Some Prefatory Thoughts on TAG 2014 Manchester [Updated]

If you've been frozen in a glacier somewhere and have just now thawed out, you might not know that yours truly has been invited to be the discussant for a session at the Theoretical Archaeology Group in Manchester, England, in mid December, 2014. [For more information there's a link in the sidebar.]

Most of you are acquainted with the mechanics of conferences like this. So, you'll already know that I've not seen an abstract, much less a draft of any papers. Nonetheless, I thought it might be valuable to offer some thoughts about the session, as it's described by the organizers. [Update: A few hours after this was posted, I received a reminder that I had been sent abstracts of the papers. Apologies to all involved for my omission. However, in my defense, those abstracts came while I was in the midst of working non-stop for the last three weeks of a very difficult reporting project about which some of you may already have heard.] 

Bridges Over Troubled Theoretical Waters: Crossing the Divide between Data-based Archaeology and Archaeological Theory in Prehistoric Studies

Organized by Paul R. Preston (Lithoscapes Archaeological Research Foundation), Katie Davenport-Mackey (Lithoscapes Archaeological Research Foundation, and Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester), Seosaimhín Bradley (Archaeology, School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences, University of Central Lancashire), and Tom Elliot (Lithoscapes Archaeological Research Foundation, and Institute of Science and Environment, University of Worcester). Vicki Cummings (Archaeology, School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences, University of Central Lancashire) will chair the session.* 

 During recent workshops of the MESO-Lithics project, a number of issues have arisen that have far-reaching implications for archaeology as a whole. Namely, interpretations derived from archaeological theory in prehistoric studies are becoming ever more ambitious, ranging from low-order functional or economic theory to higher-order socially or stylistically mediated narratives. However, such interpretations are presently limited by the legacy of ideological upheavals and profound revolutions in thought over the last sixty years. From Culture History to the post-Post-Processual fragmentation of theoretical perspectives. Added to this is the prevalence of following fashionable philosophers such as Bourdieu, Heidegger and Deleuze (to name just a few). However, a common feature that has remained a detriment to archaeological studies is the tendency of disciples of each theoretical movement to reject that which went before ―throwing out of [sic] the methodological and conceptual baby with the theoretical bathwater― irrespective of the value of certain approaches. One of the major casualties of these ‘revolutions’ is the use of data to support interpretations – especially by theorists. As a result, many have apparently forgotten the role of, or indeed how to marshal, data in their interpretations. Instead narratives have become ideologically led, as archaeologists increasingly prefer ‘top down’ theoretical approaches. This session aims to redress this by promoting a discussion on how this impasse may be redressed by showcasing recent attempts by archaeologists to bridge this important, conceptual divide between data and theory.

I'd like to focus on the passage I highlighted above. In part, because I believe that it's factual. But the 'fact' that it exposes is so unnecessary, for a variety of reasons, as I attempt to flesh out in what follows. 

As an archaeological infant I was weaned on what Binford called Normative anthropological theory—the idea that Culture is all about the norms of a society—something which he, especially, decried as useless for archaeologists interested in the Paleolithic. He likened it to 'paleopsychology,' and gave it short schrift.

Marvin Harris

I went on to be educated as a Cultural Materialist—in the Marvin Harris mould—and a Processual (or New) Archaeologist. As were so many others in the 1970s and '80s I was persuaded to embrace the nomothetic-deductive philosophy of science championed by Hempel and other late Logical Empricists. As a result I looked askance at Structuralism, and was dismissive of the Old archaeology. [Keep in mind that this was in the mid 1980s, when, unbeknownst to me, there was already considerable post-modern theoretical foment in archaeology.] 

When I was offered a Regent's Internship-Fellowship at the University of California at Berkelely [Cal to those of you familiar with such matters], one of my Simon Fraser University mentors warned me that there were Structuralists there. 'There' also boasted J. Desmond Clarke, F. Clark Howell, Kent Lightfoot, Vince Sarich, Ruth Tringham, and Tim White.

