american archaeology textbooks as reflections of the history of the

NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST, Vol. 31(1) 1-25, 2010

AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY TEXTBOOKS

AS REFLECTIONS OF THE HISTORY

OF THE DISCIPLINE

R. LEE LYMAN

University of Missouri-Columbia

ABSTRACT

Textbooks introduce students to a discipline’s methods and goals. In com-

bination with the desire of publishers to have up-to-date products, each

textbook should, hypothetically, reflect the state of the art in a discipline at

the time of its publication. Two series of multi-edition textbooks authored

by the same individuals confirm the hypothesis for American archaeology

that textbooks reflect disciplinary history. These volumes also indicate that

textbook series, like much secondary literature, do not provide nuanced and

thorough reflections of disciplinary history.

INTRODUCTION

To professionals, textbooks may be some of the least exciting literature produced

by a discipline’s practitioners. Yet it cannot be denied that textbooks are critical

to the education and training of new generations of professional practitioners.

Introductory textbooks might be made up of reprints of pieces of what at the

time of compilation seem to be critically significant bits of primary literature

(e.g., Deetz, 1971; Fagan, 1970; Green, 1973; Leone, 1972), but the majority of

textbooks are authored by one or two individuals and present summaries and

sketches of methods, techniques, and principles (and thus are secondary literature)

illustrated with particularly clear, minimally controversial examples. As eco-

logical historian Joel Hagen (2008:704) recently observed, it is through textbooks

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that “students not only are exposed to well-accepted facts and theories, but also the

norms and goals of the discipline.” Further, publishers typically want textbooks to

be up-to-date if not cutting edge and innovative in order to maximize marketability

(Bauman, 2003; McKenzie, Seabert, Hayden, and Cottrell, 2009). Textbooks thus

provide not only a necessary service to a discipline, but it is probable that they

also represent a unique source of data on the intellectual history of a discipline.

In this article I test the hypothesis that a chronological series of multi-edition

texts provide a reflection of disciplinary history. This may seem to be a non-

controversial hypothesis, or at least one unworthy of testing given the textbook

industry and its desire to have up-to-date volumes (McKenzie et al., 2009). Yet no

one, to my knowledge, has actually tested this hypothesis. Further, it is unclear

how nuanced a history of a discipline a chronological sequence of texts might

provide. Given the secondary-literature nature of textbooks, I suspect any history

reflected by a chronological series of textbooks will not be detailed but instead

will reflect general, broad, and select trends. This suspicion too has not, to my

knowledge, been empirically evaluated. I offer such an evaluation here.

A discipline’s first textbook is a sign of initial professionalization of the field of

inquiry; it signifies to one and all that professionals believe that to be a practitioner

requires training by an expert rather than trial-and-error learning on the part of the

novice (despite the fact that this is likely how the first “experts” learned). Multiple

textbooks by different authors published within a few years of each other are signs

of a discipline’s vitality and perhaps disagreement over what should be included

in a textbook or which of several alternative techniques is considered the best.

Some textbooks will be revised and reissued as new editions—occasionally over

multiple editions—whereas others will be released in one edition only. In dynamic

fields with new developments in technique, concepts, data, and substantive con-

clusions, new editions permit a text to remain up-to-date, though they require some

degree of rewriting, deletion of old text and examples, and addition of new text

and examples. Some authors may find rewriting more tedious than producing a

first edition. This could explain why some texts have only one edition; alterna-

tively, some single edition texts may not sell well because they find little favor

among the professoriate for any number of reasons. One of those reasons might

be that the single edition text is published when another textbook by a different

author is much more popular and thus the former does not sell well.

One can likely add other speculations as to why some textbooks appear as

single editions and others appear as multiple editions. What is of particular interest

here, however, is how a chronological sequence of introductory textbooks—

particularly multiple editions of a single title by the same author(s)—reflects the

history of a discipline. In this article I focus on introductory textbooks, the

subject matter of which is American archaeology. By “American archaeology” I

mean the methods, techniques, interpretive models, and goals of archaeological

research as conceived and undertaken by individuals trained in North America,

particularly the United States. I do not mean to imply that European archaeology is

2 / LYMAN

somehow lesser or not interesting in its own right. It likely would be very

enlightening to determine similarities and differences between Europe’s early

textbooks (such as Kathleen Kenyon’s [1952] Beginning in Archaeology and

Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s [1954] Archaeology from the Earth) and those written

by North American archaeologists about the same time, or a more recent volume

by European archaeologists (e.g., Renfrew and Bahn, 2004) and its American

contemporaries, but such is not my goal here. In this article my goal is to determine

how well a chronological series of textbooks produced by archaeologists trained

and working in North America reflects the history of American archaeology.

To do this I examine two multi-edition series of textbooks, each series having

been authored by the same individuals. All of the textbooks discussed here are

“introductory” volumes meant to introduce the basics of archaeology to a

novice; there are many advanced textbooks aimed at upper-division under-

graduates or graduate students but these are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Should the introductory textbooks examined here provide nuanced reflections

of disciplinary history, then aspects of that history other than those considered

here can be explored at least in part by review of a sequence of textbooks. If, as

expected, introductory textbooks merely summarize and simplify, detailed and

nuanced histories will require review of the primary literature that serve as the

basis for the texts.

I take “archaeology” to signify a set of techniques and attendant explanatory

models for increasing knowledge about human (and hominid) prehistory. Discus-

sion of the history of historical archaeology (study of that portion of humankind’s

past having associated written documents) as practiced in the United States is

beyond my scope. I begin with a few observations on the early history of training

in American archaeology as reflected by what can only loosely be considered

textbooks written by members of the first generation of professional archae-

ologists and aimed at educating novices and avocationalists. Then volumes

(about 100 pages or more) written by the second generation of professional

archaeologists explicitly for training of students and commercially published

for sale to students are identified. Brief descriptions of these earliest true text-

books provide a historical context for detailed consideration of the two series

of textbooks examined here. Significant features of the history of American

archaeology that will be sought among the textbook series are identified prior to

review of those series.

