reality as is, without needing to apprehend its implicit patterns and structures in any larger frame of reference. On the other hand, it is the recognition, or at least the suspicion, of the arbitrariness of this or that point of view, that it is a perspective arrived at by our own means and imposed upon reality to shape it to our own devices and designs, that drives us forward to seek some alternative point of view that seems somewhat less arbitrary, and from the point of view of the natural patterning, a little closer at least to the actual truth of the natural patterning of reality, the thing in itself, and not just as we would have it be.

And cultural indeterminancy and its underlying anthropological relativity determines that for ourselves at least, the hardest realities to talk about in any non-arbitrary, scientific manner, are the realities about ourselves. By comparison it has been relatively easy, once the basic periodic table of the elements was unraveled from the evidence, to talk about atoms and their electrons and properties. Sense of non-arbitrariness about these kinds of physical descriptions, especially when set to mathematical terms and equations that work and that are empirically derivable, is far less suspect and in a sense less relative on this level that would be a similar sense of a definition of some periodic table of cultures that is based, for instance, on kinship or economic patterns. It is hard to argue the facts of measurement of a chemical reaction--it is much less difficult to argue the theoretical attributions of "facticity" to ethnographic descriptions or historical narratives of events. We can state this as a kind of fundamental principle about anthropological relativity and cultural indeterminancy of our knowledge systems:

The further removed or more distant the object of our observations and measuurement from ourselves, in kind or quality or property of pattern we observe, the more non-arbitrary hence more objective manner we can attribute "truth" to our facts.

The complementary antithesis of this is the opposite principle:

The closer our descriptions and observations are in kind or quality or property of pattern to ourselves, even in a social sense of reality, the less non-arbitrary and hence less objective the knowledge and the manner with which we can attribute "truth" to our facts.

It seems we can contrapose the mighty but small atom against the larger but weaker human upon the opposite ends of a spectrum that is defined by relative arbitrariness and certainty about knowledge. If we realize at some point that, as the only observers and knowers in town, all our knowledge is ultimately situated at the human end of the spectrum, then we can see the dilemma this results in terms of the inherent anthropological relativity of our knowledge systems. We can, as "pure" scientists pretend that this is not so, or, better yet, presume it away, but we cannot really escape its implications and consequences for our knowledge systems and the contraints that we must deal with in terms of the scientific discovery and definition of reality.

Cultural Mediation

To a great extent, the mediational function of culture has largely been ignored or unaddressed in any scholarly manner. Many studies allude to it, but almost none, with but a few noteworthy exceptions, deal with the issue in any direct or decisive manner. Evidence suggests that mediation of reality is one of the principle, if not the central, function of culture in the first place. This can be justified evolutionarily in terms of natural human history and it can be found to be equally applicable today in the most advanced systems that have ever existed.

This mediation function of culture arises from its symbolic processes of integration of reality, and it can be found to occur at different levels and serving different kinds of ends. We may thus see that the mediation function of knapping a point from a core and hafting it to the end of an arrow in order to kill the next available buffalo or deer, is upon a fundamental symbolic level little different from the priest who chants a passage from the bible every night in prayer before turning into bed. The purposes and consequences may be different, but the symbolic mediational aspects of both processes are very similar in form and function.

Because I believe the mediative aspects of culture have largely been ignored and left unaddressed as serious scientific issues, the capacity and potential to "capitalize" upon these critical facets of human society and culture have been somewhat unrecognized and unrealized. These intermediative aspects of cultural integration can proceed upon different levels as well. Analytically, I will recognize four basic levels that can be further subdivided: 1. The individual; 2. The family; 3.The community or group; 4. Inter-community or inter-group relations. We can find symbolic and cultural mediational functions occurring and articulated upon each of these levels as well as between these different levels. Furthermore, we can find language in various forms as a communication medium that facilitates this mediative function. News programs and newspapers are excellent examples of communication that serves a mediative function--in this case it goes beyond merely "informing" a reader or viewer about events in the world. It serves to reinforce the individual's own psychological constructions about the world and that person's relationship to a larger world. Events that happen far away can become intensely personalized even if there is no other than symbolic connection to the event.

The mediative function of culture can be said to accomplish the following kinds of ends:

1. stress reduction, both psychologically and socially

2. to reinforce relational patterns

3. to minimize and channel aggression

4. to prevent and remedy conflict (sometimes to promote conflict)

5. to promote and organize cooperation for different ends

6. to organize knowledge, values, meaning structures and behaviors within a symbolically shared framework

Synthetic Archaeological Models of Cultural Systems

It is an implicit contention of this work that analytical archaeology demands a synthetic approach to modeling. A heavy emphasis upon empirical evidence and inference requires as a complement explicit general frames of reference. The solution to the methodological and theoretical dilemmas of archaeology may not be found in what methods are adopted, but in the conceptual systems that are employed to frame such methods. Theoretical development in conceptual systems remains weak in all the sciences, compared to the empirical progress in basic knowledge acquisition. This is due I believe to human nature, or rather to the construction of human nature, that determines humans become bound to the same systems of understanding that they seek to escape through their science. Archaeology demands a truly comprehensive theory of the rise and dynamics of human cultural systems. I have sought to provide an alternative theory in human eco-cultural evolution. A systems approach is a metascientific approach to knowledge in general that frames and makes possible such conceptioning, but it does not stand directly in place of natural systems theory that are unique to each area of knowledge. In this regard, it is important to understand human evolution as the rise of systems that were subject to a long series of basically stochastic historical events, but which demonstrated an internal ordering of process and patterning that led to the development of human civilization and highly developed cultural patterning regardless of chance historical events. Archaeology has a greater prospect of recovering the system of the human past than its sense of overall historical chaos.

The dragon of anthropological and archaeological relativity will never completely go away. It will remain like a shadowy cloud overhanging all our work. It will dissipate by subtle degrees here and there as evidence accumulates and agreement grows in our constructions of the past. There is a ratio of relativity that states that all that is known is always in proportion to all that remains unknown. The result of this ratio can be called the measure of uncertainty that can be associated with any particular instance or event structure. The known and the unknown exist in a kind of equilibrium. If we increase, for instance, the amount of definite knowledge associated with a particular problem set, especially to the extent that this knowledge has a material and empirical basis, then the degree of uncertainty associated with that problem set will be proportionately diminished compared to some other problem set about which little is known. Expertise lends itself to certainty and accuracy of knowledge and judgment. Certainty lends itself to agreement and a shared culture of knowledge.

I wish to address what I feel to be two interrelated but unanswered questions that were tacitly asked at the beginning of this essay. First, what is a rehabilitated definition of culture that goes beyond the historical tradition? Second, what is a rehabilitated notion of the culture of archaeology that goes beyond its own historical tradition?

Briefly, in regard to the first question, culture is more than the pattern that is learned, shared and transmitted between people, for it incorporates the processes of learning, sharing and transmission in its own reproduction. All cultures must meet the challenges of adaptive survival for the group, or become extinct in failing. Archaeology is largely a study of extinct peoples and their lost cultures, and we should bear in mind that the natural history of culture change must include both its genesis, florescence and expiration. There are few hard and fast rules that seem universally applicable to this patterning either from an ethnological or an archaeological perspective, beyond perhaps those of symbolic structuration and function. But culture is also something more and other than all of this. It includes the knowledges needed to produce technologies, however primitive, that permit the expression of art and religion in the first place. Old Mr. Flint Knapper was a very clever fellow indeed, with but scant and rough examples to follow and learn from, to so readily apply his skills and art to the making and survival of his den.

I will offer what I take to be a revised though tentative definition of culture as I believe this might relate to the rehabilitation of a culture history paradigm:

1. All cultural reality exists in time and space and is posited biographically and psychologically in the individual. It is primarily a temporally ordered process that has spatial and material manifestions, or what can be called secondary ordering.

2. Culture is polythetically composite and defined by its trait complexes.

a. Culture as a natural system is complex and dynamic. All cultural patterns are underdetermined, complex and hence epiphenomenally chaotic.

3. Human beings are culturally dependent creatures in a partial and incomplete manner.

a. Human adaptation & survival depend upon periods of enculturation and primary acquisition.

b. Human beings are capable of independently changing their cultural relationships within their own biographical frameworks.

4. Human beings are symbolic creatures

a. The structure of symbolic behavior and cultural pattern is universal

b. Human beings symbolically organize their worlds and worldviews, and construct and reproduce their world in a symbolic manner.

5. Cultural patterning is individually unique and idiosyncratic. The individual is the instantaneous locus and focus of cultural expression and development.

a. Cultural patterning is psychologically and behaviorally integrated.

6. We can speak of psychological and individual culture, or of variability of culture pattern upon an individual level.

a. The exact patterning of culture is different and unique for every human being.

7. Social integration depends upon patterns of cultural sharing and agreement between individuals.

a. Cultural integration implies a "social contract" between individuals.

8. Patterns of intersubjective agreement and sharing between individuals become posited in primary and secondary institutions that define collective membership and identity of the individual to the cultural group.

9. Cultural patterning is continuously variable across space and through time.

10. We can understand the continuous change dynamic of culture in terms of the state-path trajectory of its development through an individual's lifetime.

11. Cultural distance across space is approximately equivalent to historical distance through time. Historical distance implies cultural distance or divergence, and vice-versa.

12. The cultural landscape and spectrum of cultural variability consists of dynamic and complex topographic distribution of cultural traits.

a. Cultural isoclines marking trait frequencies and occurrences and boundaries will be variable and changing across this landscape.

13. Natural dialectical language patterning encodes and reflects cultural realities.

14. Abrupt transitions and dislocations result in discontinuities of cultural boundaries.

a. Sudden or abrupt juxtapositioning of broadly divergent or different cultural patterning that can exhibit secondary and even tertiary structures of folding and conformation within regions or during periods.

In regard, finally, to the second question, I will state that as Kuhn strictly defined paradigms, we can call the "schools" of culture history, both as this originated in Continental Europe, and as it was translated both to Great Britain and across the Atlantic to North America, and as their descendants are variously known today, was and largely remains a paradigm, or, for want of a better term, a knowledge culture that, in its rehabilitated and revitalized form, has a central concern about cultural knowledge, whatever its material or other behavioral manifestations. Surely, it is not the same kind of paradigmatic structure we find now focused around the Hot Big Bang model or String Theory in the physical sciences, but it is sufficient unto itself in the articulation of human historical and culture patterning. Culture history has come of age in a modern world equipped with super-computers and particle accelerators, and it incorporates a broader plethora of metaphysical models and metaphors than it did fifty years ago. If anthropologists and archaeologists today fail to live up to the standards of their predecessors, in the realization of their own theoretical and methodological potentialities, then this will be their own failing as a culture.

To extend a rehabilitated culture historical paradigm, I will offer the following postulates:

1. In the study of cultural patterning across space and through time, it is useful to distinguish between basic and elaborated or derived cultural traits.

Basic cultural traits tend to be more conservative and broadly shared.

Basic cultural traits usually tend to primary institutions relating to food getting and survival.

Basic cultural traits tend to be less marked and more functional in form than elaborated traits.

Elaborated cultural traits tend to be more variable and narrowly idiosyncratic.

Elaborated or derivative cultural traits usually tend to secondary institutions relating to human social relations and order via symbolic constructs.