Meg Conkey

The Structuralist I was to be wary of was Margaret W. Conkey, who, as it turned out, had moved well beyond structuralism in her thinking and in her fieldwork. Meg's work had been brought to my attention through her 1980 paper, "The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira" (Current Anthropology 21:609-630). Structuralist or not, that paper was data driven, and its arguments cogent. But what was really exercising most of the archaeologists I knew was Meg's and others' successful efforts to expose gender bias in archaeology, and to introduce the study of gender in archaeological cultures. I heard many a male archaeologists' whispered diatribes aimed at the very idea that an archaeology of gender was worth pursuing. Most were just re-cast anti-feminism, anti-affirmative action, anti-female, and often homophobomania [my word for the utterly despicable worldview that causes ostensibly sane men to presume that to be a feminist a women must be, deep down, a lesbian, and that to be supportive of women's causes, a man must be short a testicle or two—more homophobomania, I presume].

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

I'm very glad that despite the warnings, some said in jest, I chose to pursue a PhD at Cal, and that Meg Conkey chaired my committee, which also included Diane Gifford-Gonzalez (UC Santa Cruz) and Clark Howell. In my first year there, I was exposed to strident post-modern critiques of science and archaeology, many of which I discovered to be well-founded when aimed at the unreflexive anthropological theory then practiced by many archaeologists—especially the then-popular 'adaptationist' stance taken by most who drank the Marvin Harris Kool-Aid. Just to refresh your memory, I'm talking about the processualist view of culture as "Man's [sic] extra-somatic means of adaptation." Lots of good archaeological fieldwork was carried out under that banner; however, much more would have been achievable with a less-limited theoretical framework.

Karl Butzer

[Insider note: I was asked to guide Karl Butzer from a reception at one place on the UCB campus to the place he was to give an invited public presentation. He was on my list of archaeological deities because of Archaeology as Human Ecology. In that Cal presentation he nearly apologized for his former strictly adaptationist leanings, and came down in favour of a more nuanced examination of past human behaviour.]

Along with archaeologists Meg the Structuralist and Ruth the Marxist, there were many post-modern sociocultural anthropologists in the Department, who didn't have much time for archaeologists and physical anthropologists in general—presumably because they saw us as lacking the requisite theoretical credentials, and among our other faults we were still focussed on practicing archaeology as a scientific enquiry. Anti-science critiques abounded, although, as I was to learn, some of them used plain ol' empirical evidence to shore up their arguments [otherwise known as scientific reasoning], and they were still thinking about Science in its positivist philosophical mould, which I now see as a self-inflicted wound that went unnoticed within that circle. 

And it's to Meg whom I owe the bear's share of gratitude for expanding and deepening my theoretical toolkit. Hers was my first graduate seminar, "Issues in the Archaeology of Hunter-Gatherers." Despite the presence of a strident post-modernist and several reconstructed Cultural Materialists in the group, I was delighted by the breadth of empirical observation that was levelled against what was then popularly called the New Archaeology, or ProcessualArchaeology. Regardless of people around me proclaiming that science was dead, I was learning more about the value of archaeology as an empirical undertaking at the same time as I was being shown that the theory I'd been fed was, to put it bluntly, limited.

Alison Wylie

Meg arranged for Alison Wylie to facilitate a seminar in my second term. I had not been swayed by the proclamations that science was dead, or hopelessly flawed, or inherently androcentric, and yet I had nothing but my 'faith' that there was value in a body of knowledge that was based on empirical observation and evidence-based reasoning. Alison's work and her frequent mini-lectures in that seminar have enabled me to think differently from most post-processual archaeologists—because of my exposure to a [relatively] new way of thinking about how scientific knowledge is constructed.

I'm guessing that everyone reading this is familiar with the notion of the Scientific Method. It goes back hundreds of years. Put simply, it holds that you can't make a scientific inference unless you can observe the phenomenon. Hempel and others—sometimes referred to as Logical Positivists—belong to a group of philosophers of science known generically as Logical Empiricists. "If A, then B" pretty much sums up the Logical Empiricist stance. If you can't show that when A occurs, B follows, you don't have a scientific construct. I can't explain in detail here—and many have done it far better than I ever could—although I do a reasonably good job of it in one of the papers I wrote prior to being made a PhD candidate, "What is Archaeology, Really?" 