EARLY BACKGROUND

The first formal “how to do archaeology” texts were produced in 1923 and 1930

by the National Research Council (Committee on State Archaeological Surveys,

1930; Wissler et al., 1923). At a combined 35 pages, neither was exhaustive

in coverage (notice these are labeled “texts” rather than textbooks), though

they did have an explicit purpose—educating otherwise untrained avocational

TEXTBOOKS AND THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY / 3

archaeologists on proper field procedures; the focus was on how to locate,

describe, and record the location of sites and how to retrieve artifacts without

loss of provenience and association information. At the time, avocationalists

outnumbered professionals and were doing most of the archaeological research

then being undertaken—finding and recording site locations and recovering

artifacts—and the few professionals then working hoped to insure against the

loss of critical contextual, associational, and stratigraphic data as well as to build

communication networks between the professionals and avocationalists so that

the former knew of the latter’s discoveries (O’Brien and Lyman, 2001).

The fundamental concern with recovery provenience was the purpose of

what is arguably the first true textbook, Robert Heizer’s edited A Manual of

Archaeological Field Methods, a spiral bound volume of less than 100 pages first

published in 1949 (Heizer, 1949). The fourth edition was retitled A Guide to

Archaeological Field Methods and was the first hard-cover textbook; it was

published in 1958 and ran to 162 pages (Heizer, 1958). The most recent edition

appeared in 1997 as Field Methods in Archaeology and at more than 400 pages

shows how the knowledge necessary to be a professional field archaeologist

grew in 50 years (Hester et al., 1997). The growth of Heizer’s Manual is found

in virtually all series of archaeology texts, whether a chronological sequence

of titles by multiple authors is used or a sequence of multiple editions of a single

title by the same author(s) is used. Similarly, the frequency of texts per 5-year

bin meant to be introductions to the field published over the past several decades

has risen over time (Figure 1).

What is often referred to as the “culture history approach” had been practiced by

most archaeologists prior to the middle 1960s but only received its name when

alternative approaches developed (Lyman et al., 1997). Gordon Willey and Philip

Phillips (1958) described the basic methods of culture history in a book not

considered here to be an introductory textbook because only one-fourth of its

pages concern the actual doing of archaeology; the other three-fourths describe the

prehistory of the Americas as it was then known. When approaches proposed as

alternatives to culture history began to develop, other textbooks by other authors

appeared (see Binford [1968a], Deetz [1970], and Flannery [1967] for early

statements on the new approaches). Frank Hole and Robert Heizer’s (1965)

An Introduction to Prehistoric Archeology devoted many pages to describing

methods for the recovery of archaeological materials but also discussed in some

detail how to determine the age of those materials and how to interpret them in

terms of such things as economy, technology, trade, transportation, social organi-

zation, religion, and the like. Reviews were largely favorable (e.g., Jelks, 1966)

and the volume went through three later editions that, along with the seminal

edition, are discussed in detail below.

James Deetz’s (1967) Invitation to Archaeology and Bruce Trigger’s (1968)

Beyond History: The Methods of Prehistory both focused on the culture history

approach, but both also discussed, if briefly, how the archaeological record might

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be used as a source of anthropological, cultural, and social information regarding

prehistoric societies. Deetz (1967) devoted only a half dozen of 138 pages of

text to excavation techniques but he did make explicit a previously implicit

interpretive notion held by culture historians. Given that he discussed the

analytical method of seriation of artifacts as a way to track cultural transmission,

he had to describe the interpretive notion that underpinned the method. Deetz

(1967:45-49) noted that an artifact’s form originated in a “mental template” or

a model held in the mind of the artisan of what a proper looking artifact of a

particular category should look like; this notion became known as “normative

theory” (see Lyman and O’Brien [2004a] for a history of this concept). One

reviewer (Fowler, 1968) was not very impressed with Deetz’s effort, finding

it to be more humanistic than scientific, apparently because Deetz identified

what he took to be parallels between units of language (phonemes, allophones,

morphemes, allomorphs) and units of artifact classification or attributes of

artifacts (formemes, factemes, allofacts). Deetz (1968) discussed these potential

parallels elsewhere but his ideas were, so far as I know, not further developed

by him or anyone else.

Trigger (1968) did not describe any methods for recovering artifacts; instead he

reiterated many of the basic culture history concepts (community, culture, society),

analytical units (component, stage, phase), and cultural processes (invention,


Figure 1. Frequency of introductory American archaeology textbook

titles per 5-year bin, 1960-2008.

migration, diffusion) summarized a decade earlier by Willey and Phillips

(1958). Trigger (1968:xi) stated that the “aim” of his small book (100 pages

of text) was to “provide a discussion of the methodology of prehistory,” which

for him involved “reconstructing and interpreting the history of human groups

for which there are no written records.” A reviewer (Wendorf, 1969:345)

lamented that Trigger’s book “cannot be recommended as a statement of the

methods and concepts in prehistory. Such a book is greatly needed, but it is

not yet available.” That lament is strange in light of Hole and Heizer’s

(1965) recent volume. Whatever the case, the lament would, in the next two

decades, be resoundingly silenced by the appearance of several textbooks by

different authors.