Elaborated or derivative cultural traits tend to be more highly marked in form than basic traits.

2. As a result of the distinction between basic and elaborated, which is a purely hypothetical construct, and which reflects the difference between reality culture and value culture, we may infer in any given ethnological or archaeological context two levels of cultural meaning or order in relation to the evidence we infer.

Basic traits tend to occur and vary on a slower clock of change than elaborated traits.

3. It the study of cultural patterning, it is useful to distinguish between sources of exogenous and endogenous change based upon variation of trait pattern:

Endogenous change tends to be continuous and to involve primarily the variation of elaborated cultural traits.

Exogenous change tends to be relatively discontinuous and disruptive of cultural equilibrium of pattern.

4. Change and variation of cultural pattern reflects the transmission of cultural traits.

We may distinguish three forms of transmission:

Horizontal transmission (i.e. diffusion of traits and peoples)

Vertical Transmission (i.e. heritable transmission of traits and peoples, usually cross-generationally)

Diagonal Transmission (i.e. enforced or uneven enculturation due to asymmetries of structural relations)

We may also distinguish between selective transmission and non-selective or wholesale transmission.

We may also distinguish transmission by their consequences, defining destructive, neutral or constructive forms of transmission.

5. The greater the distance in time and space between two patterns, the more it can be expected that basic cultural features will be fundamentally different.

There can occur a convergence of elaborated features based upon divergent basic features. (Analogous trait complexes)

There can occur a divergence of elaborated features based upon divergent basic features. (Homologous trait complexes)

6. From these basic rules, we can derive a complex kind of differential equilibrium that can be said to affect the patterning of cultural variation over time. For instance, we can construe dimensions of change, variation, transmission such that there tends to be a balance.

a. We may say that basic traits exist in ratio to elaborated traits, exogenous changes exist in ratio to endogenous traits. Vertical transmission exists in ratio to horizontal transmission and diagonal transmission, and selective transmission exists in ratio to nonselective transmission. Destructive transmission exists in ratio to constructive transmission. The following kinds of equilibrium formulas may be applied, where K in every case can be defined as complex equilibrium in change.

1. K_(traits) = E_(traits)/B_(traits)

where E stands for elaborated traits and B stands for basic traits

2. K_{(transmission)} = V_{(transmission)}/H-D_{(transmission)}

Where V stands for vertical transmission, H for horizontal transmission, and D for diagonality of transmission

3. K_(selection) = S_(selection)/W_(selection)

Where S stands for selective transmission and W for nonselective (wholesale) transmission.

4. K_{(consequence)} = C-N_{(consequence)}/D(_consequence)

Where C stands for constructive change, N stands for neutral change and D for destructive change

5. K_(change) = En_(change)/Ex_(change)

Where En stands for endogenous change and Ex stands for exogenous change.

In this kind of formulation, we may distinguish as well differential rates and directions of change (one way, two way, reciprocal or nonreciprocal, current or countercurrent, direct or indirect, etc.). For simplicity, we may say that, for instance, slow rates versus fast rates. We can attempt to apply some kind of complex rate constant for changes in cultural trait variation with the proviso that such rate "constants" are purely provisional and relative to the local or regional framework in question.

There are many kinds of hidden presuppositions in such formulation. We should not presume any necessary or direct relationship between variables. One of the critical problems of this formulation is knowing whether to apply one term or another to a certain specific trait or trait complex as this is found in situ. How can we tell, for instance, if a trait is constructive or destructive in its consequences if these consequences are complex and differentially distributed in the cultural landscape. What may be relatively constructive for one person or group may be comparatively destructive for another. The same trait may have both constructive and destructive attributes or features.

7. To extend this kind of model one step further, it is necessary to make a basic presupposition in regard to culture traits and their form and function in reality. First cultural traits that are real and isolatable entities can be said not to exist in a vacuous form. Even symbolic ideas can be said to occupy space in the mind of the culture bearer and therefore, as some kind of neural pattern, to be real in a distinct sense. We may say therefore that all cultural traits exhibit a quality of change that can be called character displacement.

Traits, as finite and distinctive entities, tend to displace other traits that are of a similar (analogously or homologously) character.

The kind of complex equilibrium I build on this can be said to be based upon and derived from the Lotka-Volterra model of competition theory, where, for any two coexisting traits, trait complexes, and by inference cultural systems, T₁ and T₂, there will tend to be a competitive relationship of displacement of traits where the occurrence and frequency of one will at some point be traded off in terms for the occurrence or frequency of the alternate, and the following kinds of non-linear relationships may be applied:

dN₁/dt =r₁N₁[K₁ - N₁ - a N₂]

dN₂/dt =r₂N₂[K₂ - N₂ - b N₁]

Where K in either case can be said to be a complex equilibrium derived from the equilibrium expression above, where N is the frequency of occurrence of a particular trait or complex, a and b are the respective rates of character displacement occurring between the two traits, r is the rate of replacement or reproduction of a trait, and t is the time period in question, and d is the rate of loss associated with a trait.

Various extensions of this basic set of equations can be adopted from ecology dealing with predator-prey interactions and competition theory, as well as with various models of commensalism and population dynamics. These abstract equations may have particular reference to human group patterning of cultural systems in time and place.

The problem with such equilibrium theory applied to archaeological contexts is that equilibrium is so complex and underdetermined that it becomes virtually impossible to interpret in relation to any specific site. There is no saying for instance whether one trait will completely or only partially displace another, or even if displacement is directly occurring between two traits, or that there might not be a third intermediate but unknown set of factors occurring. We cannot clearly distinguish if a trait has been necessarily borrowed or inherited, or what its constructive or destructive consequences may have been. Even if we could, it would be difficult to affix values or weights or even uncertainty factors to such formula. Implicit to the use of such formula is that the numbers we plug in would be frequency counts of traits and or features in some combination. Alternatively, we could plug in correlational coefficients, especially if we were doing inter-site comparison. Still, any such approach would be based upon presuppositions that would be virtually impossible to empirically verify.

Any site represents a process. Deposition is a process that does not occur as a single event, but over time that is quite variable. From the moment an artifact is deposited into a site context, natural depositional processes, including the handiwork of other people, come into play. The older the deposition, the longer such processes have had a chance to work their magic. The result is a natural conflation of natural depositional events with what can be construed as original cultural depositional events. Even "original" cultural depositional events were often not singular, but also represent a phase of a series of events that may or may not necessarily be related. It is impossible to completely separate the noise from the clutter, unless this can be filtered by inter-site parallax.

Correspondence or correlation between sites is the only method we have yet of firmly distinguishing what can be considered as cultural from otherwise natural process. We stand as archaeologists, also participating in the depositional disturbance of the original context, at the end of a very long phase of time during which the site acquired its current deposition.

In a sense, the archaeologist always comes at the terminus of an archaeological depositional cycle. The archaeologists attempts to see through or over the mountain of the data to infer what was on the other side that led to the depositional consequences that are observable. The first task is to sort possible information into three categories resembling the general phases of this cycle. The second task is to compare the evidence and interpretation of such a site with any other possible site that may be of interest on some level.

Such formulaic approaches must be used with caution when it concerns the problem of culture historical transmission, change and development, as these kinds of abstract equations belie a tremendous complexity of human motivation, action and response in the world. It can be seen that cultural transmission and change is always continuous and underdetermined, leading to chaotic results. In general, rates and modes of cultural transmission and change are much faster and more variable than the use of an ecological or biological model would suggest. They would overlay rates of human population increase and loss in any given area, and the proviso must be remembered as well that people are only partially dependent upon and therefore relatively independent from the traits and cultures that they may possess at any one time. Individuals may pass back and forth between different cultures, just as traits do, and these are related but separate processes.

8. It is possible to develop a complex kind of interpretive and occurrence, frequency or correlational based calculus based upon the hypothetical equilibrium relationships identified in 5 and 6 above. In general, we can say for instance that endogenous changes tend to be an dependent variable in relation to exogenous change, which can be said to be an independent variable. Groups attempt to control sources of exogenous change in order to maintain the stability and variability of patterning of internal change.

a. Vertical transmission tends to be endogenous and conservative of basic traits.

b. Horizontal transmission tends to be exogenous and dynamic of elaborated traits.

b. The greater the degree of exogenous change in relation to the degree of endogenous change, the more deeply affected and rapid the change will occur, and the more destructive the patterns of change are likely to be.

c. The greater the distance in time, place, or social development between two groups, the greater the resulting differential and potential dynamic of change between the groups.

From both an ethnological and archaeological standpoint, this model rests upon our definition and determination of what an " cultural trait" may consist of. In general, a trait may be said to be any "thing" existing as a phenomenon that has unique and characteristic form intrinsic to itself and that can be determined by at least two or more distinctive features or characteristics that can be said to be determinative of or cardinal to that form. A basic cognate may be considered a "trait," a certain belief, and a material artifact, such as a stone implement or a pot.

a. Traits are polythetically determined things definable by their distinctive features.

b. Similar or related traits cohere into broader classes based upon the degree of similarity of form as determined by common features.

c. Different but associated traits cohere into "systems" based upon interfunctional or symbolic relationships.

d. In general, such systems are indicative of cultural patterning upon some level.

e. Cultural traits are transmissible, either in whole or in part (i.e., as a thing or object, or as a distinctive feature of a thing).

In understanding what is a cultural trait, it must be distinguished from what it is not in terms of its symbolic differential.

a. A cultural trait is not person. People make things, think things, use things and eventually discard things into the ground. Traits do not make people.

b. A cultural trait is not a culture or a group. A trait does not stand for a culture or a group unless we wish it to be so. A cultural trait is a part of some culture but in an inherently complex and underdetermined manner. The same trait may be shared by different cultures, and the same culture may come to have different traits.

c. A cultural trait is an empirically definable datum, but it is not a concept or class or category, or even a "fact" if such a fact is an attribution of truth value or some other quality extending beyond the thing itself. It is the thing for which the name or concept stands, but not the name or concept itself that we, as researchers, bring to the trait. It is treated in a factual or factive manner only in so far as it can be said to be objectively real as a basic and identifiable "thing in itself."

In this regard, traits may be said to have multiple dimensions that can be assigned to them, and to exhibit attributes of these dimensions. The same trait therefore can be differently classified according to the dimensions that it is fit into and the attributes we derive from it. The dimensional analysis of traits can be said to be theory or context driven, and is a separate issue from the feature analysis of traits. Dimensional analysis can be said to be the emic features of a trait, while feature analysis can be said to consist of the etic features of a trait. Dimensional analysis is no less interesting or important than feature analysis, but in general it is context dependent and also dependent upon informants who can qualify the dimensions. What a trait may mean to one person is not the same thing as to what it may mean to somebody else.

Cultural traits can be said therefore to provide us an empirical hook onto cultural reality, a hook that should be in theory at least partially countable and therefore partially determinative. This hook is never non-relative, but in its purest and most unbiased form it can be seen to be based upon common statistical measures of presence and absence, frequency and relational contextuality.