As Wylie points out, empiricist philosophy of science effectively ruled out our discipline as a science, because we attempt to make knowledge of something that, literally, doesn't exist: the past. As it turns out, Positivism also rules out early universe physics. And, I know from experience—having worked with astronomers and astrophysicists for nearly a decade—those so-called hard scientists make knowledge of the past using the very same reasoning that we archaeologists do. [Nostalgic note: the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, was nearly canonized by New Archaeologists, because they loved the idea of overturning the 'Old' archaeology 'paradigm.' Yet, as Alison Wylie pointed out to our graduate seminar, Kuhn's was essentially a social critique. His 'data' were currents of thought, which should be a lesson to any hold-out empiricist who seeks to confine 'data' to observations of physical phenomena.]

Just because we make knowledge in ways that don't fit with Logical Positivism doesn't mean that we're not doing 'Science,' or that our science is weak, or soft, in contrast to the likes of physics or chemistry. Indeed, the philosophy of science that held sway for hundreds of years has been in need of a facelift. That 'lift' is an account of how scientific knowledge is made that's often referred to as Scientific Realism. There are many philosophers of science, in addition to Alison Wylie, who can tell you all about it. I'll just say this. Empiricist philosophy of science couldn't even adequately describe the true nature of well-established scientific knowledge, because so much of it depends on recognizing and building on abstract models for physical processes that were inherently unobservable—the atomic structure is one example of a scientific finding that's been arrived at without anyone ever having seen an electron or a proton, much less an atom in the wild. Scientific Realism is an epochal shift for philosophy of science, and someday, I hope, the rest of the world will catch up. In the meantime, there is much "throwing out of the baby with the bathwater," as the TAG 2014 session organizers suggest.

The Subversive
Archaeologist,
ready to do battle
with bad inferences

I hope you'll forgive me for a rather lengthy blurt about not much of anything.

Mostly, I wanted to foreshadow my 'discussion' of the theoretical issues that will no doubt be raised by the papers we'll be seeing at TAG 2014 in Manchester.

___________________________

* I look forward to meeting all of you. Paul Preston a long-time friend of the Subversive Archaeologist. [And yet it hasn't hurt his career to the best of my knowledge. Note to self: warn Paul of imminent danger.]

The Levallois Technique: Human Evolution or Intelligent Design?

ROB: LINK TO YOUR PREVIOUS POSTS WHERE APPROPRIATE.

I'm feeling my oats, today. I've been thinking about my efforts to overturn ideas about the Levallois technique of chipping stone. For a great many archaeologists it represents a technically complex process that is governed by the desired end product. This view is so deeply entrenched in palaeolithic archaeological theory that it is tantamount to orthodoxy. I've tried to dispel this idea using sarcasm, innuendo, irony, satire, and . . . oh, yeah . . . empirical observation, to no avail. A few days ago, sitting on the porcelain throne, it came to me that there's an almost one-to-one correspondence between the way the Levallois is viewed and . . . *waits while the room becomes suddenly, deadly quiet* Intelligent Design [ID]. If you're not familiar with this so-called scientific theory, all you need to know is that ID is the movement formerly known as Creationism [or the theory of Special Creation]. Yup. ID is the same old poppycock about the ultimate goal of a Christianized supernatural being that has been a pain in the ass for science since the nineteenth century [where it should have remained], and is now very much favoured by Christian Supremacists in North America. Same bull; different moniker. So I'd like to bring my novel argument to the intertubes—run in up the flag-pole, as it were—to see if anyone salutes.

Speaking of saluting. Let's hope that if someone metaphorically 'salutes' my newest brain-child, it won't be in the same manner as these youthful citizens were doing in May 1942 while the group was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America, in Southington, Connecticut ;-)]. This tiny slice of US history was brought to you by the Subversive Archaeologist's irony allele.

This was,  indeed, the posture prescribed when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States, from the time American socialist Francis Bellamy wrote it in 1892, until it was replaced in 1942, for fairly obvious reasons. This image was captured in May 1942 by photojournalist Charles Fenno Jacobs, who was at the time employed by the US government. The US Congress formally adopted the Pledge in 1942. At that time a new-and-improved approved salute was written into law. Photograph in the Library of Congress.