Although there are a number of topics that might be identified as signifying

steps or eras in the history of American archaeology, I here focus on a limited

number of them. The topics have been extracted from recent histories of the

discipline that are based on primary literature (O’Brien et al., 2005; Trigger,

2006). The topics chosen can be roughly categorized as the adoption of new

methods and techniques for doing archaeological research, and nuanced con-

sideration of fundamental concepts that result in new interpretations and

insights. The new methods include the adoption of probabilistic sampling

(e.g., Binford, 1964; Cowgill, 1964; Ragir, 1967; Redman, 1974; Rootenberg,

1964), the development of ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology, and

middle-range theory as aids to interpretive efforts (e.g., Binford, 1977, 1978;

Gould, 1978; Kramer, 1979), adoption of systems theory to assist interpretive

efforts (e.g., Binford, 1962; Flannery, 1968; Plog, 1975), advocacy of the

hypothetico-deductive and deductive-nomological models of science (e.g.,

Binford, 1968a, 1968b; Fritz and Plog, 1970; Hill, 1972), and an attendant

adoption of the “scientific method” (e.g., Watson et al., 1971). Perhaps the most

fundamental conceptual shifts involve several detailed considerations of the

concept of culture; these include discussions of what culture is and what it does.

The discussions herald increasing variation in the models of human behavior

(and culture) used to interpret the archaeological record and are initially signified

by the appearance of what became generally glossed as post-processual archae-

ology (Hodder, 1985)—a more humanistic (and humane) and less dehumanizing

and less scientistic approach to archaeological research. It includes agency theory,

gender or feminist theory, neo-Marxist theory, critical theory, and poststructuralist

theories (Preucel, 1995). Discussion of these topics in chronologically appropriate

editions (editions published when a topic was prominent in the contemporary

literature) of the textbook series will constitute evidence that at least some

textbook series provide accurate reflections of the history of a discipline. A

nuanced discussion will be equated with a detailed outline of how and when

a new method or concept was developed, along with a description of who

was responsible for the development and why that development was believed

to be necessary.

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TEXTBOOK SERIES

Trends such as that shown in Figure 1 are not unusual in any discipline and

thus are not unexpected in American archaeology. The contents of the textbooks

reflect to some greater or lesser degree the evolution and development of the

discipline’s fundamental principles, techniques, and goals. It is precisely that

evolution and development that can help us understand why our discipline

looks the way that it does today. Perhaps more importantly it will help us explain

to our students—the novices we are training—why we now do some of the things

that we do. Without such a historical context, some of what we do may seem

unimportant, incomprehensible, or simply wrong-headed. It will be easiest to

identify historical shifts in thinking and intellectual trends by tracking a multi-

edition book authored by the same individual(s). In the following discussion

of two non-chronologically overlapping series of multi-edition textbooks, I

identify some aspects of disciplinary history and note some general trends in

the evolution of each series.

Hole and Heizer (1965, 1969, 1973, 1977)

Hole and Heizer’s (1965) An Introduction to Prehistoric Archeology is, as

indicated earlier, the first true textbook on American archaeology. In the

preface the authors state that the book “brings together in an introductory way

relevant background material that is not available in any other single publication”

(Hole and Heizer, 1965:v). The book describes what archaeology is, what an

archaeologist does, kinds of sites and how to find them, context and stratigraphy,

preservation and excavation and record keeping, how to classify and describe

finds, and various sorts of technical analyses. Four chapters (40 pages) are devoted

to dating techniques, and the final four chapters describe how to interpret archaeo-

logical data. It is a classic volume not only for its seminal position in the history

of American archaeology, but because many of the methods described are still

in use today, more than 40 years after it was published.

The second edition of Hole and Heizer (1969) appeared four years after the

first. With 400 pages of text (excluding references), it was 60% longer than the

250 text pages of the first edition. The authors indicate that the “revisions consist

of up-dating the technical sections, introducing new and more advanced inter-

pretive theory, [and] expanding other parts of the original text” (Hole and Heizer,

1969:v). They also note that “the spirit of the time” was changing; the “new

emphasis is on methods and theories of interpreting archeological data in cultural

terms. A much more rigorous application of scientific method is now being

made in the selecting of problems for investigation, in the posing of meaningful

hypotheses about these problems, and in the testing of the hypotheses with data

deliberately obtained for that purpose” (Hole and Heizer, 1969:vi). Hole and

Heizer suggest that general system theory will become a fruitful interpretive

framework in the future, and they thus devote considerable effort to describing that


framework. Further, a growing sensitivity to how science works on the part of

some archaeologists will, they suggest, allow those archaeologists to build and

test “theories of culture process” (p. vii).

Discussion of reconnaissance, excavation, and recovery methods changed little

from the first edition. The four chapters on dating were hardly modified. What had

been a stand-alone chapter on the interpretation of artifact use was subsumed

within the chapter on artifact classification. About 15 pages are narrowly devoted

to general system theory, but the basic notion of culture as a system permeates

much of the discussion of interpretation. What had been a section comprising

four chapters on “Describing and Interpreting Prehistory” is now a section on

“Reconstructing Cultural Subsystems” made up of three chapters (minus the one

on artifact use). The chapter on “Prehistoric Economy” is now titled “Subsistence

and Economic Systems” and is reorganized, expanded, and now includes several

figures. The original chapter on “Prehistoric Society” is now two chapters,

“Patterns of Settlement” and “Social and Religious Systems.” A new chapter

entitled “Analysis of Culture Processes” is added as well, and this comprises a

major change between the first and second editions. What had happened in the

1960s in American archaeology was the emergence of a new approach (O’Brien

et al., 2005). Some refer to that emergence as a revolution in archaeological

method and theory (e.g., Adams, 1968; Martin, 1971) though such a charac-

terization depends on the attributes one chooses to define an intellectual revolution

(Meltzer, 1979; see also Custer, 1981; Meltzer, 1981).