The other critical relationship in the cultural model presented above is the relationship of people to the cultural traits that they transmit and carry and elaborate. People are not isomorphic to the cultural traits they may be related to. The relationship between people and culture traits are largely what can be called correlational and complementary, rather than as being directly causal or deterministic. The correlative aspects of culture and people entails that we may exam apparent relationships and patterns of variation between trait patterns and the inferable people patterns in a manner that is somewhat short of an actual causal history of events. It is clear that people depend upon culture and cultural context in basic and important ways. It is at the same time true that the relationship between people and culture is to some extent arbitrary and nondeterministic. Further, we can say that the expression of culture trait pattern depends very much upon the people who are the bearers and makers of these patterns. The definition of culture that I have elaborated above situates the focus and locus of culture squarely upon the human being in a larger culture historical context. We might call it an individualistic conception of culture history.

I would seek in the artifactual evidence of sites similar kinds of patterning that I find in my symbolic framing tasks as I have elicited these to different people, as both represent in alternative forms the same basic aspects of the symbolic mediation of human behavior. Whether we find evidence of the symbolic substrate of human culture in Rorschach inkblots or in the design patterns of potsherds, it is clear that very similar cognitive processes produced both forms of behavioral response. People demonstrate these kinds of relational patterns repeatedly, regardless of their intentionality structures and the unintended consequences of their lives. Of course, the former kind of archaeological evidence is usually silent and incapable of speaking clearly for itself, and its makers or producers are therefore most often anonymous and forgotten.

People are both constructive and destructive, and when they follow either trajectory, there is a certain expectability about their behavior and its outcomes. Of course, house pattern for one place and period will be substantially different from the house pattern for some other place or period, but wherever we find people we can expect to find some kind of living arrangement that we can characterize loosely as a "house pattern" or "style." Similarly so with almost any other kind of human cultural characteristic or feature. We can derive a basic list of all those features of human culture that can be said to be universally evident. We can divide these lists into polythetic traits or distinctive features arranged in a paradigm equivalent to that used in descriptive linguistics. We can develop a grid of these features that would allow us to place all different peoples with a unique profile upon this grid. This in a sense is derived from the culture area method, but I believe the constructive underpinnings of the system can be rendered more explicit in a detailed manner that foregoes any presumptions about cultural boundaries in time or place. We can add to this list those complementary features that may serve to distinguish one culture from all others beyond the profiles of their basic features.

This seems to me essentially what an archaeologist is doing when they hit upon an occupation site that might be characterized by at least a handful of different features.

Of course the utility of such a method for archaeologists is severely constrained by the limited range and extent of artifacts and relational patterns found in any particular location. The major preoccupation of such an approach in Archaeology would therefore be the external relation of evidence between sites, and not the internal evidence within a site. Such a method would depend therefore upon the quantity as well as quality of archaeological site development within any given area.

Extending this system, I think that it is possible to apply more systematic and exhaustive methods of cross-correlational analysis that would cross not only archaeological boundaries of time and place, but reach across disciplinary boundaries of interest and "object" of inquiry. The correlation of physical anthropological, archaeological, linguistic, cultural and symbolic evidence in the case of the peopling of Oceania and the connections to Southeast Asia is a fitting example of this kind of larger approach.

Cross-correlational or intercorrelational analysis is useful and interesting for several reasons. First, it permits the determination of hidden patterns or 'structures' of relationship within complex data sets that are not otherwise evident, in a manner relatively independent of "analyst bias" or any arbitrary construct except that used in the organization of the data in the first place. Secondly, it permits us to cross data types, mixing apples and oranges, with a presupposition of an underlying structural similarity or systemic unity. Thirdly, there is, in relation to human systems in general, a presupposition of cultural ordering processes that can partially account for the occurrence, frequency and arrangement of evidence of any form or type. Homology can possibly be inferred from such methods as well, if distinct like "basic" and "derived" traits can be reliably distinguished. Cross-correlational analysis appears to work at a level and definition of data-type that is most suitable for human systems analysis especially, and it can be adapted to fit all forms of statistically defined data types. Finally, this form of analysis appears to be quite compatible with what can be called a naturalistic organization of human knowledge systems as these are found to occur and function in the world, both in terms of the cognitive function of the human mind, and in terms of the cultural reproduction and social distribution and articulation of this knowledge.

Beyond this is the symbolic substrate of human understanding that all people are prone to follow in one form or another. Even rudimentary stone tools can be said to have some kind of symbolic value to those who made and used them and eventually discarded or lost them to the ground. This symbolic value is inherent to the knowledge framework that permitted these individuals to make and use these implements in the first place, and this makes its import unavoidable and invaluable. When we gaze upon a finely carved Venus figurine, we must marvel at its exquisite execution and natural anthropomorphic style. We ask ourselves what such a thing would mean to ourselves, and we conjecture what it might have meant to those who first owned such a "fetish." It represented some kind of life lived by an actual person. We cannot say what that life was like exactly, but we can guess at some of the things it was not like. It was probably not like life as we ourselves know it, except perhaps in the most basic of senses. Perhaps conjecture is the best we can do in this regard.

In the course of my own methodological development over the past 16 years, I have borrowed from culture history and anthropology extensively in what I have called ethnocultural methods that are applied ethnologically to the description and understanding of diverse groups of people in the world. I would suggest the development of a total or comprehensive context of interpretation by which to frame the particular evidence of a site. This would include interdisciplinary interests and knowledge as well as that material information that is directly or indirectly associated with a particular provenance. Even what a particular provenance may actually be in the finer sense may mean something more or less different to different observers or from borrowing different methods--provenance may be in fact a phase or a point or a situation or even an event, more than a depositional context. The challenge of context, as Ben Ami Sharfstein has written, is its methodological dilemma. The total context in the largest sense is what would relate a particular site as a natural phenomenon that occurs upon multiple levels of integration simultaneously. We can speak of the depositional pattern, containing in itself a variety of environmental and ecological evidence. We can tie this to a larger geographical or geological context that can be framed within a wider region. We can attempt to infer historical or broader prehistoric context from our evidence, which would then be said to be "implicit" to this evidence (i.e., something we inferred and presumed to be true).

Complementarity of knowledge is important to this concern with archaeological context. Niels Bohr likened the complementarity of explanation in relativity theory and the uncertainty principle applied to atomic phenomena with the complementarity of experience and explanation of relative psychological and cultural realities (1939, 1958). Complementarity of perspective allows the development of more sophisticated systems that transcend the dialectics that result from dichotomous types of answers about reality. Such a perspective would allow us to tie together in a non-exclusive and non-contradictory manner not only multiple perspectives derived from multiple archaeological sites, but also multiple points of view concerning the same sets of sites. Ethnocultural studies as I have developed these in relation to various peoples, demonstrate clearly the utility and value of such a complementarity of approach to the development of a comprehensive context in the understanding of human realities that can be brought to focus on the ground, so to speak. Ethnocultural studies themselves situate theoretically within a larger paradigm of human systems theory, that is itself nestable within an even more comprehensive paradigm of natural systems theory. At the same time, from a methodological standpoint, it is capable of being eclectic and integrative in utilizing a broad range of different methods and operational approaches to the problem of ethnocultural understanding and knowledge systems. I would not any longer approach ethnographic description or ethnological research in any other manner than that that has been developed through ethnocultural studies. But at the same time I would and have attempted to systematically extend these kinds of studies in a wide number of ways, incorporating an eclectic body of both qualitative and quantitative methods to the task of understanding the context and story of a people as they are situated in a larger frame of time and place.

In closing this overwrought essay, it is my general observation that archaeology and anthropology need culture history as a part of both their working and theoretical knowledge. This is as true for cultural anthropologists as it is for archaeologists. Archaeology and cultural anthropology in the Americanist tradition have been intertwined and interdependent from the beginning. This sense of culture history must be refined and sensitive to its own strengths and weaknesses as a methodology, and does not preclude but incorporates a firm scientific methodology. Culture history as a relativistic theoretical paradigm is not the same as culture history as a methodological approach to knowledge acquisition and evaluation (i.e., research and scholarship). The strengths of this approach, are in fact the source of its weaknesses as well. It is quite true that the recognition of the relativity of knowledge is knowledge in itself that allows for a more precise and realistic evaluation of the information at hand. The science of culture and history can never be what the science of physical reality or biology has been. It has its own methods and its own sense of uncertainty that it must deal with. It is true that the science of culture and history stands much closer to the humanities than to the mathematically driven natural sciences, and such mathematical rigor will never be the strength of these fields of inquiry. Culture and history necessarily come to close in its knowledge to ourselves, to the human being, as unpredictable and willful creatures that we are, to permit the kind of atomic resolution we find with chemistry or even the molecular resolution of biology. Interpretive parallax is too great, the data too complex and underdetermined, the results too uncertain, to always resist precise formulaic explanation in a manner that yields a coherent set of universal principles or laws. Lacking the precision of the natural science fields, the human sciences are thereby no less scientific or interesting. They refer to a different level of natural phenomena in the world, a level at which humans themselves have had a critical influence in shaping.

Historical or prehistoric frameworks are of necessity painted with a very broad brush. They are generalizing frames of reference that are only minimally anchored at a few empirical points to the ground. The dialectic of culture history in archaeology is therefore the conversation that is held between this general framework and larger context of history and prehistory, with the exact archaeological evidence, constructions and models that are as close to the ground as possible. The general framework and its articulation in the world is not the same thing as the conduct of archaeological research in and on the ground. Both depend upon one another for symbolic unification, legitimization and a sense of research direction, but they are in fact separate problems and each line of inquiry has its own issues.

The archaeological site remains the basic research unit of archaeology that defines this field as a science. It represents both the standard frame of reference and the unit of analysis for archaeological research. In my own mind, I would assert that any archaeological site comprises a unique metasystem that must be understood as thoroughly and accurately as possible both in its own terms, and in terms of its larger archaeological context, which would include at some level culture historical reconstruction of past events. As a metasystem, a site cannot be approached in an exclusively analytical manner that focuses only on key defining traits to the neglect of other possible information contained in a site. A metasystem is a complex concatenation of natural events that exhibits some underlying sense of structural order or pattern. Even the archaeologists own relationship with the site becomes a part of the history of the site and its process. There is associated with any metasystem, of any kind or order, features of uncertainty of knowledge about the system either as a whole or in its various parts, and a necessary complementarity of observation and interpretation (or should I say, description and explanation?) In other words, archaeological sites are inherently, multidimensionally complex constructs. Such a metasystem can be inferred to be a part of other, larger scale systems at multiple levels, and in this way archaeological research at some level becomes interdisciplinary as well as inter-site, to the extent that it strives to develop a more general and comprehensive understanding that situates the site and its significance within a larger field of meaning.

It is true, as Clyde Kluckholn remarked, that to get at the psychic unity of humankind is to approach a level of understanding about human behavior and adaptive response that will permit us to arrive at some sense of cross-cultural and trans-historical substrate for meaning or structure that might be useful for anthropological and archaeological research. Butt such understanding is not exclusive of a relativistic framework for human reality, and is a long way from a periodic table of cultural elements or a mechanistic understanding of cultural dynamics. We will arrive at such a substrate when we better understand the human brain in its real social, evolutionary and biological context in which it arose and developed and found its adaptive function. Such understanding may tell us for instance how our archaeological predecessor, Mr. Flint Knapper, made his first tools. It may even reveal to us the complex reasons why he made them, but it will never tell us what he was thinking about when he made them, and what he did before and after he made them.