I found it on this web site


Now, back to our story.

[If you're in need of a Levallois technique refresher, I've created a special Subversive Archaeologist Primer that recaps my past arguments, and provides links to SA articles that bear on this matter.]

You may know that I've repeatedly called for the revision of palaeoanthropological thought on the Levallois technique. You remember? The Levallois method of knapping stone is claimed to be a way to reduce a block of stone in a complicated sequence that achieves a desired end-product [that even modern humans have a lot of trouble replicating]. Of course, being able to replicate a stone artifact cannot, logically, stand as evidence that the object being replicated was manufactured with the same end point in mind. It's the fundamental fallacy of stone artifact-replication experiments.

François Bordes

Nevertheless, on the basis of François Bordes's ingenious 'reverse-engineering' of Middle Palaeolithic artifacts, French archaeologists have, for over half a century, described the presumed Levallois technique as très pensée [~ingenious]. I've prattled on about the [very real] possibility that, rather than its being a really ingenious method, it's ingenuity is entirely in the minds of the archaeologists that construct its use in this way. There's another logical fallacy at work here, too. It's this: the orthodox view of the technique was constructed from a experience-near, source-side analogy* to the way modern humans have prepared stone tools over the past 40 ka or so. It's completely bass-ackwards. We should be trying to understand the Levallois technique from the point of view of what came before. That's crucial if we're ever to achieve a more objective understanding of the cognition behind this behaviour. [Notice I didn't say, merely, "objective." At best we can hope for an objectivity mitigated by our understanding of the intellectual and cultural 'baggage' that we carry with us in our quest for knowledge of our past.]

This proposition, while independently theorized by your favourite subversive archaeologist [but not in print], isn't original. In the early 90s Iain Davidson and Bill Noble recognized the same theoretical bias, calling the phenomenon the 'Finished Artifact Fallacy.' Indeed, most palaeolithic archaeologists labour under the anachronistic and erroneous mind-set that imagines a stone-worker's intent can be directly inferred from an artifact's morphology. It's not just bad inference-making; it's bad science!

Schematic representation of the Levallois technique, involving removal of a 

great number of preparation flakes intended to set up for removal of a 

final flake with a morphology that was envisioned before the process began.  

Kayso, in the Levallois Technique the two major claims are 1) that it first demands careful preparation to produce what's called a tortoise shell-shaped core, and 2) that the tortoise-shell core is the platform from which will be struck one and sometimes two flakes that have a morphology akin [only akin] to an artifact shape for which modern archaeologists claim a certain function based on its topological resemblance to stone artifacts known from the ethnographic record [and a lot that aren't]. It's . . . pardon my French . . .absurde, in the first place, to think such thoughts, and in the second place, abracadabrantesque, simply to assume it was so. As the basis for one's inferences of Middle Palaeolithic bipedal ape behaviour and cognitive complexity, we need a bit more than weak argument and a leap of faith!

The Levallois Point is a perfect example. I took the photograph below while excavating at Kebara Cave, Israel, in 1989.** Well, actually,*** the original depicted only the Levallois Point in the middle. I've superimposed a Dalton Point  and a generic fluted point, from North America's Archaic and Paleo-Indian Periods, respectively. I've brought them in to illustrate how patronizing it seems to me to look at the one in the middle and say that it bears enough of a resemblance to the generic type category, 'projectile point,' to be considered one and the same thing. In fact, it's downright condescending to point *cough* to the item in the middle and say that it must be such a tool—sub-text: "We all know those big, lovable blockheads, the Neanderthals, couldn't quite get the symmetry in the way that modern humans can, nor, for that matter the idea that a simple flake can be turned into such a shape through judicious application of retouch." Patronizing? I'll say! And so 1990! [Aside: at the end of the day, 'retouch' may be seen as the only, real, Middle Palaeolithic innovation in stone-tool making. Just sayin.]

Left, Dalton Point; middle, Levallois Point; right, fluted point.

