In the late nineteenth century, interpretive models in archaeology were guided by the conception of cultures as organizational stages along a continuum from simple to complex. These societal stages, for example, savagery, barbarism, and civilization, were recognized by their degree of technological, social, and ideological sophistication relative to conceptions of progress and rationality in industrial states and empires of the time (England, France, United States, etc.). It was assumed that progress from the lower stages of savagery to the upper stages of civilization was a universal process, albeit that societies passed through these stages at different rates, mediated by natural and social processes. In some versions, there was an explicit recognition that progress was hampered by biological inferiority, but in others social factors were heavily weighted as the basic biological apparatus or ‘psyche’ was assumed universal.
Stage Models
This understanding of cultures allowed ethnologists to organize vast amounts of data. Given that artifacts and architecture were significant attributes of these stages reflecting social, technological, and ideological sophistication, known material culture patterns in living societies became ready-made analogical packages for archaeological interpretation. One could match known cultures of different evolutionary stages to unknown ones with similar artifact assemblages and begin interpreting specific finds according to the logic of that stage. This approach was particularly powerful if living descendants of these cultures existed in similar evolutionary stages. In the American Southwest, the prehistoric Pueblos, for example, were assumed analogous to ethnographically extant Pueblo Indian cultures whose lifeways were classified as representative of the lower state of barbarism.
Therefore, evolutionary oriented ethnologists working the Southwest extrapolated from living Pueblo peoples to prehistoric ones. Jesse Walter Fewkes, who eventually became the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, explored
Soviet Archaeology
Also an early creative, but largely isolated interpretive model that derives from a synthesis of classical evolutionism and Marxist social theory was the rise of Soviet archaeology. Its history was briefly chronicled for Western scholars in Bruce Trigger’s first edition of The History of Archaeological Thought. Marx and Engels shared with other nineteenth century social evolutionary theorists a teleological understanding of human history. Their dialectical materialism also highlighted the importance of technology and was deeply committed to social rather natural explanations for cultural differences. In that archaeology, the earlier evolutionary stages were replaced by Marxist understandings of different socioeconomic forms of society. Although implemented in a politically repressive fashion, the explicit linkage between favored Marxist theory and archaeological interpretation exemplified a now widely held assumption about the interpretive process; material patterns and inferences are what your theory makes of them (see Marxist Archaeology).
World History