The relativity of culture history folds upon the complex question of time. Conventional cross-cultural or inter-site comparisons reflect a rather Euclidean geometry about the human landscape and a Newtonian mechanics about cultural process, but this does not explain to us the historical factors or processes that created the culture in the first place or that directed the culture in its own orchestral performance. The problem of time in culture history is not unlike the problem of time in Einsteinian relativity--time is relative to the frame of reference of the observer, and all things real seek their own geodesic trajectory. Transhistorical phenomena are not the equivalent of cross-cultural phenomena transposed through time, and the comparison of putatively contemporaneous cultures belies the complex history underlying all the differences and similarities. If we are to seek a transhistorical cultural explanation, or we are to seek cross-cultural realities, we are likely to find ourselves upon a trail of time with a convoluted sense of history that rises and falls, speeds up and slows down, in ways not evident by our calendrical time-lines. Unlike the physical geometry of time, its human geometry remains as much an emic as it is an etic phenomenon. There are no regular rates or constants to apply to culture historical time--change is continuous and continuously variable. This is important to consider from the standpoint of archaeology or anthropology as a science of human reality, as the determination of causality that is the basis of a conventional Newtonian science and the experimental platform for all scientific method becomes impossible to make in any certain or precise way.

Towards Synthetic Cultural Models of Human Systems

In this last section, it is my interest to address the role of archaeological and anthropological inquiry, especially in regard to the implications of Lewis Binford's work, in relation to the elaboration of what I would consider a more comprehensive paradigm of human systems theory, that is part and parcel of a modified scientific paradigm of natural systems theory.

I wish to propose the use of a synthetic-analytic (or dialectic) model of culture that is the consequence of the resulting dialectic between structuralist thesis as represented for instance by Binford's analytical models of culture, and the counter-thesis of post-structuralist critique, and in particular, the problem of what can be called the "construction and reification of the concept of culture" and hence its naturalization as a scientific model. Cultural anthropologists and Archaeologists have always worked with the presupposition that culture is a reality that can be represented by material or behavioral or social patterning. Lost in the definitions of culture that have been employed by those who study its patterning and evidence is the recognition or realization that "culture" whether in part or in whole, is a concept or an attribute that is largely ascribed to a certain sense of order or pattern that is found in the data. Culture is an interpretative framework that the student of culture brings to the evidence, whether this is archaeological or ethnological.

This is the reason that there is so little exact empirical or epistemological agreement as to the definition of culture. Once a definition has been decided upon, the "naturalization" of our cultural model through the linguistic rationalization of its empirical patterning is in a sense a self-assured outcome. We posit to the evidence we attribute to "culture," whoever anecdotal or analogical this may really be, a kind of natural "facticity" and we call this doing good science. This is not to say that the definitions of culture that its students and scholars have used and applied are all rubbish. Each has some merit, even if this insight is at best only metaphorical.

In the recent science and anthropology wars, what is lost sight of frequently is that both sides may be right, and both sides may be construed by the other as wrong at the same time. What is lost sight of as well by both sides is that the social construction of reality theorists were originally aiming at an objective and scientific view of social organization and process, and to a great extent achieved this. Furthermore, social constructionism as this is applied sociologically, psychologically and anthropology, rests fundamentally upon a functionalist and structuralist model of human social organization and culture. That the original meanings and purpose of these theories were lost sight up and to some extent corrupted by those who had little understanding or concern with their consequences, mostly by humanists who were concerned primarily with the critique and hermeneutical interpretation of literature, often with a political or at least an egotistical or ethnic axe to grind, led to their incautious and ridiculous employment in the "deconstruction" of everything that remotely smacked of science. The natural reaction of those who were genuine scientists has been one of blanket rejection and a kind of collective nausea directed towards those who they see as interfering with their efforts to do good work.

I have been developing natural systems theory for the previous two years, and it has been a natural outgrowth of the dissertation work described above that was completed by the end of 1995. Science in a modern sense is primarily interested in naturally or experimentally occurring systems, at whatever level they happen upon. A system can be said to consist of any non-random and self-contained organization of natural phenomena that achieves holistic integration, expression of emergent properties, and that endures in an isomorphic sense for some period of time that would defy stochastic process or chance determination.

Natural systems stratify in patterning in an ordered and regular manner, by scales of size and derivative complexity. This stratification of natural systems can be said to be a central dogma of natural systems theory. The fundamental relativity of natural systems includes the fact that any naturally occurring system, say a culture, can be described at multiple levels of analysis at the same time, though each description would be fundamentally different than any of the others.

While all natural systems share design features of structure and process that can be said to be isomorphic or at least analogous, it is evident as well that all natural systems are stratified upon multiple levels of integration and function, and these levels of stratification are defined by complex and derivative "determinants" or "cardinals" that are expressed as emergent properties at that particular level. The consequence is that natural systems theory must search for and develop what can be called comprehensive theories that apply to the general orders and levels of natural stratification, and that the theories that are applicable directly at one level or order, as for instance physical or biological levels, are not applicable in any direct sense to a higher order of integration and function where different emergent properties exist and lower level properties are merely subsumed. Another way of saying this is that the complete behavior and structure of an order of natural patterning cannot be sufficiently described or explained in only terms that are analytically reductionistic to the lower orders of subsystems composing that system. Each order will have its own distinctive set of properties, at its own scale of size and complexity, that will require therefore its own set of models and theories for explanatory understanding to occur. It is insufficient therefore to apply merely biological theory to human systems, even if human systems are natural biological populations, if the latter human systems are said to be culturally distinct from their biological substrate. We may reduce the study of human systems to a level of biology or even of physics, but we lose the important properties of cultural integration and patterning in the process of such reduction. Lower level processes and properties cannot be used to explain higher level processes and properties.

The development of natural systems theory therefore depends upon the competition of ideas and models at different levels and orders of reality. Most people are at least vaguely familiar with general relativity theory to which all physical systems apply. Similarly, most modern people must admit on some level to the validity of Darwinian evolutionary theory for biological systems. Darwinian theory has been the most comprehensive theory yet achieved in the sciences, and comprehensiveness or generality of a theoretical model is important in the understanding and framing of natural systems theory. Of course, from an anthropological and archaeological point of view, we are most interested in cultural and human systems theory. We can of course explain human systems as biological systems, but such an explanation would be inadequate to the definition of cultural systems which are the distinctive and key defining aspect of human systems patterning in general. The central question of the anthropological sciences therefore is the development of a comprehensive theory of cultural systems. This theory is not and cannot be based upon Darwinian evolution, just as much as it cannot be based upon or defined by the theory of General Relativity. Thus in the explication of natural systems theory at the level of human systems, we must seek therefore a comprehensive or "unified field" theory of culture (as systems, process, patterning) that is empirically non-contradictory and that satisfactorily accounts for all the different facets of human reality in a parsimonious manner. There is no expectation in such theoretical construction that it should have the mathematical precision obtaining in the physical sciences. It lacks even the explanatory elegance that can be found in the biological sciences. Nevertheless, it must be found and defined on its own terms, terms appropriate to the description and explanation of cultural patterning, wherever, whenever and however this is evinced or expressed.

General natural systems models that seek the design features and structural dimensions of systems common to all occurring systems, are not the same as the comprehensive models and theories that are found to be relevant at whatever level of natural stratification that we are dealing with. In other words, the model of a natural system as an abstract set of relations, transitions, information, forces and patterning, that is hypothetically applicable to any system at any level, provides at best only a general or global frame of reference by which the specific comprehensive models appropriate to a level or order of patterning of natural phenomena can be applied. We should not make the mistake of substituting the methods and procedures relevant to such an abstracted frame of reference, for the discovery of the principles and relations pertinent to a comprehensive theory at any given level of integration and stratification of reality. Doing so, as in the case of David Clark, represents a misapplication of frames of reference, and should not be done in lieu of development of a more concise and comprehensive theory of cultural systems in general.

I will state before proceeding, that the search for a general or unified theory of cultural systems, equivalent to the Darwinian theory of evolution in biology, concerns the concept and definition of culture centrally and in a general sense, and this concept should be sufficient to comprehend all aspects or kinds of cultural patterning that we may recognize, whether we adopt an anthropological or archaeological, or a psychological, or historical, or sociological or linguistic frame of reference. Another way of looking at this is to state that a unified theory of cultural systems will logically lead to and include an theory of human history, a theory of human psychology, a theory of human language, social organization, etc. Such a theory will also take into account human biology in a manner that is sufficient for understanding its relationship to cultural patterning.

The most comprehensive theory I have found so far that fits this billing is Berger and Luckmann's theory of The Social Construction of Reality. A careful exegesis of this central text reveals that it is an objectivist and functionalist model of socio-cultural reality that is framed within the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge. Though it achieves generality, it falls short of true comprehensiveness of human systems for failing to take into fuller account cross-cultural differentials of human systems and their patterning, or to explain change processes that may occur in a systematic manner. It has been an unfortunate history of interpretation after this text that this landmark piece in the social sciences has been construed as an attack on scientific objectivity in general, and not an effort to achieve greater scientific objectivity. I believe the text was used in an uncritical manner that misappropriated its central significance as a functionalist theory of social and human reality, for the sake of developing "post-structuralist" and deconstructionist perspectives that were fundamentally anti-scientific.

I have in my own research deliberately adopted a larger framework of the Anthropology of Knowledge (defined scientifically, free of post-modern bias) that concerns centrally the cross-cultural application of Berger and Luckman's central thesis, and the delineation of the related problems of knowledge organization, worldview, symbolization, and human cognition. This includes as well problems relating to human language, particularly semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. It is beyond the scope of this paper that is focused upon the excoriation of Binfordian archaeology, to develop completely this theoretical framework for human systems theory in general. It is necessary only at this stage to provide an outline of its general points, and to seek to apply this especially to an archaeological framework for the interpretation and analysis of cultural patterning.

All natural systems can be said to be defined by entropy relationships within a surrounding environment. Systems perform work to sustain order, and have a natural tendency towards disorder. Because such systems are complex, they can be said to be inherently underdetermined systems. Even well organized human systems can maintain order for only so long before overall tendencies towards increasing disorder catches up with them. All natural systems therefore have a typical bell shaped growth curve marked by their initial phases, growth, stasis and ultimate decline. Similarly, cultural systems, as forms of natural systems, can also be so characterized, and these reflect, as in the example of archaeology, the unimodal curves attributed to the principle of "popularity" which in relation to natural systems theory can be revised as the principle of "growth."

In general, all natural systems, including human systems, can be characterized by a model of non-linear, non-constant control factors. The general state path trajectories of such models can take one of four alternate forms: 1. Growing; 2. Decreasing; 3. Stability about a central point; 4. Instability in reference to more than one point. Populational dynamics of biological species are typically characterized in such a model, and so can cultural and social systems also be so characterized as: a. increasing; b. decreasing; c. converging; d. diverging.

The second pattern that appears common to complex systems are that modeled by a pendulum, or alternatively, what can be called an interharmonic periodic oscillator mechanism. This mechanism fits a more conventional model of a linear control function that results in positive and negative feedback controls, and fits a pattern of a trajectory that tracks along a linear pathway in the maintenance of a complex sense of equilibrium. The key to understanding equilibrium is the question of maintaining some sense of balance between forces, and in nature systems tend to obey Le Chatelier's principle, which states that any disturbance of equilibrium in one direction in a balanced system, will result in compensatory reaction by the system in the other direction to restore equilibrium or to resist disequilibriation.