That brings us to today's matter. A lesson in how to talk to dyed-in-the-wool advocates for a genius behind the so-called Levallois technique. Forget highfalutin talk about equifinality, and misplaced formal analogy.**** Forget trying to show them that Bordes's Levallois core and flake types are a load o' hooey. Instead, get straight to the point *coughs [again!]* and embarrass the Hell outa them. How? Let me count the ways! Well, actually, the way. One. Just one.

It's rather easy. You need only point out to them that their view of the so-called Levallois technique uses the same ill logic as the theory of Intelligent Design promoted by Christian Supremacists as the holy alternative to evolution by natural selection.

That's it, Rob? That's the best you can do? You said as much in the first paragraph! What gives?

Need I say more?

Oh, all right! I'm really sorry for dragging you this far, and having said so very little about my novel idea. What I've said is all there really is to say about it. Seriously. So, I ask you again, "Need I say more?"

All right! No need to yell! My last word? OK. Today's final word will be a riddle. What do you get when you prepare a Levallois tortoise-shell core but don't remove the final flake? Answer: a hand axe, of course!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

* Gotcha! Experience-near, source-side analogy means those that are based on knowledge constructed in the present, and which are then used to infer that a process or phenomenon from the past is the result of the same process or phenomenon in the present. Or, words to that effect. Sort of.

**Thanks again, Ofer and Paul, and the rest of the équipe for letting me play in the dirt with you at Kebara! Sorry about the whole burial thing. Nothing personal!

*** There's a strange harmony between what the English say to contradict or to affirm the reality—actually—and what the French say in a similar social context—en verité, [literally 'in truth']. In fact, the French word actuellement [literally 'actually'] is actually used to signal something that is happening 'as we speak,' as it were. My mischievous, satyrical historical--satirical side thinks this may reflect the long-standing [but for the past couple of centuries, simmering] antipathy between the French and the English over who owns what, where. 

****  A formal analogy is made when two things—whether processes or phenomena—that share some similarities—usually readily observable—are claimed to be more or less the same, by presuming other—usually unobservable—similarities.  It was Alison Wylie who first brought to my attention the distinction between formal analogies and relational analogies, those analogies in which causal relationships between different processes or phenomena that can be observed or inferred. For me, formal analogy is like inferring that a doggy bone in the shape of a real bone is, in fact, a real bone; while relational analogy describes the reasoning behind identifying once-living organisms from their fossils. 

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/analogy#ixzz2z4aD4CmE

Neolithic Houses Do Not Grow On Archaeological Trees: Until Now

Our pals at Pasthorizons: adventuresinarchaeology have just released this.

FOUR NEOLITHIC HOUSES UNEARTHED AT QUARRY

Honestly, this is almost epochal. Neolithic habitations in England [at least] have been notoriously elusive. Much is due to the deforestation and resultant deflation of the landscape thanks to those very same, pesky Neolithickers. One of the four is shown below, from CEMEX's Kingsmead Quarry in Berkshire, radiocarbon dated to between 3,800 AND 3,640 B.C.E. 

One of four Neolithic domestic structures in Berkshire. [Stolen, with thanks, from www.pasthorizons.com.]

A house this large is, to my way of thinking, evidence of what Brian Hayden has called corporate groups. One well-known example of this kind of social arrangement was visible in the ethnographic large plank houses on the northwest coast of North America. Each 'house' was more like a family business. Several related families would occupy the house and all would cooperate to exploit the environment in a cultural system that included frequent competitive feasts---feasts that did less than distribute wealth [as some archaeologists and anthropologists have claimed] and more to beggar other similar groups. Each guest at a 'potlatch' would leave in debt, basically, to the family or person holding the party. If you've gone to the link to read up on the potlatch you'll very quickly discover that the preponderance of anthropologists cleave to this idea of wealth redistribution. That's pretty much caca in my book.

Anyway, onward to the past. 

As the folks at Pasthorizons will tell you, finding four such places is, to say the least, extraordinary. As you can see in the photo, this was an enormous structure, on the order of 10 m by 20 m. Finding this site is a good news story, archaeologically speaking. Let's hope that CEMEX will see fit to conserve this unique settlement.