The most stark indication that the second edition of Hole and Heizer reflects a

change in the discipline—revolutionary or not—is the addition of the chapter titled

“Analysis of Culture Processes”; in it processes of culture are defined as “how

culture works and how it changes” (Hole and Heizer, 1969:359). The new

approach to archaeology that emerged in the 1960s came at the end of that decade

to be known as processual archaeology because of its alleged interest in cultural

processes (Binford, 1968a; Flannery, 1967). Hole and Heizer’s (1969) book is

exceptional for its clear if terse statement about cultural processes; it is as if

this icon of 1960s archaeology is so well-known—nearly everyone at the time

uses the term “culture process”—that discussion of what exactly the concept

denotes is unnecessary (Lyman, 2007a). Fortunately for students who might

not be clear about what exactly a cultural process is, Hole and Heizer (1969)

think it is a concept that is important enough to be described, though not in

elaborate detail.

The third edition of Hole and Heizer (1973) boasts an additional 60 pages of

text relative to the second edition. Some rearrangement of chapters is evident as

well as some restructuring within chapters. Of four new chapters, one contains a

few small sections from the second edition. The four new chapters (2, 4, 16,

and 21) reflect only partially the shift that took place in American archaeology

during the 1960s. In Chapter 2, “The Structure and Process of Archeology,”

Hole and Heizer introduce the deductive-nomological and hypothetico-deductive

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methods—definitive hallmarks of processual archaeology (e.g., Binford, 1968a;

Flannery, 1967; Fritz and Plog, 1970; Watson et al., 1971). Importantly, Hole

and Heizer (1973:36) note that although the processualists prefer deductive

methods over inductive ones, “in truth scientists work with both,” something

that only became generally accepted among archaeologists in the mid-1970s

(e.g., Hill, 1972; Salmon, 1976, 1982; Smith, 1977; Thomas, 1974).

Chapter 4, “Basic Concepts in Prehistory,” contains a discussion of archaeo-

logical cultures modified from that in Chapter 2 of the second edition. It also

introduces the concept of uniformitarianism and equates it with ethnographic

analogy, acknowledging that “human behavior in the past may have no exact

counterparts among modern peoples” (Hole and Heizer, 1973:75). As well, the

authors note that because culture is “learned and transmitted from one generation

to the next, changes in culture can be and often are cumulative.” This is an explicit

statement of what at the time was becoming derogatorially known as normative

theory (Lyman and O’Brien, 2004a). Finally, the discussion in Chapter 4 empha-

sizes that while homonids have evolved as biological organisms, cultural and

biological processes of evolution are not only different but they are largely

independent of one another.

The new Chapter 16, “Concepts Relating to Reconstruction,” focuses on the

interpretive principles and bases of archaeology. In this chapter uniformitarianism

is described in a bit more detail than in it is in Chapter 4, and it is related more

explicitly to ethnographic analogy for which six rules of application (from

Dozier, 1970) are listed. The discussion of ethnographic analogy that appeared

in 1965 and with some minor modification in 1969 is modified a bit more and

expanded in 1973. The term “ethnoarchaeology” appears, but it is described as

“one starts from the present and works back in time, using such historic records

as are available” (Hole and Heizer, 1973:15). Not only is this a description of

the direct historic approach (Lyman and O’Brien, 2001), it is not what the term

“ethnoarchaeology” would come to mean by the end of the decade (e.g., Gould,

1978; Kramer, 1979).

What is a bit less than a one-page discussion of culture systems in 1969 is in

1973 nearly three pages. Chapter 21, “Concepts and Methods of Processual

Interpretation,” repeats the 1969 discussion of system theory and devotes an

additional nine pages to culture systems. Also, Hole and Heizer (1973:434-437)

summarize recent discussions of other archaeologists on the differences between

history and science (e.g., Binford, 1968b; Erasmus, 1968; Sabloff and Willey,

1967; Trigger, 1970). This was a topic of some debate at the time and subsequently

(see Lyman and O’Brien [2004b] for a review). Hole and Heizer (1973) then

provide a brief description of the scientific method, something that would appear

in many introductory textbooks published in the 1970s-1990s (e.g., Thomas,

1974:60-62).

What here is treated analytically as a fourth edition is technically not a new

edition but instead is, in the eyes of the authors, an extensively reworked,


rewritten, restructured, and briefer introduction to prehistoric archeology than

that provided by the third edition (Hole and Heizer, 1977:vi). There are indeed

fewer text pages (375 in 1977 versus 470 in 1973). Although there is some

extensive reorganization, restructuring, and combining of chapters (21 chapters in

1973, 15 in 1977), the content of the 1977 edition is similar to that of the 1973

edition. One obvious change is that in 1973 some 35 pages are devoted to survey

and excavation techniques, but in 1977 only 25 pages cover these topics. Other

obvious ways the 1977 volume is shortened involve omission of discussion of

several chronometric techniques (e.g., much of 1973’s Chapter 15, which includes

astronomical dating, sequence dating, and cross dating). On one hand, unlike

the 1973 edition, in the 1977 edition Hole and Heizer (1977:23) provide an

accurate description of ethnoarchaeology as “the study of peoples specifically

for the information they may give on archeological matters.” But on the other

hand, Hole and Heizer (1977) do not mention deduction and only briefly mention

hypothesis testing, what at the time were extremely important hallmarks of

the state of the art (e.g., Hill, 1972; Salmon, 1976, 1982; Smith, 1977). Further,

through all four editions of their book, any mention of sampling does not include

discussion of probabilistic techniques but rather only that by sampling is meant

that less than all of a site is excavated or fewer than all of the artifacts in a site

are recovered.

Hole and Heizer (1965:8) provide a terse description of culture that is effec-

tively glossed as shared ideas while at the same time noting that archaeological

cultures are represented by “repeated associations of [kinds of] artifacts” and

in a restricted geographic area “groupings of sites with similar assemblages [are]

cultures” (p. 66). This brief characterization is greatly expanded in 1969 when

Hole and Heizer (1969:40) note that adopting the culture notion makes archae-

ology a behavioral science. They argue that this is so because culture is learned,

transmitted principally through symbolic communication, is adaptive, and is

patterned or a system. The transmitted characteristic of culture makes it uniquely

human in their view.