The second important set of considerations of human systems, as natural systems, derives from the understanding that all systems are based upon subsystems, and give rise to supersystems that can be considered superorganic. In general, human systems are fundamentally biological systems, and thus all human systems must be fundamentally controlled by basic biological constraints that affect biological systems, these include primarily evolutionary and ecological kinds of constraints. Cultural systems are emergent systems built upon biological systems. They are not completely determined by biological systems because they are in themselves underdetermined systems, just as are the biological systems underlying them. But cultural systems are bound to the biological basics, and any society that fails to realize this constraint and overcome it is doomed to failure. We can adopt the Easter Island or Rapa Nui model as an example of a cultural based system that outstrips its own ecological and biological basis. It can be said that because in general cultural based adaptive systems, which are by definition human systems, are successful from a biological perspective, then tend to increase over time in terms of the biological basis, or biomass that it supports. This in general leads to both environmental and social circumscription over time. The human species has become a relatively K-selected species, and cultural selection tends to bring human social organization into relatively saturated ecosystems that are characterized by an elevated K and high, intensive social densities.

Cultural systems are based upon biological systems, but are not bound by these systems. Cultural systems function primarily upon forms of horizontal transmission of information (symbolically encoded) while all biological systems are bound to a vertical mode of transmission. Cultural systems therefore occur independently of the biological systems upon which they are based, and in general cultural change, like language change, happens at a much more rapid rate that basic forms of biological change. The concept of gene-culture coevolution is largely untenable, though in a larger frame of reference we may speak of biological and cultural coevolutionary systems through counteradaptations and metabiosis. Therefore, cultural historical patterns assume fundamentally different cycles and pathways than do natural biological histories. Biological change tends to be one way, or unidirectional, and once a species evolves into some form, in general it will not reverse itself back to some predecessorial form. On the other hand, cultural systems can experience loss and drift and complex patterns of acculturational shift that is not found in biological systems. All cultural systems by definition are naturally divergent as population increases. Cultural divergence is reflected, for instance, in dialectical divergence. Furthermore, unlike two different species, two or more different cultures, under the right conditions, can become amalgamated and fused or what is referred to as integration. Of course, competing cultural systems may behave very much like competing species, and through principles of mutual exclusion, will be led into a pattern of conflict.

Achievement and maintenance of equilibrium is important to all natural systems, especially those that are capable of long-term stability and endurance. It is clear that cultural systems that achieve long term adaptive success do so by means of the maintenance of equilibrium by means of feedback mechanisms. All equilibrium of naturally occurring systems can be said to be dynamic equilibrium, in that the equilibrium line is non-constant and remains continuously fluctuating.

In other words, and in short, we may say that all human systems are biological systems, but they are also something more than just biological systems--they are biological systems with a critical socio-cultural difference. We can ask a basic question of structuralist theories of culture that looks through their reification as systems of abstraction and misplaced concretization. Fundamentally, how can cultural systems be defined in a structurally overdetermined manner, if the biological systems upon which they are based and which constrain them in basic ways are themselves inherently complex, chaotic and stochastically underdetermined? It appears that to adopt linear kinds of models to explain what amounts to as non-linear and variable kinds of phenomena is to vastly oversimplify and overgeneralize about the actual history of such patterning in the first place.

The rise of cultural systems has led to the increasing importance of cultural selection factors influencing human adaptation and human evolution. In fact, Darwin derived the term natural selection from observations of selective breeding, or "cultural selection" of domesticated species. Cultural selection has been an important factor of human development for at least the last four million years, and this selective factor has been of increasing importance in the world, and cultural selection during this period of time has played an increasingly important part in shaping human evolution as well, rendering humankind a fundamentally culturally and symbolically dependent creature.

At the outset it can be said that all human systems of behavior and relation are fundamentally cultural systems. All things human are by definition cultural. It can even be argued that even our basest instincts and reflexes may be culturally conditioned in fundamental ways. There is nothing human that does not bear the stamp of cultural expression and the seal of symbolic realization. I have sought to give to the definition of culture an empirical foundation in anthropological and ethnographic reality, in a manner parallel to, and stemming from the same source as, Binford's definition of archaeologically definable cultures.

Systems theory involves something of an inherent dilemma, for this kind of thinking is primarily holistic and synthetic in orientation, though it invariably leads to analytical models of methodological operations. This paradox is more apparent than real, as synthetic and analytic approaches are in fact complementary to one another, in the same manner that the complementarity principle holds in physical realities of fundamental entities and processes. The criticism of the New Archaeology from the old-generation Pre-historians was, as in Jaquetta Hawke's John Danz lecture, nothing but and something more. An exclusive emphasis upon analytical reductionism, that an archaeological culture is nothing but the patterned relationships obtaining between its critical elements, which is the outcome of processual archaeology carried to its extreme, does lead to an unnecessary dichotomization of the world that interferes with the larger picture of comprehension and meaning in context.

Cultural equilibrium is a complex phenomenon. We may say that the primary balance must be maintained between socio-cultural elements on the one hand and natural elements on the other. Equilibrium must be found intraculturally between people, and extraculturally with the social environment. Social equilibrium must be maintained between different groups of people. There is also a sense of symbolic equilibrium that must be maintained by such a system, which equilibrium takes several different forms and functions in the cultural integration of human reality.

Cultural equilibrium theory is based, I believe, upon the maintenance of consistency in social relationships and in a senseof identity and persistence of pattern as this articulates upon various levels. Socially, I believe it to be based upon the establishment of some kind of system of reciprocity that orders and makes predictable social relations between people that might otherwise remain uncertain and therefore potentially dangerous. The requirement of establishment of reciprocity of relationships entails sharing of mutual frames of reference and expectation, and it involves, or rather leads to, patterns of horizontal cultural transmission.

Models of equilibrium often overlook a fundamental aspect of such design, and that is the tendency for systems in equilibrium to continuously oscillate about some trendline or norm, and this possibility for oscillation spells a range of adaptation and relative adaptability of a system over time in relation to environmental changes (which changes include intersocial relationships in human systems). Long-term oscillatory patterns often appear to represent periodic phases or cycles, and I believe represents the relative entropy that may be associated with a given system. Systems that oscillate very dramatically over the very long run would be indicative or diagnostic of systems that tended to be structurally unstable or to have a relatively high degree of entropy associated with its organizational foundation. These oscillatory cycles may define cycles within cycles, and may lead to differential patterning over time. Regular annual climate change represent a very stable form of oscillatory cycle to which all cultural systems must be adapted, and many calendrical ritual ceremonies reflect this requirement of these systems. These oscillatory cycles must be distinguished from longer-term or larger scale developmental trajectories that tell if any particular cultural system is in general rising or falling on the grand scale.

Models derived from advanced ecology theory are pertinent to the description of patterns of cultural equilibrium. That cultural reality is distributed and polythetic in its constitution entails that there are few clearcut, across the board boundaries between different kinds of people. The hardness and hence facticity of culture at that point breaks down into a fuzziness and uncertainty of distributed characteristics and trait profiles that tend to have fluid and relative boundaries.

The models I adopt from ecological theory to explain synthetic cultural patterning are those of the shifting mosaic steady state, dynamic succession, reciprocal replacement, climax, nonsuccessional fluctuation, and processes controlling community dynamics. To say that any given cultural context is in fact a complex community system that may articulate upon several levels simultaneously is to suggest that culture is essentially an historical phenomena that is made everyday by people on the ground.

We may thus describe the range and continuum of cultures as having few real or nonrelative boundaries, but existing in a range of clines and zonation patterns that themselves tend to be complex. The result is a dynamic mosaic topography of the distribution of cultures on the ground--a patterning that is well represented archaeologically after the fact.

A cultural community therefore is more than a collection of people sharing certain affinities of basic culture or an assemblage of artifacts linked by type or provenience. A community comprises an open system of relationships that connects into a larger social and symbolic universe. Individual people are its principle nodal points, its articulators. But people are not all the same. They are not all just "Dani" or "Pintupi" or "Hokkien" or "Cheyenne" or "American" because they are imputed to share a common culture pattern. Nor do they shape and concatenate the cultural variables and parameters that are a part of their life world and shape them in all the same way. This is clearly more evident in radically plural societies like Malaysia, and increasingly, the United States, than they are in societies like Korea, Japan or China that can be said to be greater than 98% ethnically monothetic.

It is clear in the case of Malaysia and America, with which I am ethnographically familiar, that there is a shared national culture and identity that links all Malaysians under a common umbrella and that sets the average Malaysia off against the Singaporean, the Thai, or the Indonesian. At the same time, it is well known that there are fundamental cleavages of race, ethnicity and religion (i.e., cultural cleavages) that separate a Malay from an Indian from a Chinese in Malaysia. We see in this patterning an internalized and socially embedded stratigraphy of culture that is complex and variable. Individuals in some settings can cross different kinds of boundaries, and utilize a facet of their composite cultural constitution, and then shift in other contexts into a completely different modality. This complex patterning is found and reflected linguistically as well as behaviorally and relationally. It is typified as well by an interesting kind of cognitive pluralism that defies simplistic description or the functional superimposition of uniform standards.

We describe a phenomenon of cultural succession to explain the rise of primary, secondary, and climax cultural communities that are based upon achieved levels of technology and social innovation. In other words, wherever culture takes place and in whatever guise or shape it takes, we can understand cultural development as automatically tending to pass through a series of stages of growth and structural reorganization. These patterns of succession are tied to community dynamics, relative densities, and what I believe can be called culturally eco-trophic niche adaptations. Even what can be called a cultural niche, if we look at it carefully, can boil down to a high degree of complexity, as for instance in the archaeological identification of Iroquois culture as being shared by a range of non-Iroquoian peoples. If a cultural system, as a dynamic community system is by definition heterotrophic and heterogeneous composed at the individual and familial level, and we can only best define such a system by means of polythetic systems of classification, then it becomes possible to intercorrelate trait associations across a broad suite of distinctive features, involving many variables, leading to a very mosaic and fragmented patterning of human reality as this may be layered upon the landscape as any particular phase of development.

Cultural succession, as a model, ties cultural development and its historical patterning into a more general model of cultural evolution, but this model of cultural evolution is not based upon or even borrowed from the classical Darwinian model of biological evolution, or the descent of species. A culture is not, and cannot be, a kind of species in the same way that a biological species can be defined by their reproductive isolation and genetic determination. Horizontal transmission and the fluid boundaries maintained by people entail that the tree of cultural evolution does not resemble the tree of natural biological evolution.

All viable cultures can be said to be by definition open community systems, and this openness is a fundamental part of their dynamic structure. They relate therefore to a larger field of cross-cultural relations, of communities within communities as these emerge and take shape across the human landscape. We might call therefore a "complex" a relatively stable cultural system that emerges and growths into a climax that lasts for a considerable period of time. We would associate such a complex with an archaeological horizon, I believe, and by a tradition as these were culture historically defined.

