Functionalism

In a scathingly critical but brilliant piece, Walter Taylor emphasized this discrepancy arguing that culture was an emergent property, literally a mental construct “objectified and made observable through the action-systems of the body. ... it follows from this that culture is unobservable and non-material.’’

By removing all materiality from the concept of culture, Taylor ushered in an era of explicit theoretical archaeology whose ramifications are still being worked out. His call for interpretations focused on reconstructions of past cultural contexts foreshadowed more recent studies of archaeological sites formation processes, gendered activities, technological style, practice, agency, and ecology. His explicitly mentalist rendering of culture led him to propose a conjunctive model of archaeological inference where archaeological patterns were modeled as material manifestations of ideas. With the terminology and social theory available to him, he was unable to convince many archaeologists to follow his approach. Until postprocessual archaeologists, such as Ian Hodder, began to talk about the material record as text, practice and active, many of the nonmaterialist themes Taylor proposed went unaddressed.

Archaeologists instead seized on the inherent assumptions he suggested about the deeper organization of material patterning in archaeological sites and began pursuing functional and ecological questions. Understanding of what constitutes a culture shifted once again. Rather than being a contingent clustering of traits, the metaphor of an organism with systems of relations (like organs) became a more favored means for realizing the emergent organization of culture.

Settlement pattern studies and archaeological survey became an early and effective means for finding evidence of such organisms on ancient landscapes. Willey’s former trait ‘settlement pattern’ was transformed into a topic of study in its own right in Archaeological Settlement Patterns in the Virti Valley, Peru. Other scholars recognized that warfare was an important process that also deserved important attention, as did study of religious processes and the growth of political and economic power.

In eastern North America, scholars such as Raymond S. Baby, Preston Holder, William Ritchie, Antonio J. Waring, and William S. Webb explored religious processes that had previously gone unstudied. Ethnographic analogy was back. Many of the organizing principles of culture broached by Taylor could be found there. Charles Di Peso presented a detailed and radical interpretation of the Site of Casas Grandes in northern Mexico linking the regional economic and political history of the American southwest to the empires of the valley of Mexico. The use of such analogies highlighted a clear need for ethnographic information appropriate to archaeological interpretations that was not necessarily available in past ethnographic work. Archaeologists, therefore, began to go out and conduct their own studies in the form of ethnoarchaeology (see Ethnoarchaeology).