Stolen, with thanks, from www.pasthorizons.com 

That's it for today!

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Part One of [Probably] Many: What Does It Mean To Be A Subversive Archaeologist?

I'm betting most people are surprised to hear the word 'subversive' spoken in the same breath as 'archaeologist.' After all, subversives work against evil governments or brutal oppressors, not university subjects. So, what's up? 'Subversive archaeologist' seems almost oxymoronic. You're getting close. Oxymoron is from the Greek words for 'sharp' and 'foolish.' In archaeology, as in life, one is either 'sharp' or 'foolish,' and from my perspective, there's no in-between. 
     This blurt is about the distance between getting it right and makin' stuff up, between a good theory and a bad myth, a well-warranted inference and a mistaken one. Whoa! Wait a minit! Inference? Don't people infer stuff from partial information? Exactly. But, that doesn't sound like science to me. Well, that's science, and in this case, archaeology, all over.
     It's not up to me to comment on the way knowledge is made in the other sciences. But in archaeology, artifacts don't come out of the ground with labels on 'em. Believe me. I've spent years on my hands and knees, scraping back time, in search of a long-forgotten past. And you don't 'discover' the past, you make it up. Sort of.
     Archaeologists dig to find traces of the past. And those traces don't speak for themselves. In a very real way, archaeologists give those things meaning. We try to get it 'right.' We don't try to pull the wool over your eyes. But much of the time the bits we find are ambiguous, and sometimes we don't find that out until years later. That's how archaeological myths are born. The job of a subversive archaeologist is to reveal the ambiguity, and in that way to help in dismantling both the myth and the web of mistaken beliefs that it spawned down through the years.
     The work of a subversive isn't popular with the 'government' of archaeology--the hierarchy of Professors and Directors and such. And they let you know it, in various ways, overt and insidious. So, being a subversive archaeologist, like a lot of subversives, is almost like being in an armed conflict. There are skirmishes, strategies, tactics, logistics, even outright war in archaeology. And it's all because of the tension between 'getting it right' and getting it embarrassingly wrong. Come with me and I'll show you worlds you never imagined [there's a lot of that in archaeology], and ideas you hoped you'd never have to grapple with.
     No worries. I'll talk you down. We'll have fun. Honest.
     Maybe an example will help. You've probably heard of the Piltdown Man, once considered a fossil ancestor. You may even have heard that it was a hoax. It was. But thanks to the guile of the hoaxster and the gullibility of most archaeologists of the time, it's reality was unquestioned for decades. That's because the people who study our fossil relatives decided that it was a proper piece of the jigsaw puzzle of human evolution. That expectation and the acceptance of Piltdown Man held back real scientific progress, real knowledge, for nearly forty years.
     Piltdown is still a small country crossroads in southeastern England. Too far from London to be built up. It had or has a gravel pit. In nineteenth and early twentieth-century England that meant one thing--there be fossils here.

The Piltdown Pub, Piltdown, East Sussex, England. (From Wikipedia. This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. See this photograph's page on the Geograph website for the photographer's contact details. The copyright on this image is owned by Nigel Freeman and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.)

Group portrait by John Cooke, 1915.
Back row (from left): F O Barlow, G Elliot Smith,
Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward.
Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith,
W P Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

To make a long story short, in 1912 Charles Dawson came across a skull and jawbone that looked to him as if it was the 'missing link' between the apes and humans. [For the time being we'll ignore the specious distinction between 'ape' and 'human,' since we're all apes. Humans just happen to be the only apes that habitually walk upright on their hind legs--A.K.A. obligate bipeds.] The Piltdown specimen was readily accepted because it had a modern sized skull and teeth and jaws like the other apes [the lower jaw was actually that of an orangutan, with its long canines literally filed down]. This all fit perfectly with conventional wisdom of the time--that the essential difference between apes and humans was our big brains, and that the 'missing link' would have a big brain and [most likely] a body like an ape. Therefore, the Piltdown specimen 'fit' with what scholars expected to find, and what the hoaxster knew they'd be ready to accept. Unfortunately the strength of scientific orthodoxy meant that for nearly forty years no one seriously questioned the find. Well, almost nobody.