Hole and Heizer (1969:41) cite Kluckhohn and Kelly’s (1945:97) definition of

culture as “historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational,

irrational, and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides

for the behavior of man.” Again, this is readily glossed as shared ideas and reflects

what was then becoming known as normative theory (Binford, 1965), a label

that became derogatory when used by processual archaeologists (Lyman and

O’Brien, 2004a). An important thing to note, however, is that Hole and Heizer

(1969:120) clearly and effectively identified social transmission as the cause of

similarities between artifact assemblages, something that was only then being

made explicit and put to distinctive analytical use (e.g., Deetz, 1965; Longacre,

1964). Yet Hole and Heizer (1969:43, 328) caution that an archaeological

culture (replicate assemblages of artifact types) is not the same as an ethnog-

rapher’s culture. But likely because they are anthropological archaeologists (as are

10 / LYMAN

virtually all archaeologists trained in the United States; their university

degrees are in anthropology) who hope to do more than map the geographic and

temporal distribution of artifact types, they provide nine general statements

about culture (e.g., human cultural “behavior is patterned”) that they suggest

provide a “framework within which archaeologist can operate” with respect

to interpreting the archaeological record in anthropological terms (Hole and

Heizer, 1969:361-363).

In reading through the various statements on culture in the 1969 second edition,

one gets the distinct impression that Hole and Heizer are struggling to make

explicit for the first time what had until then been largely implicit notions about

the relationship of a static archaeological record to a dynamic cultural system. This

struggle is less apparent in the 1973 third edition where much of the 1969

discussion is repeated, if using different wording. With respect to the latter, for

example, the definition of culture proposed by Kluckhohn and Kelly is repeated

(Hole and Heizer, 1973:79) as are the properties of culture as socially transmitted

by symbolic communication and as adaptive. But Hole and Heizer (1973:80-82)

perfect the linkage between culture and replicate artifact assemblages when they

note that by saying culture is patterned they mean that its parts (as in a system) “fit

harmoniously” together; this translates archaeologically into replicate artifact

forms (types) and site structures. They add “change” to their list of properties of

culture, noting that change is the result of imperfect social transmission and

learning, diffusion, invention, and accidental discovery. Finally, their nine general

statements about culture from the 1969 edition are reduced to six that are explicitly

focused on culture as a system and culture as adaptive; for example, “a culture

system consists of sets of behaviors and the interrelations among them” (Hole and

Heizer, 1973:451-452). There is virtually no change in the discussion of the

culture concept from the 1973 edition to the 1977 edition.

In sum, Hole and Heizer’s (1965, 1969, 1973, 1977) four editions provide some

accurate reflections of what happened in the discipline during the 13 years

represented. The inclusion (initially in 1969) and expansion (in 1973) of discus-

sion of systems theory is a major indicator of change in this series, and lesser

indications are the shifting definition of ethnoarchaeology (from 1973 to 1977)

and the brief mention of hypothesis testing and laws (1969, 1973, and 1977). Their

discussions of the culture concept nicely illustrate their and others grappling

with the shifting meaning of this key notion in U.S. anthropology (e.g., O’Meara,

1997). There are also some aspects of history that are missing, including mention

of deduction and probabilistic sampling.

Thomas (1979, 1989, 1998; Thomas and Kelly, 2006)

Picking up largely where Hole and Heizer’s (1977) final edition leaves off,

David Hurst Thomas’s (1979) volume simply titled Archaeology is a clear reflec-

tion of the processual archaeology that was at the time the dominate approach in


the United States (O’Brien et al., 2005). At 453 pages of text divided among 13

chapters, the length of the volume falls between Hole and Heizer’s last two

editions (470 pages in 1973, 375 pages in 1977). Hole and Heizer (1973:13-14)

mention the increasing pace of “salvage archaeology,” altering the term to

“cultural resource management” a few years later (Hole and Heizer, 1977:25),

in both cases emphasizing that the archaeological record is being destroyed at

an alarming rate. Thomas (1979:146) writes about “conservation archaeology,”

expresses concern for the destruction of the archaeological record, summarizes

important federal legislation that had been passed to protect the record,

and states the qualifications of a professional archaeologist established by the

Society of Professional Archaeologists. Both Hole and Heizer (1977) and Thomas

(1979), then, highlight some of the socio-political context of late 1970s archae-

ology in the United States.

Thomas (1979:vi) clearly states in the Preface that the “scope of the book

can be defined [as] contemporary American archaeology” and that this means

what is going on “right now” in the “brand of archaeology currently taught

and practiced at major universities and museums within the Americas.” For him,

this means “a single theoretical framework” characterized by “three hierarchical

goals: construct cultural chronologies, reconstruct past lifeways, and under-

stand cultural processes” (Thomas, 1979:vii; see also Binford, 1968a; Deetz,

1970; Dunnell, 1978). At least one reviewer largely finds that Thomas “has

managed to present contemporary archaeology as a logically integrated, cohesive

discipline consisting of a sequence of interrelated research goals that are generally

shared by the profession” (Smith, 1980:635). That Thomas’s approach is

unabashedly American is found in the fact that he devotes over 40 pages of text

(all of Chapter 3) to answering the question “What is Anthropology?” Unlike

in the Old World where archaeology grew out of antiquarianism and history

(Trigger, 2006), American archaeology originates (today, and historically) in

anthropological inquiry:

One simply cannot understand the trends and directions of contemporary

archaeology without a solid grounding in the specifics of contemporary

anthropology. The practical archaeologist needs to understand the major

questions in modern anthropology before attempting to provide answers

to these questions. . . . I firmly believe in the old adage that “archaeology is

anthropology or it is nothing.” [Thus] we must understand how major anthro-

pological strategies operate before we can place archaeology in its proper

anthropological perspective. (Thomas, 1979:viii)

Thomas describes and exemplifies the scientific method that underpins the

(newly explicit if not simply new) approach to American archaeology, empha-

sizing the role of hypothesis testing and mentioning the writing of laws of cultural

process, something only a few earlier archaeologists claimed they were doing

(e.g., Meggers, 1955) but that by the 1970s was part of the mantra of processual

12 / LYMAN

archaeology (e.g., Binford, 1968b; Watson et al., 1971). Thomas distinguishes

but does not elaborate on cultural processes as both synchronic and diachronic,

respectively involving the mechanisms by which cultures operate and those by

which cultures evolve and change (Lyman, 2007a). He provides more than a

dozen pages on ethnoarchaeology as not only a useful but a mandatory interpretive

aid, and includes several pages on experimental archaeology as well. Unlike

Hole and Heizer, Thomas describes probabilistic sampling in some detail and

includes a discussion of differences in sample unit size and shape. Also unlike

Hole and Heizer’s later editions, Thomas does not discuss systems theory

but does characterize culture as a system that makes up humankind’s adaptive

mechanism and implies that as a system culture is made up of functionally

and structurally inter-related parts. Finally, unlike Hole and Heizer, Thomas

devotes no text to describing how to excavate a site, how to recover artifacts,

or the critical importance of recording recovery provenience. But there is

a 15-page glossary which suggests that Thomas recognizes a key to learning

a new field of inquiry (or subject matter of any kind) involves learning

the terminology and jargon of the field. Hole and Heizer (1977) also include

an 11-page glossary in their final edition, though they do not include one in

earlier editions.

The initial chapter of Thomas’s book concerns the history of archaeology; the

focus is American archaeology, whereas Hole and Heizer’s historical sketch

includes both the New World and the Old. Thomas’s (1979) second chapter

discusses science and the scientific method, while the third presents a detailed

discussion of the scope of anthropology, reflecting the fact that the so-called

“new archaeology” that emerged in the 1960s thought of itself as a major con-

tributor to anthropology rather than just a hand maiden that could only add

time depth to various cultural traits and processes (Lyman, 2007b). Chapter 4

identifies the objectives and underscores the values of modern archaeology.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss archaeological chronometry. Chapter 8 covers how

to reconstruct prehistoric subsistence practices; chapter 9 focuses on settlement

patterns; chapter 10 covers social organization; and chapter 11 discusses ways

to reconstruct past ideologies. The last two chapters discuss ways to decipher

the processes that form the archaeological record and “General Theory in

Archaeology,” respectively, with the last focusing largely on mechanisms

of cultural change within the three-level framework of cultural materialism:

technological at the base, sociological at the middle level, and ideological

occupying the top tier (Thomas, 1979:119). This ecological-functional inter-

pretive framework fairly characterizes much of processual archaeology at the time

(e.g., Price, 1982).

At 575 pages of text, the second edition of Thomas’s book (1989) is 27% longer

than the first edition. In the Preface, Thomas explains how and why the new

edition differs from the original. First, examples are updated and new illustrations

are included. Second, historical archaeology is included, and the gender bias


recently identified in archaeology (Conkey and Spector, 1984) is confronted.

Third, three new chapters on field methods—a noticeable lacunae in the first

edition—are included. And, the chapter on anthropology is significantly modified

to include a new discussion of “critical theory” and the application of Marxian

ideas to modern events and circumstances (e.g., Leone et al., 1987). The discus-

sion of processes that create and form the archaeological record in the first

edition (Chapter 12) was 33 pages long; in the second edition it (Chapter 5) is

42 pages long and the title is “Middle-Range Research,” reflecting the growing

importance of this actualistic means of interpreting the archaeological record

(e.g., Binford, 1977). Non-invasive and non-destructive techniques of archaeo-

logical research such as remote sensing, resistivity, and ground-penetrating

radar are described, reflecting the heightened awareness that traditional

archaeological practice, like industrial-age modification of the landscape, can

be excessively destructive of the archaeological record. Similarly, the chapter on

“General Theory in Archaeology” grows from 29 pages to 38 pages. Rather than

discuss “Technoecological Change,” “Sociopolitical Change,” and “Ideational

Change” as in the first edition, Thomas (1989) now describes theories about

hunter-gatherers as optimal foragers (a theory that would come to guide much

research in anthropology and archaeology in the 1990s [Winterhalder and

Smith, 2000]), domestication, origins of the state, and the evolution of ideology.

Many other modifications reflect slight shifts in emphasis and technological

and methodological developments rather than major alterations of the basic

Americanist approach.

As Thomas (1998:ix) notes, the second edition pretty much “maintained

the basic processual agenda” of the first edition. Not so with the third edition.

At 609 pages of text, the third edition is just a bit longer than the second

edition. The structure and content of the third, however, differ considerably

from the second. Although what was becoming known as the “postprocessual

critique” had begun to emerge in the 1980s (e.g., Hodder, 1985, 1991), and

Thomas (1989) acknowledges that emergence in the second edition, he

finds in the middle 1990s that “Americanist archaeology today is neither

processual nor postprocessual. It usefully employs modified versions of both”

(Thomas, 1998:x; see also Hegmon, 2003). As in earlier editions, he begins

the third edition with brief historical sketches of some major archaeologists

before turning to a description of anthropology and the scientific method.

However, in a new twist, Thomas (1998) distinguishes scientific and humanistic

approaches, the latter a reaction to the ultra-scientism of processualism of the

1960s and 1970s that was thought by some to have dehumanized many lines

of inquiry.