A closed cultural system is by definition a dead system. It is one that is bound for extinction just as a species that has hyperspecialized in one eco-tropic niche bounds itself to extinction. Cultural systems may come and go, but people survive and die. People may come and go, passing in and out of particular community systems, but the community systems in a corporate sense are larger than any individual who is a part of that system.

Cultural evolution is therefore best described by a model of "transculturation" which is an extension of a general model of acculturation, or horizontal transmission, and of innovation, upon which all cultural development is based. Transculturation involves what can be called the rise of "civilizations" as climax community systems. It also involves the diffusion and widescale adoption of new designs and devices that provide an adaptive advantage in survival to a group. The horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world is an inevitable historical outcome of the human community of nation-states and their players. It is just like the spread of silk, paper, gun-powder, the concept of zero, and the alphabet. People recognize the great utility value of having a bigger and better bomb in their arsenal of weapons.

In regard to the understanding of a synthetic cultural model within an archaeological frame of reference, we must ask what a cultural community system would look like within an archaeological context, when especially we have few if any people (actually just fossil remnants and a few mummies) to associate with the remains of sites, but we most only have the products and by-products of human behavior and activity. Correlational and frequency strategies of analysis are the only way of approaching this kind of problem, and this must always be done with an eye to the construction of a comprehensive frame of reference that incorporates and contextualizes all known sites and evidence as well as all possible sites and evidence waiting to be discovered and unearthed. It is the kinds of questions we ask of such information, such as "what was going on here that produced such and such a pattern," but we really have no certain way of giving a final, conclusive answer. Such a problem presents us with what we can call archaeological parallax, such that the same problem set may lead to multiple alternative solutions, without having any clear way of choosing between them. Binford appears to have wanted to take that extra step, that final leap of faith in the reliability of his own reasoning and methods, but, in lieu of further evidence that is still waiting in the ground, inductive inference must always fall short of conclusive proof or unequivocal, final determination. Is there any way out of this dilemma in archaeological knowledge. Beyond more careful excavation and recording of data, beyond new techniques of analysis and dating, and beyond the discovery of new sites and new artifacts and naturefacts, I believe there is no other way around the problem, except to learn to ask questions that are more sophisticated and interesting from a theoretical standpoint, and to ignore the kinds of questions that cannot finally be answered one way or another.

Cultural equilibrium can be defined as dynamic and historically complex. Its foundation is the adaptive survival of a group within a biologically defined context, but cultural selection entailed the emergence of a new set of processes and forces influencing subsequently human evolutionary development. Cultural patterning emerged historically that was increasingly independent of genetic modes of transmission. We can find at the center of human culture the function of a complex brain that is capable of abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and symbolic organization of experience and response. Cultural equilibrium therefore necessarily entailed, even from the beginning, a form of symbolic equilibrium that people maintained with their environment. It has entailed that, evolutionarily, humans have become both culturally and symbolically dependent creatures, if we define symbolic cognitive organization as the basis of human cultural organization, and if we define cultural patterning as shaping of a context, both internally in the worldview of humankind and externally in the material world of humankind. The evolutionary transition that marked the beginning and rise of humankind as a distinct species on earth was accomplished by a unique set of circumstances that led to the rise of consistent and enduring cultural contexts or culturally defined surroundings within which people normally operated.

Cultural equilibrium arises from the natural human proclivity for adaptive survival and reproductive success. The general success of cultural patterns of adaptation has entailed that human communities would coalesce over time into contexts of increasing socio-environmental saturation lead to circumscription and what can be called supercomplexity. As such community systems developed, the emphasis of adaptive survival and reproductive success tends to shift away from natural environmental concerns and increasingly towards socio-environmental issues. For most of human history, humankind all around the world has tended to live in contexts and communities that can be described a socio-environmentally saturated and where the emphasis is towards social competition and the organization of social behavior leading to equilibrium between people. Social competition must always be construed in relationship to its complement, social cooperation. Often for groups to compete effectively, they must organize themselves into coalitional structures in relation to other groups. The result is what Bateson has described as schismogenesis and what I have referred to in contemporary contexts as ethnoschismogenesis. I have therefore hypothesized as the basis for a general theory of human social process what I have called the "social competition hypothesis." The problem archaeologically defined, once again, is to find clear and unequivocal evidence for such social competition in the ground.

Cultural Systems as Ecosystems of Functional Adaptation

From an archaeological and anthropological point of view, it is quite useful to adopt the perspective of human populations, culturally mediated, upon a natural landscape, occupying specific adaptive niches, and modify and in time creating for themselves new niches. It is useful to apply the models and concepts derived from animal and plant ecology to an understanding of human socio-cultural patterning. The study of animal competition and interaction is particularly insightful to the organization of humans and their interactive behavior. It is clear that the evolutionary connotations or natural selection factors of this competition have been largely obviated by the role that cultural adaptation has played human survival and reproductive success. The basis of the social competition hypothesis as I have stipulated this is that humans tend in relatively saturated contexts towards increased within group and between group competition for both scarce resources and for reproductive advantage. To a great extent, though the motivating factors behind this resource competition are virtually identical to those factors that motivate animal behavior in the natural world, human patterns are fundamentally different because these relations have been fundamentally mediated by symbolic transformation of stimuli and response processing which entails compensatory displacement of both stimulus and reponse and the channeling, sublimation and constructive/destructive manipulation of this libidinal energy and drive towards other aims. Cultural conditioning therefore accomplishes through processes of enculturation and socialization the constructive or at least non-destructive integration of the individual into the normal structure of the system.

The basic drives that any cultural system must satisfy upon a biological level are the requirements of feeding and breeding, or what can be called the requirements of production and reproduction. Because these processes are symbolically mediated, and symbolic expression always takes a material and functional form, the cultural system includes as a part of its fundamental agenda not just the biological productivity and reproductivity of the group, but the problem as well of the symbolic, behavioral and material reproduction of the cultural system itself. It follows that the archaeological record should reflect, if nothing else, patterns of food-getting and patterns of group reproductive activity, as well as other symbolic and material productive interests.

At the same time, behind the symbolic veil of any cultural system can be found interpersonal and intergroup competition for resources, symbolically defined and mediated, such that frequently such competition will lead to interference competition, scramble competition, monopolization and induced dispossession of resources between people. Social stratification is a means of controlling and segregating groups into unequal identities that serves to preserve the differential in resource acquisition occurring between the two groups. Socialization patterns will always be such as to reinforce these kinds of social differentials between groups. Regardless of established social institutions, individuals and groups continue, out of necessity, to compete for scarce resources, as well as for those culturally and symbolically defined resources which may be artificially defined. There is no reason not to assume some form of interpersonal competition and cooperation and intergroup stratification occurring from fairly early times in the human fossil record, perhaps at the time of Australophithecus afarensis, up until today. Institutional incorporation can be considered to be the symbolic formation of enduring coalitional structures that stem from ritually organized patterns of interpersonal networks and relationships.

The eco-evolutionary model I have developed to explain the basic cultural system that was adopted and later refined by the hominid line must be accounted for in terms of the adaptive capacity of such cultural traits that permitted humankind to achieve niche expansion, adaptive generalization, and subsequent niche diversification that led to successive adaptive radiations.

Primitive, Intermediate and Advanced Cultural Systems and the Concept of Dynamic Cultural Succession and Selection

A primitive cultural system may be said to be a basic cultural system. Its primary focus will be upon an direct environmental tehnoculture that permits its adaptive survival in terms of food-getting strategies. Certain features may be associated with such a level of cultural development. We may associate with such a level characteristic features of animistic religion and beliefs in spirits, emphasis upon shamanistic ritual, acephalous political organization, concrete, iconographic context bound use of language, a restrictive grammar and limited lexicon, the lack of contexts for sophisticated intellectual development that can be defined by eidetic and undifferentiated patterns of response. Any human being born into such a context would adopt the patterns characteristic of this cultural level, regardless of their inherent intellectual capacity for development. We may typify such a culture in a basic sense as fundamentally an "oral" society.

An advanced cultural system can be said to be technologically sophisticated in every way. These systems will be characterized by relatively high population densities, incorporation of broad regions of ecologically diverse resources, complex stratification, development of systems of communication, etc.

Between these two extremes, we may recognize a range of alternate configurations upon a continuum of cultural development. Intermediate cultural systems may be characterized by their relative levels of development in the various aspects or areas of their patterning.

It is unfortunate that "primitive" like "fossilized" has taken a pejorative bias in anthropological literature as denoting a Eurocentric condescension of other people who may be relatively undeveloped in terms of economy, etc.. I use "primitive" in this context to connote only in an objective manner what I construe to be the developed features and characteristics of an "undeveloped" cultural system in the manner that we might construe the early proto-culture of Homo habilis to be relatively undeveloped compared to that of the Neanderthal culture of Central Europe at a later period of human evolution. I would comparatively characterize the culture of the Australian aborigine as this has developed over the past 50,000 years and as this existed before Western contact as "primitive" compared to the culture of the Chinese peoples of mainland China as this developed over the past 5,000 years. The contrast between the Chinese cultural system and the aboriginal one of central Australia is an important one to make, and we might compare both these systems to an intermediate development of cultural systems for instance in the New Guinea highlands over the previous 20 to 30,000 years or alternative within the Southeast Asian or Oceanic context over the past 2 or 3,000 years.

In setting up this developmental sequence, which resonates the traditional formula of primitive, barbarian and civilized, what I am really doing is positing a kind of theoretical-hypothetical baseline by which to gauge the subsequent development. I am also setting up a contemporary historical horizon, from which one may backtrack. Thus, what is really "primitive" goes only back to our own models of anthropogenesis (mostly just so stories) that we like to speculate about in regard to the rise of the hominid line and human culture. What really references "civilized" is our own contemporaneous, post-modern global culture with the Internet, the atomic bomb and Moslems carrying anthrax vials. Everything between the first "then" and "now" can be characterized as "intermediate" and hence marked as so many "phase transitions" or stadial sequences that line up in some archaeologically chaotic manner.

If I went back to a model of anthropogenesis, I would have to push the story to at least the time of Lucy and the Laetoli footprints. What evidence supports a thesis for the rise of primitive culture at this time? We find now Chimpanzee groups elaborating primitive cultural patterning in the forests of Africa today. My contention in this thesis is that the two patterns of feeding and breeding, the eco-evolutionary imperative of humankind, created the conditions for the rise of the first protocultural manifestations.

The best model I can come up with is that from this period or sometime just before, the main hominid line was a single evolutionary sequence marked by several distinctive features and always centered in the periphery of the dark heart of Africa. Early precultural hominids were adaptive generalists who were capable of rapid niche expansion and resource diversification strategies. If we ask ourselves from a common sense point of view (or perhaps from a San bushman's bird's eye view) what knowledge is necessary to survive in the African bush without the benefit of modern technology, then we can find the answer in terms of archaeological systems for the rise of prototypical human culture. I would assert that the line ran continuously, if somewhat crookedly, from an Australopithecus precursor, through Homo habilis, to Homo erectus, through Archaic Homo sapiens, including a heterozygous type of Homo neanderthalensus, into the modern Homo sapiens sapiens line. This always was focused in certain regions of Africa, and these transitions marked by the rise of these paleoanthropological types define conditions of bottle-necking that periodically occurred due to rapid population die-off.

