While the classification of prehistoric cultures in Europe and the Near East was always overshadowed by a concern for chronology and a belief in evolutionary progress, these factors were almost wholly lacking in early North American archaeology. There was for a long time a general belief that the native inhabitants had arrived in the Western Hemisphere only within the last two or three millennia, and that their cultures had undergone little or no significant advance during the subsequent interval. At the same time, however, ethnographers could recognize the enormous diversity of culture exhibited by present-day Indians in different parts of the hemisphere, and it was expected, correctly, that the same diversity would be encountered in the archaeological record. As a result, culture classifications in the Americas from the beginning came to emphasize geographical rather than chronological variation.
If the informing framework for Old World cultural classification was the theory of social evolution, the informing framework for New World classification was the culture-area concept. In simplest terms, this involves the recognition that cultures in different regions show a high degree of similarity to one another, but differ from those in neighboring regions, as a result partly of historical diffusion but mostly of adaptation to differing environmental resources. Culture-area theory, unlike early evolutionary theory, places a heavy emphasis on specialized adaptation. It is an approach developed initially not from archaeology but from the ethnographic study of living Indian peoples.
Archaeologists, assuming that the remains they dug were immediately ancestral to living Indian cultures, tended for a time to take culture-area theory as a given. Moreover, their excavations for a long time failed to uncover any conspicuously stratified sites or any evidence of genuinely primitive, Palaeolithic-type cultures, thus seemingly confirming the general belief in a recent migration of the Indians from the Old World. As investigations progressed, however, two things became apparent: first, that there was considerable diversity among the prehistoric cultures even within certain culture areas, and second that there had indeed been substantial developmental change in many of the prehistoric cultures. This led, in the 1920s, to a widespread recognition of the need for a classification of the prehistoric American cultures that should be independent of existing ethnographic classifications.
The first Pecos Conference, held in New Mexico in 1927, marks the beginning of formal classification in American prehistory. The conferees agreed to divide the prehistoric Pueblo culture (nowadays called Anasazi) into seven developmental stages, each marked by distinctive pottery types, house types, and settlement patterns, as well as certain other cultural criteria. While this was, strictly speaking, a periodization rather than a classification, it set a pattern of systematization which was soon widely copied in other parts of North America. Within a very few years, several other cultures had been defined and periodized not only in the Southwest but also in the Midwest, Northeast, and other areas.
The proliferation of named cultures led, at least in some quarters, to a perceived need for more formal systematics. In 1934, Winifred and Harold Gladwin published a short monograph entitled A Method for the Designation of Cultures and Their Variation. Their approach was strictly chronological and culture-historical, and was based on an analogy with biological classification. The metaphor they used, however, was that of describing a tree. In the beginning, according to the Gladwin scheme, there were a few widespread and generalized regional roots. These in the course of time had given rise to stems, stems had subdivided into branches, and branches into phases.
At nearly the same time, archaeologists in the Middle West were developing a fundamentally different classificatory system that ignored history altogether, and was based purely on typological resemblances between artifacts and artifact groups. Formally designated as the Midwestern taxonomic method, it came to be known popularly as the McKern system because it was first described in print by W. C. McKern in 1939, although it had actually been formulated at a series of archaeological conferences several years before.
While the Gladwins’ system was essentially a splitting system, the Midwestern system was conceived by its authors as a lumping system. It began at the lowest level by recognizing foci, which were made up of groups of sites in a localized area, sharing a very large number of traits in common. Foci were grouped into aspects, which shared some but not as many traits in common; aspects were in turn lumped into phases, and finally phases were grouped into patterns, representing the highest and most generalized level in the system. The original scheme comprehended only two patterns for the whole eastern United States: the Woodland and the Mississippian. The Midwestern system was devised to a considerable extent for the study and classification of museum and private collections, most of which were poorly dated, and for that reason it did not have a specifically chronological dimension. Phases, aspects, and foci might be either temporal or geographical variants of the parent pattern.
The McKern system has been widely, though not very systematically, employed in many parts of North America besides the Midwest; however, it has never been accepted as providing a fully satisfactory overall schema for the classification of North American prehistory. Like nearly all classificatory devices, it has been found to work better in some places and at some periods than at others.
Meanwhile, the discovery of so-called Early Man (now usually called Palaeo-Indian) remains in the 1930s added a new and unexpected chronological dimension to American prehistory. Palaeolithic-type remains were found which must date back at least several thousand years, and which could not be definitely related to the later Indian cultures. In classifying these early remains, American prehistorians followed much more closely the model of de Mortil-let, rather than the methodology they employed in dealing with the later cultures. That is, the various Palaeo-Indian cultures, like Clovis and Folsom, were treated strictly as chronological subdivisions in a single linear progression. This approach seems to be supported both by distributional evidence and by subsequent radiocarbon dating, but it probably owes something to the influence of the Old World Palaeolithic canon as well.
In 1958, G. R. Willey and Philip Phillips proposed a comprehensive chronological schema for all of the native cultures of the New World. The prehistoric cultures were assigned to five developmental stages: lithic, archaic, formative, classic, and postclassic. This involved no formal systematics; it was a simple evolutionary chronology somewhat akin to the European three-age system, though with more attention to ecological factors. It has proved to be useful for the evolutionary pigeonholing of specific prehistoric cultures, but it makes no effort to express historical relationships among them, as the Gladwin and McKern systems were intended to do.
The Gladwin and McKern systems remain almost the only efforts to introduce anything like formal or rigorous systematics into the classification of New World cultures, and neither has come into general use. Insofar as formal methods have been employed, they have been devoted much more to the differentiation of sequential phases within the same culture (e. g., Pueblo I-II-III-IV-V) than to the differentiation of spatially distinct cultures. Overall, archaeological culture classification in the Americas remains mostly an ad hoc process, guided by no rigorous rules, as it does also in Europe and Africa.
World History