Another notable difference in the third edition is a chapter devoted to

“Levels of Archaeological Theory.” Low-level theory concerns making obser-

vations and recording data about the archaeological record; middle-level

theory links archaeological data to human behavior; and high-level or general

14 / LYMAN

theory provides understanding and explanations of humans and their cultures.

Here, cultural materialism and postmodern (postprocessual) interpretivism are

presented as exemplifying some of the variation in high-level general theory.

Some of the discussion of general theory echoes the earlier editions, but the

discussion of interpretivism includes new nuances and insights. Discussion of

archaeological reconnaissance and survey changes to reflect new site-discovery

techniques, as does discussion of excavation techniques. Thomas (1998) does

not change his description of how one determines the ages of archaeological

materials much at all. A new chapter on bioarchaeology takes up some

30 pages, likely reflecting the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves

Protection and Repatriation Act. Although the discussion of foragers appears

in new form (chapter 14), much of the discussion there had appeared in

earlier editions. So too with the chapter on “neo-evolutionary approaches.”

New content appears in chapter 16 on the “Archaeology of the Human Mind:

Some Cognitive Approaches,” chapter 17 on “Archaeology of the Mind:

Some Empathetic Approaches,” and chapters 18 and 19 on historical archae-

ology. Also, while discussion of conservation archaeology occupied fewer

than eight pages in the second edition it now takes up 19 pages (a more

than 100% increase). Thomas (1998) concludes the volume with a chapter on

applied (forensic) and ethical archaeology, topics that had grown during the last

decade of the twentieth century with American society’s advocacy of politically

correct behavior.

Thomas’s (1998) Preface to the third edition is enlightening. He notes that

he always viewed his role as textbook author “to be one of cutting through the

hype and self-serving bluster, to demonstrate how the various pieces—‘new’ and

traditional—fit together into a workable discipline of archaeology” (p. viii). The

first two editions indeed successfully wed traditional (culture historical) and

new (processual) approaches; the third edition is necessary because of major

changes in the discipline that could be attributed to the emergence of so-called

“post-processual” approaches. But here, too, Thomas (1998:x) successfully weds

the various and varied approaches by noting that “most of the underlying issues—

science and humanism, objectivity and empathy—have concerned thoughtful

archaeologists for more than a century.” He demonstrates this with his historical

examples of archaeological practice, and notes that the “vast majority of those

practicing Americanist archaeology fall somewhere toward the middle” (p. x).

An icon of the age during which the third edition is published is the fact that

in the text pages there are numerous “Archaeology on the Internet” boxes that

provide URLs for on-line additional discussions of topics and examples of sites,

artifacts, and protocols.

The fourth edition, published in 2006, includes discussions of the scientific and

humanistic methods that are similar to those found in the 1998 third edition, but it

also includes new examples of each of those methods (Thomas and Kelly, 2006).

Chapter 3’s “Structure of Archaeological Inquiry” reiterates the three levels of


theory and provides an extended discussion of what has by now become known as

“processual plus” (e.g., Hegmon, 2003)—the wedding so successfully crafted by

Thomas in the third edition has now become commonplace. One noticeable

difference between the third and fourth editions is the inclusion in all but the

first and last chapters (1 and 18) of a one-page box on “Archaeological Ethics” in

the fourth edition; this addition clearly reflects the social context of the time of

being morally and ethically thoughtful when studying and reporting the cultural

heritage of particular social or ethnic groups—something Thomas alluded to in

the third addition but which now holds a prominent role.

Thomas (Thomas and Kelly, 2006:xxi) asked Robert Kelly to join him as

co-author of the fourth edition because he (Thomas) felt that “one person just

couldn’t adequately cover the field anymore.” This latest edition, like the pre-

ceding ones, nicely captures the state of the art in the first decade of the third

millennium. The scientific and materialistic, and the interpretivist and humanistic

are given equal time, as in the third edition. The new perspective is apparent in

an explicit discussion of the differences and similarities of ethnographic analogy

and middle range theory (chapter 10), the latter a topic that by now has seen

much consideration in the literature but which seems to have been misinter-

preted by many commentators (Arnold, 2003). Another reflection of a new

perspective is the shift from a discussion of the principle of superposition,

stratigraphy, and stratigraphic excavation in earlier editions to a new chapter,

chapter 7, on “Geoarchaeology and Site Formation Processes.” This chapter

integrates what has by now become standard operating procedure in American

archaeology in response to the fact that the archaeological record has a geological

mode of occurrence (e.g., Waters, 1997). Geoarchaeology was a single index

entry in the third edition; in the fourth edition it has its own chapter. That the

fourth edition is up-to-date is reflected by discussion of new chronometric tech-

niques (chapter 8).

The fourth edition of Thomas’s book continues the tradition set by the first

three; all editions are engaging presentations of what is going on in American

archaeology “now,” at the time the text was written. An excellent marker of this

is found in Thomas’s treatment of the culture concept across the different editions.

In the first edition, Thomas (1978:103) suggests that archaeologists “need not

be overly concerned with attempting to find the ultimate definition of culture.