There were apparent at least three or four widespread adaptive radiations, and maybe more if we are willing to risk pushing the hominid line back to Sivapithecus, Ramapithecus and Gigantopithecus. More likely, a Proconsul precursor lead to some as yet unidentified type of which these three dispersive creatures were divergent representatives, and this constituted the first adaptive radiation that could be tied to the significant evolutionary accomplishment of semi-bipedalism. Even I would not fully discount repeated stories of Yeti or Sasquatch as being the survival in remote areas of an evolved "Kulture flieren" Gigantopithecus, who had more to fear from competition with Grizzlies and Panda bears than from their hominid cousins.

Returning to the main-line, we find Australopithecus, Homo Erectus and Archaic Homo and Modern Homo sapiens widely distributed, each time further and further abroad. We find a continuous transformation of these lines, with numerous off-shoots that were invariably evolutionary failures, in isolated pockets or regions here and there. Evolutionary failure of overspecialized subvarieties tended to create ecological vacuums that would subsequently be filled by new and improved cousins from the African heartland. Remnants of the older groups would be either further marginalized or else simply swamped out and reabsorbed. This may even have been a rather continuous process occurring through the last four million years.

This bespeaks a model of a shifting or oscillating steady-center theory that had its main range in eastern, northern and southern Africa. Successive adaptive radiations from this central ecological zone of the hominid line was based on the capacity for continuous niche shift and niche expansion based upon the following eco-evolutionary principles:

1. cultural adaption conferred selective advantage in a general sense.

2. success in the central regions resulted in continuous out-migration

3. bottlenecking due to climatological and long-term environmental shifts tended to circumscribe and bottle-neck the central zone, always favoring the generalist mode of adaptation.

4. subsequent and derivative specializations followed the principle "specialization leads to extinction"

5. groups bound for extinction suffered loss of environmental equilibrium, fall off of population, and would result in niche vacuums that would be subsequently filled by other peoples.

6. Remnants would be marginalized or reabsorbed.

This basic model fits all subsequent cultural development and populational patterns of the hominid line, with new oscillating centers becoming established in the later part of hominid history (i.e. the Americas, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe)

Another possible conclusion of this is that for any given range of adaptive radiation of the hominid line, the level of cultural development permitted fundamental horizontal transmission that permitted the integrity of both gene and "meme" exchange. In other words, we would expect to find relative heterogeneity and clinal zonation patterns that are quite variegated at any global phase or horizon of human development.

Eco-evolutionary principle also dictates another principle that was probably applicable to the hominid line, and that is "competitive exclusion." It is likely that new groups entering regions tended to push out or else destroy the previous occupants of an area, appropriating whatever resources that could be appropriated in the process--this would include reproductive resources. This process is an extension of the concept of cultural evolution that was primary horizontal rather than vertical, and would have served to maintain the central homogeneity of the hominid line over time.

What are the likely rates of this process? If we look at rates of human generation time, it is approximately 36 generations per 1000 years at this time. It was probably more like an average of 68-75 generations per 1000 years up until the Neolithic, at which time it tended to shift, and continues to shift, into today. The rates may even have been more rapid during the time of Australopithecus, if we take into account the small body size, shortened periods of post-partum dependency, more rapid rates of neotonous development. The average birth number per mother would probably have been an amazing 12 to even 16 per generation, though it is expected that rates of infant mortality may have been greater than 50% and at least 33% during most of human evolution. This would have meant that population growth rates of Australopithecines were greater than they were for subsequent hominid lines, and this would have exerted greater pressure on the environment for growth.

One central question I would ask in this regard would be what was the rate of average replacement of older populations by new populations over time. First, this rate would have decreased over time. Secondly, we can estimate that a population inhabiting a central and accessible area (age area hypothesis) would be faster on average than in a contemporaneous but more remote area. Accessible areas would favor heterogeneity, horizontal transmission, niche generalization, higher r-K shift, spin-off migration, rapid turnover, transition and replacement. Remoter areas would favor slower rates, niche specialization, increasing bottle-necking and loss of heterogeneity, supersaturation, environmental degradation, and eventual extension to the creation of a niche vacuum.

In the sense of evolutionary history, I would say that an average rate of replacement would be on the order of every 1 to 2 thousand years, at the most. It can be expected therefore that human populations were continuously radiating outwardly every few generations. The rates may have even been of the order of a few centuries during the earliest phases. In other words, in any given area that was occupied by hominids, complete gene-cultural replacement could be expected to occur regularly anywhere from a few centuries to a few millennia time frame. If we set this average to 1000 years, we could see that this process recurred over the past 4,000,000 years something on the order of four thousand times (and probably much more.) What we get is a variegated mosaic pattern of continuous occupation that oscillated and expanded like tides. Any given local context would be fairly rapidly replaced and changed out over time, on average, but the entire system would retain its overall continuity over time, due to the growing influence of cultural equilibrium, or cultural-K.

We can surmise from this a kind of formula that would relate the likelihood of survival in any depositional context per 1000 year period with the number of known fossil cases, and from this we can derive an estimate of original population cases. If we speculate the odds of any particular fossil surviving to be later excavated as being 1 in 1,000,000, then it would take on average at least a million (an probably more) miscellaneous death events to produce a single viable archaeological specimens. The fact that more specimens are found in caves suggests that this statistic be amended in favor of the preservation characteristics of cave-like formations. That so many Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and Homo erectus are found in caves suggests not only that cave dwelling became for at least the last million years a preferred mode of adaptation, but that hominids deliberately sought and found in their world environments those contexts that permitted the survival and development of their cultural adaptations.

The question I would ask in this regard is how many Australophithecine fossils have been found in or around cave-formations. The South African examples must be taken as exception, to the extent that some of these appear to have been nature-fact deposits by leopards or lions. The likelihood that we find numerous non-cave Australophithecine remains that date between 2 and 4 million BP suggests that this line and its branches must have existed in mainly non-cave formations, depending upon organic cultures, not unlike modern Chimpanzee and Gorilla populations, and maintained relatively high population densities. One must inquire in this regard what the association between cave-dwelling and the rise of stone-tool technology may have been, especially if we consider the work of Homo habilus.

If we find a period of 4 extant species of Australopithecus at 3 to 2.5 million BP, we can estimate that cultural transmission was more diagonal and less diffusive, and did not cover the broader range achieved during the Homo erectus period. We can estimate the likelihood that there was greater genetic variability of the phylogenetic line of Australopithecus than subsequent Homo lines. This line was more oriented sympatrically compared to the main allopatric Hominid line.

In this anthropogenic scenario therefore, we can see the evolutionary tree of the human line as representing something like a pyramid superimposed by an inverted pyramid. With each subsequent generation, the degree of hominid heterogeneity increased with the increase of cultural transmission, and the rates of sympatric speciation fell off in negative correlation:

The distinction between robust and gracile forms I believe have been important to an understanding of hominid evolution, and this distinction, roughly parallel to the distinction between Chimpanzee and Gorilla populations, represent what I believe to be the two trend-lines that were followed in terms of niche specialization/generalization.

Gracile forms tended to win out in the long run over the robust forms. The niche adaptation of robust forms followed a granivore, frugivorous, and vegetarian adaptation.

It is even possible for instance that hominids at times tended toward a rear-gut fermentation pattern. The tendency to shade off in this direction is understandable in the context that vegetable diet was in general more available and functioned at a lower trophic level than the opposite tendency towards a more carnivorous diet. Gracile species tended toward greater omnivory with increased reliance on or preference for patterns of predation. I do not believe scavenging was ever a central aspect of hominid diet. Hominids never had to compete with vultures over decomposed carrion. On the other hand, cannibalism during periods of stress may have been an important peripheral pattern, playing a part in long-term human survival. This would be a relationship to the principle of competitive exclusion and frequent rates of replacement.

Evolutionary development therefore proceeded at a fundamentally faster pace for hominids during the Australophithecus period, and have fallen off subsequently in a stadial manner. Australophithecoid ancestors would have been relatively more r-selected and less K-selected than its subsequent lines, but this worked to this lines advantage in the long run. Cultural adaptation and development permitted what I believe to have been an K-shift and an r-retention at K-levels of equilibrium. In other words it created greater dynamic flexibility, or oscillatory flexibility of the central hominid line. Some of the more specious sociobiological arguments published in reference to modern Human populations may have been more meaningful in an Australopithecine context (Boyd & Richerson, Cavalli-Sforza) than they are in a modern framework.

What exists is a picture of a continuous stock and heterogeneous dynamics in Africa, a line that continues today even. The basic proto-cultural pattern of this central hominid line must be defined only as a "generalist" cultural adaptation that was something akin to the structure of the wolf pack, though hominids were also omnivorous and generalist feeders, more like bears who are socially organized into wolf-like packs. Generalist adaptation by our hominid ancestors was made possible by a basic cultural configuration that made possible the anthropogenic evolution of a central cultural trait configuration pattern, that included of necessity the progressive development of technology and material culture. This is the hook of archaeological systems theory into the story of humankind and human cultural systems.

If we look at the extent of the adaptive radiations, and the environmental mosaics they encompassed, we can infer some basic constraints to the knowledge cultures encompassed by each successive generation of the hominid line. It is evident that, for instance, Australopithecus was unclothed and probably was confined to latitudes that were warm or at least temperate year round. The tool kit of Australopithecus would be called "osteodontokeratic" but without the aggressive implications originally assigned to Raymond Darts model. It would probably have included a wide range of mostly organic and easily fashioned tools of bone, antler, ivory, wood, and rough stones or cobble stones. The first tools therefore would not necessarily have been focused upon stone industry that later arose--this represented an important refinement, the first technological revolution known to the hominid line, but certainly not the last.

We may say, in keeping with the age-area hypothesis, that relatively isolated cultural systems (isolated by distance, mountain barriers, or water) tend to be slower to develop than those "continental" or cross-roads systems that occupy central places or strategic junctures. We may say that such cultural development depends upon stimulus diffusion to occur at high enough frequencies or rates, the natural range of resource diversity and availability within a region, and in the case of the peopling of the Pacific, a founder effect and continent-island effect. We can speculate, for instance, that the Malayo-Polynesian peoples and the Papuan sundodontic cousins who came to occupy Melanesia and Micronesia were already of a relatively advanced, intermediate state of cultural development before they began their voyages, presumably from somewhere on the Asian mainland. They had apparently a cultigen-growing complex that combined with fish-culture as well as pig and dog-cultures that were transplanted and broadcast across the entire Pacific region wherever the surf met the turf. On the higher islands, and in some Island chain complexes, subsequent development proceed to the rise of paramount Chiefs and relatively advanced trade-tributary systems and ritual-religious states. From an ecological standpoint, Roman civilization could not have been achieved on the island of Truk, and it was also unlikely that Aztec-like development would be witnessed in the central and forbidding deserts of Australia.

Cultural development will be restricted fundamentally by ecological and environmental factors affecting population density, distribution and adaptation. Cultural development sequences can be fundamentally "arrested" on any level depending upon the environmental situation and circumstances in which this development occurs. Cultural selection factors and the introduction of new technological designs can alter the relationship of humankind and his environment, and permit a change in the level of development possible within any given context at any given period. Cultural climax can thus be conceived as the zenith of cultural developmental growth of a particular system in a given context, relative to that environmental and social restrictions incumbent to that context and the level of technological sophistication achieved by that system.

