These functional approaches to cultural organization were consolidated in the 1960s by a ‘processual’ or new archaeology and its proponents such as Lewis R. Binford who applied Leslie White’s understanding of culture as an adaptive system. In such a framework, the institutional organization found in earlier functional studies of religion, war, politics, and economy was placed within a larger contextual framework of cultural ecology. Material patterns were assumed to be reflections of the ongoing cultural processes of adaptation both developmentally (internal society changes) and in response to external environmental changes.
To enhance, as well as justify, this understanding of culture, an important development for interpretation was the explicit discussion of modeling and the process of inference itself. It became common-place for archaeological interpretations to integrate references to theory from the philosophy of science in these discussions. Ideally models not only explained cultural adaptations but also took the form of testable propositions or hypotheses. Although regional histories were still critical to this endeavor, the greater goal was to produce broadly applicable conclusions about culture and history that transcended particular cultures or times. In conjunction with this emphasis on building a new archaeological science, innovative technologies such as computers as well as spatial and mathematical techniques, were introduced in interpretive models to give them more rigor and assess the reliability of interpretations.
In such an archaeology, artifacts were initially considered as representative of different parts or aspects of the cultural system (see Artifacts, Overview). Bin-ford introduced the terms technomic, sociotechnic, and ideotechnic to classify artifacts into functional categories. Following White, Julian H. Steward, and others, these materialist theory categories also reflected a hierarchy of causes. Technology, defined as the harnessing of energy in the environment for subsistence and other basic needs, was assumed to be the driving force that conditioned the organization of social institutions which in turn laid the causal groundwork for particular systems of belief. As technological needs changed so would social organization and ideology. Finally, this causal layering of culture and its subsystems prioritized group activities and longer-term processes rather than individual activities and specific events.
Behavioral Archaeology
This combination of scientific goals, causal priorities, and units of analysis has generated a range of critical and alternative archaeological models of interpretation beginning in the 1970s that continues today. In the mid-1970s, J. Jefferson Reid, Michael B. Schiffer, and William R. Rathje called for a ‘behavioral archaeology’, arguing that to achieve the goals of such a process-oriented study scholars needed to refocus the discipline on building knowledge of the relationship between behavior and material culture in all times and places (see Behavioral Archaeology).
Schiffer proposed a pathway model of archaeological inference to understand how patterns in the archaeological record were causally produced by earlier events in the history of the artifacts involved. He argued that given a detailed knowledge of correlations between activities and artifact patterns in different stages of an artifact’s life history (e. g., manufacture, use, re-use, discard) derived from ethnographic (especially ethnoarchaeological) settings, one could define traces in the archaeological record of these earlier activities.
In effect this model suggested that any interpretation was at root a series of hypotheses about past artifact life histories. Behavioral archaeologists differed from Taylor by arguing that culture was an emergent product of the behaviors, rather than ideas, making up these histories. Although initially framed as working within the same materialist framework as other processual archaeologists by emphasizing artifact histories, behavioralists were forced to elevate the importance of specific site formation process events, as well as individual scale activities. This was telling, as it led to a break between behavioralists and other processual archaeologists and exposed undertheorized aspects of the interpretive models of the time that have since been pursued in practice and agency-based models.
In a famous exchange between Schiffer and Binford, each described the other’s interpretive model as lacking the dynamism to accurately characterize variability of the archaeological record. Schiffer argued that frequencies, forms, associations, and spatial relations of artifacts changed from one stage to another stage in their life histories. Therefore, it was critical to partition out these changes. Depositional patterns, he argued, were distorted versions of earlier manufacturing and use patterns. For example, the distribution of ceramics in a site likely reflected the spatial locations of refuse disposal activities rather than use locations at a site.
Processual Debate
In contrast, Binford balked at the consideration of transformations and reconstructions of life history stages, asking if the archaeological record results from the output of a culture and its subsystems, how could it be a distortion of itself? Why not simply link material variability directly to its organizing principles. That, at lower scales of analysis, sites contain artifacts that were once in a different place is simply to be expected given a specified set of organizing principles in an adapting system. It is the organization of that system and not the minutiae of its artifact variability that ultimately counts.
Much has been made of this exchange, but what seems clear is that while they shared an ideological allegiance to science and processual archeology, at the root of this debate were different interpretive models originating in different understandings of culture. For Binford it was an adaptive system; for Schiffer it was an emergent property of behaviors. Indeed, Schiffer called for the formation of a new behavioral science based on artifact-people relationships to explore such phenomena, and has in his subsequent books explored the role of artifacts in communication and the history of science and technology.
This is a significant difference that has since the mid-1980s taken archaeologists, behavioral and otherwise, far from functional interpretative models of culture. For example, a small but vocal group of scholars inspired by Robert C. Dunnell, known as Darwinian or Selectionist archaeologists, has argued that much of the evolutionary talk in archaeology owes its heritage to Spencerian conceptions of cultural evolution rather than to the more reputable biological science of Charles Darwin. They have persistently argued that culture, activities, and artifacts should be approached as variable phenotypic properties under the influence of the forces of evolution, particularly natural selection. Although this program is still developing it is clear that many of its adherents have focused on looking at artifacts as extensions of their users’ phenotypes. Their interpretive models therefore assume, like those of palaeontologists, that ever-changing populations of past artifacts can be modeled through the consideration of their adaptive fitness in specific historical contexts.
World History