What is important to know is how culture works.” He finds Tylor’s (1871) seminal

definition of “that complex whole [of] capabilities and habits acquired by man as

a member of society” to be “too general” (Thomas, 1978:103), preferring instead a

definition that makes cultural behavior visible today and also that which occurred

in the past. Toward that end, he follows linguist David Aberle (1960) and

distinguishes three components of culture: the idiolect (individual version of a

culture), shared culture (modal), and cultural system (in which individuals par-

ticipate and is basic to cultural adaptation; Thomas, 1978:104-105). The last is

where White’s (1959) definition of culture as humankind’s extrasomatic means

16 / LYMAN

of adaptation resides; this definition is the one advocated by Binford (1964) and

adopted by many processual archaeologists. Thomas (1989) shortens the dis-

cussion of culture in the second edition, adds a brief description of the emic and

etic distinction, but otherwise does not change the basic message. In the third

edition, Thomas (1998) changes little of the basic discussion, likely because the

1989 discussion was sufficient to capture shifts in the archaeological conception

of culture from something participated in to something that is constantly created

by human behavior and interaction (e.g., Watson, 1995). By the fourth edition,

Thomas and Kelly (2006) have discarded the linguistic metaphor and charac-

terize culture as learned, shared, and symbolic. That culture can ontologically be

ideational (normative) or adaptive (extrasomatically) is retained from earlier

editions. Overall, the history of Thomas’s discussion of the culture concept nicely

captures the history of that concept in American archaeology (Lyman, 2008;

Watson, 1995).

DISCUSSION

The fifth edition of Thomas’s book was delivered to my office in early March

2009 as I was finishing the first draft of this article. Interestingly, the publication

date in the volume is 2010, indicating that this edition will be “new” for nearly

2 years (the remaining 9.5 months of 2009 and all of 2010). Interestingly, the

order of authorship is reversed from the fourth edition (Kelly and Thomas, 2010).

I considered including this most-recent edition in this discussion, but decided

not to for one simple reason. The hypothesis I examine here has been sufficiently

tested with the volumes reviewed and inclusion of this newest edition would

merely add length to the discussion rather than additional tests.

Both series of multi-edition textbooks examined provide accurate reflections

of the history of the discipline during the time span covered by each. There is a

bit of temporal lag on some key issues, but that is to be expected. The author

of a textbook has to keep pace with developments in the discipline as he or

she writes, and sometimes it is unclear which of several newly appearing

developments will be significant and which will be but flashes in the pan. Better

to ignore the unknowns and focus on what seems to be standard practice at

this point in time and keep the publisher happy by meeting deadlines (McKenzie

et al., 2009). There are also some aspects of the history of the discipline that are

not reflected in each series. That, too, is to be expected in introductory textbooks;

they are not intended to be exhaustive in their coverage but rather to be extensive

and at a level that is readily grasped by the novice (thoroughness can be had

in volumes intended for graduate students and professionals). I conclude that

each series nicely tracks some of the major themes of their time and thus each

series—Hole and Heizer’s, and Thomas’s—provides a general perspective on

the history of American archaeology. My hypothesis is not refuted, and the

demands of publishers for up-to-date discussion are met. My suspicion that


textbooks will provide broad-brush general histories rather than nuanced ones is

confirmed by identifiable trends and the omission of some significant historical

events, nuances, and details.

Two next steps in the analysis of chronological sequences of textbooks as

revealing disciplinary history are possible. One would be to examine another

series of multiple editions by the same author; two possibilities exist here—Brian

Fagan’s twelve(!) editions of In the Beginning (1972, 1975, 1978, 1981, 1985,

1988, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2008 [only the first edition is listed in

the references]), and Robert Sharer and Wendy Ashmore’s three editions of

Archaeology: Discovering Our Past (1987, 1993, 2003 [only the first edition is

listed in the references; an earlier version was published under the title Funda-

mentals of Archaeology in 1979]). The other step would involve examination of a

sequence of volumes, all written by different authors. Such a sequence is easily

constructed for American archaeology; in chronological order, the volumes are

Smith (1976), Knudson (1978), Rathje and Schiffer (1982), Bower (1986),

Webster et al. (1993), and Price (2007). I suspect that the history of the discipline

will be a bit more murky with multiple authors than with multiple editions by a

single author; this is so because of idiosyncrasies across multiple authors and

their idiosyncratic take on disciplinary history.

CONCLUSION

The hypothesis that series of textbooks reflect the history of a discipline is

confirmed by the two series of volumes on American archaeology reviewed here.

Both series highlight some, but not all, aspects of the history of the discipline that

were more or less contemporaneous with the time when a particular edition was

published. Both series highlight the scientific method, the concept of culture

process, and cultural resource management or conservation archaeology, all

of which reflect significant developments in American archaeology during the

1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In addition, Hole and Heizer chose to emphasize

systems theory, whereas Thomas chose to focus on hypothesis testing, ethno-

archaeology as an interpretive aid, and probabilistic sampling, all of which

also reflect significant developments in American archaeology during the 1970s

and 1980s. Thomas’s later editions also reflect the growing importance of the

myriad approaches to archaeology that fall under the banner of postprocessual

archaeology.

Perhaps the two series of multi-edition textbooks examined here provide good

historical reflections of the evolution of the American archaeology because the

authors were particularly attuned to that evolution, and thus the series are not

representative. This could be tested by examining other series, both by a multi-

edition series by a single author or by a chronological series each volume of which

was authored by a distinct individual. Regardless of the outcome, what is clearly

revealed by the two multi-edition series examined here is the fact that each of

18 / LYMAN

those series, at the time a particular volume was published, exposed students

who read it to a sampling of methods, techniques, norms and goals of the discipline

(to borrow Hagen’s [2008] wording). As a practitioner and teacher of American

archaeology, but also as someone who has not taken on the task of writing an

introductory text, I take comfort in the simple fact that at least some of those

who have written an introductory text are deeply familiar with the state of the

discipline. That makes my job as teacher much easier.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe R. C. Dunnell, M. J. O’Brien, M. B. Schiffer, and the students in my

history of archaeology class for prompting my understanding of the history of

American archaeology. Comments on an early draft by two sympathetic and one

not so sympathetic anonymous reviewers forced me to rethink several issues.

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Note: The preceding article was subjected to formal peer review prior to being

accepted for publication.

Direct reprint requests to:

R. Lee Lyman

Department of Anthropology

107 Swallow Hall

University of Missouri

Columbia, MO 65211

e-mail: [email protected]


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