I propose that upon the complex human and social historical landscape that is represented by the human prehistoric record, that humankind lived within conditions of chronic socio-environmental saturation of eco-trophic niches, especially in regions that can be considered to be central or prime, as compared to peripheral or secondary regions.

We must consider therefore what a human niche was under different circumstances, and what would have represented an ecotropic zone or region of eco-diversity that was definable in uniquely anthropological terms. It is expected that some regions were strangely adaptable to human population and the development of human cultural systems

Cultural succession describes what I would call the tendency for any cultural system within an ecologically or geographically definable area, to tend over time to develop in certain directions towards increasing internal order, internalized stratification and social competition, role differentiation, etc., leading to greater densities of population and dynamics of cultural patterning.

One caveat of this model must be born in mind. Human migration is a special form of diffusion and acculturation. People are like seeds of culture, that, if blown to the wind, will transplant their cultural patterning like so many weeds across an open field. Of course, this transplantation of cultural patterning rarely occurs without significant trait displacement and subsequent adaptive modification. Migrations of groups of people almost invariably entails therefore a basic shift of cultural pattern that occurs upon multiple levels of cultural integration and expression. Ecologically, we may understand human migration as a natural population control mechanism, and we may state that on average, marginalized individuals and groups will be those who tend to emigrate away from a culture area. At the same time, the differentials in relative cultural development between place of emigration and place of immigration must also be taken into account in reference to the outcomes of such migration.

Combining Anthropological Frames of Reference

A metasystem can be seen as a naturally ordered system that occurs across time and place and that is heterogeneous in its constitution. Such systems naturally comprehend multiple levels and orders of patterning, and thus are defined by complex processes that tend to be chaotically underdetermined in their state-path trajectory. Any real cultural system, as this is represented archaeologically or ethnographically, for instance, may be said to be a human metasystem. It is important therefore in the definition of such metasystems to seek systematic models that enable us to take into account the multiple frames of reference and relevant units of analysis/lines of evidence, that are pertinent to the model as a complex and heterogeneous system.

Part of the problem of this is the inherent incommensurability and noncompatibility (and, hence, incomparability) of fundamentally different kinds of evidence that are derived within different or alternate frames of reference. It becomes a problem of comparing apples and oranges, so to speak.

Extending a model of synthetic culture in an operational manner entails development of a new kind of methodology around a set of analytical and comparative techniques, as well as around also some systematic interpretive, critical and synthetic techniques of heuristic problem solving and model building.

The relationship that occurs between archaeology and anthropology can and should be extended systematically to embrace the fields of physical anthropology and linguistics. If we seek patterns of migration, acculturation and the rise and fall of different peoples in our shared prehistory, we must learn to take as much as possible the corroboration and coordination of evidence from separate lines of inquiry. At this stage, we can say that general anthropology becomes truly interdisciplinary in its perspective and approach to humankind.

The problem and the challenge of a systems approach that is suitable for understanding human systems is that we are never ever just dealing with single overdetermined systems, but we are always having to deal with multiple interconnected systems that are themselves underdetermined, and result in chaotic and complex patterns upon an unfolding landscape.

What emerges from efforts at the systematic coordination of different kinds of data sets is what can be described as a complex mosaic topography of the human epigenetic and cultural landscape. The transformations that this landscape has undergone in the past reflects more the processes of Lyell's uniformitarianism and gradualism than it does any kind of single systems model.

Survey of linguistic maps of families in different regions of the earth can tell us a great deal of the social history of human affairs for at least the past four or five thousand years. Each region is unique in its historical patterning. It is not clear that if we looked at the linguistic map of the world ten thousand years ago, that it would necessarily have been any less complex that it is or has been in the recent historical period (last 100 years.)

Linguistic mapping is an imprecise science, but language presents to us the paradox of systematic change that at times can be quite predictive or retrodictive. Reliance must be made upon basic cognates that are least susceptible to borrowing or fundamental alteration of morphophonemic structure. Basic anatomical terms (hair, eyes, face, hands, legs, etc.) are good candidates. The first tend numbers, basic colors, basic terms of common flora and fauna (birds, dogs, fish, etc.) are also good key terms to rely on in doing this kind of comparative analysis.

Techniques in genetic mapping have grown both more sophisticated and more reliable, and lead us to the ability to determine in a precise manner the degree of difference or genetic distance between two or more groups of individuals.

Archaeological Systems Theory Reconsidered

Any particular phase and place in the archaeological context represents a disturbed sample of a larger possible universe of unknown size and variability. We do not know the full range of variability that is represented by the exact provenience of any particular artifact or site or complex that we may discover. The challenge of polythetic classification and trait analysis is not so much the problem of determining degrees of similitude or sharing, but in terms of determining the complex patterns of variation that may occur within any given sample or between different samples.

This means that for any given classification system, we my lump or split the data along any number of dimensions of difference we "infer" or "discover" in the data. There is an empirical sense that before we can lump different sets of things into common, often conflating categories that disguise variation, we must learn to systematically split items according to their finite and discrete patterns of variance. It is as a rule of thumb always better to split before we lump, as long as we do not define each split as a new type or species, but only as a new break in a broken stick model. The uniqueness of each item, representing a complex set of events leading to its discovery, must be appreciated to its fullest capacity before it is somewhat stereotypically cast into any particular category or cubby-hole of the archaeologist's data-bound imagination. Surely, labeling any specimen prematurely with a new typological name and category brings with it the requirement of demonstrating the validity of the category regardless of the things that it is said to represent. We must ask of each item, from a human standpoint, what was the knowledge necessary and associated with the making and use and final deposition of this artifact? What knowledge was needed to use this item effectively, and how many different ways might it have been used? What other knowledge may have been in consideration or necessary to the original context when the tool was made, manufactured and lost? We may never be able to answer these kinds of questions in any exact manner, but we can definitely learn to answer them in some manner better than we have yet been doing.

Estimates of similarity and variation will always be relative measures to the unknown archaeological universe from which they were derived and to which they refer. We may fix the dates of an artifact in some absolute sense, but we cannot guess the range of variation that that artifact represents and was a part of in the original cultural system that produced it. Inter-site comparison permits us some handle on the uncertainty problem associated with this issue. The greater the between site agreement, the greater will be the confidence in our estimation, but the greater the between site variation, the less confident we can be in our final conclusions. Without knowing the original distributions of the cultural system, we can have no means of controlling the problem of variability within our archaeological samples.

Any tool or artifact was part of the original cultural system that produced, used and eventually lost the artifact. At the same time, any particular artifact as it is dug up is part of an archaeological context that is associated with that particular point in place and time. The cultural system that produced the artifact and the archaeological system that recovered it are not the same systems, since the archaeological system is derivative of and subsequent to the cultural system. In this sense, we may posit a complex kind of causality--the cultural system was the cause, the archaeological system was the effect (with the intermediary effects of a natural depositional history thrown in for good measure.) The challenge becomes the abductive logic of inferring the causes from the consequences, which, in a formal system of classical logic, is a modus tollens fallacy of deriving the validity of an antecedent from its consequent. Abductive reasoning is probably the most characteristic form of reasoning about archaeological systems. Such a problem can therefore only be approached in an inductive manner and therefore will always have a degree of uncertainty attached to its final conclusions.

It is uncertain that conventional descriptive statistics, such as T-tests or F tests, may be applied directly to a larger potential archaeological universe from a smaller and imperfect sample. It is impossible to tell if the normal measures for the sample are the same as for the population from which it was taken. The deeper in time and the more fragmentary the evidence, for example that representing hominid prehistory, the more this is truly the case. Only if multiple samples can be taken from the same general archaeological context can a larger range for the original population be more reliably calculated, but even this would be open to some serious doubt as to its limits and representativeness.

Just how much can any archaeological site, or all archaeological sites combined, realistically, accurately and reliably represent the segment of prehistory for which it exists? Ultimately, either statistical or qualitative measures and techniques must fall short of finally answering this kind of question. Does this foredoom archaeology as a science, and entail that we abandon the archaeological enterprise in favor of literary criticism and deconstruction? I do not think so. The strength of archaeology is in its systematicity in both theory and method.

Reconstructed Frames of Reference: The Reciprocal Relationship between Scientific Archaeology and Scientific Anthropology

We have come full circle back to the initial statements made by Binford concerning the relationship between Archaeology and Anthropology. Binford's opening statements in his "Archaeology as Anthropology" is that "It is argued that archaeology has made few contributions to the general field of anthropology with regard to explaining cultural similarities and differences.(1963: 217) and that "'American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.'" (ibid. 217) In this regard, Binford distinguishes between explication and explanation as important goals of anthropological inquiry. He asserted that while archaeology made important contributions in the former goal of explication, it was lacking in the latter goal of offering to anthropology models of explanation.

I will claim that in asserting and attempting to elaborate the role of archaeology in anthropological interpretation, Binford was implicitly asserting a general reciprocity and symmetry of relation and status between cultural anthropology and archaeology. By effectively articulating archaeology in terms of its methods in relation to anthropology, Binford had actually accomplished something more than the affirmation of this relationship and the role of archaeology in anthropological theory building. He actually provided this role, and provided the basis by which Anthropologists themselves could look to models in archaeological theory and method as a guide to their own research design and implementation in fieldwork and in the ethnographic interpretation.

How has archaeology contributed to anthropological inquiry? It has provided both conceptual models and methodological tools by which to conduct and refine this inquiry in ethnographic fieldwork. Many of the quantitative methods now employed (or at least that should be employed) in ethnographic fieldwork are those that were originally applied to archaeological data-sets, as for instance in the case of Binford's early use of cluster analysis applied to the Mousterian data, or the previous use of sophisticated computer modeling by Brainerd. There is a clear reason for this, as archaeologists are working with complex data sets, usually of cultural origin and structure, that require some kind of secondary manipulation, organization and correlation. Thus it seems that working out of complex data analysis procedures comes first in archaeological knowledge, and then feeds over into ethnographic data.

It is really impossible in this regard to say which comes first, the archaeological egg or the anthropological hen, but the point is that there is dialectical feedback between the two disciplines that exhibits a form of balanced or symmetrical reciprocity. Archaeologists employ anthropological data as analogy, anthropologists employ archaeological techniques and concepts as operational analogy.

As a matter of experience in ethnographic work and anthropology, I would say that no anthropologists worth his or her weight in fieldwork would be wise to ignore the important lessons taught to the field by Binford. At the same time, cultural anthropologists must be aware of the continuing contribution that their own cross-cultural fieldwork can make to the construction of the archaeological record.

I have come to emphasize the mutualistic and interdependent relationship between archaeology and anthropology at this late stage in the game because I believe there has been too much divisiveness between disciplines and this has created an atmosphere not only not conducive to research in either area, but often destructive and interfering with such work. The truth of archaeological or anthropological knowledge is not to be defined politically or to be found in its social recognition or acceptance. Scientific knowledge that is real remains independent of the social systems that construct and articulate this knowledge. Both archaeology and anthropology remain young sciences, and this is in spite of the fact that the archaeological and anthropological realms of reference might be quickly disappearing under the concrete foundations of modern development. Their relative youth compared to other scientific disciplines entails that their full growth and potential remains before them in the future.

Last Updated: 08/25/09