The 'Taung Child' (Australopithecus africanus).

South African anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart knew differently. But for most of those forty years he faced a sceptical discipline that pooh-poohed his work. You see, in 1924 Dart had discovered a tiny skull of a very ancient, infant ape. It had a little ape brain, and big ape canine teeth, just as you'd expect in an ape. But it had one huge difference. The place where the spinal cord emerges from the skull wasn't near the back of the skull--the normal place for apes--it was instead almost directly underneath it. That's where yours is, and mine, too [though some have called me a little monkey now and then for my *clears throat* efforts, I'm still human when it comes to the big hole in my head. That's funny. Having a big hole in my head is actually something people have accused me of. But they must have been thinking of my anatomy, and not my intellect. Maybe not. Actually, that hole in our heads has a scientific name--foramen magnum--which is Latin for *almost under his breath* 'big hole.' Look. I can't help it if eighteenth-century European scientists thought it'd be cool to use Latin for scientific discourse, most likely to get past the problem of having about a million languages in the Europe of the time. Besides, doesn't foramen magnum sound more learnéd than 'big hole'?]

Raymond Dart

     So, Dart had this infant ape that would most likely have walked upright as an adult. [He knew its age because it still had its baby teeth. Yes, chimps and gorillas and people all have baby teeth. But as far as I know only humans have the tooth fairy...] ] That it walked like us was a perfectly plausible inference. Having the foramen magnum underneath the skull, Dart's new species must have evolved to have a bipedal gait like ours. This was a bold argument, since he had no fossil bones from the rest of the body to compare with ours. But it was a brilliant induction, just the same. [Yes, yes, I meant to say induction. Sherlock Holmes was actually mistaken in his use of the word 'deduction' to describe his characteristic brand of reasoning. Math problems involve deduction. 'This is a three. This is a two. What must you subtract from three to get two.' There's only one possible answer. That's what's known as a deduction. Rather like what happens to your pay when the tax is taken out! Doh! Focus, Rob. Most things that we know about the real world are inductions from insufficient observations. Think about it. We don't actually know that, after we step off the curb, a car isn't going to appear out of nowhere and wipe us off the face of the planet. In the love of truth--the original meaning of 'philosophy'--we really can't know such things. There'll always be a possibility, however remote, that something we don't expect is gonna happen, regardless of the evidence from long experience. But, even though we can't be certain that we're gonna be wiped out when we cross an empty roadway, we can be comforted by the fact that, so far, it's never happened. Moreover, we have no reason to think that it might--unless, of course, you believe that the movie Back to the Future was a documentary. But, don't take my word for it! Read anything on informal logic. You'll see. I'm right!]

     So, there was Dart. A [literally] small man, with a small, unique fossil skull, living in a small backwater of the British Empire, trying to subvert [in the eyes of the scientific establishment] the conventional wisdom of the English scientific aristocracy. Fat chance. So, Dart labored mostly in obscurity for decades, accumulating more fossils. Over time, he and Robert Broom found more evidence that the English scientists were mistaken, and that the Piltdown fossil MUST be a fake. I don't need to bore you with the details of how that fake was exposed. It's all there in books by people much more steeped in the minutiae of Piltdown hoaxery. Read them.]
     Wow! As examples go, that was a long one, eh? Unfortunately, that's one of the downsides of being a subversive. Almost always the effort it takes to unravel a bad inference is way more than it took to make it in the first place. The reasons for that will, I hope, become clear to you as you work your way through future blurts on this and other matters. [Whaddaya mean you don't wanna hafta work while you read? You always have to work when you read...unless, that is, you believe everything you read, or hear--like the people who watch Fox News. I suspect you don't, otherwise you wouldn't have clicked on a link to The Subversive Archaeologist. You're ready. I know you are. And I know you can 'do the work.']
     If you're up for more, I sure am. Let's go, shall we?

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

[Updated] The Subversive Archaeologist's Plaint: 'Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me'

Some of you may have seen a comment from Maju informing me that I'm a bigot because I happen to think that the Neanderthals aren't our cognitive equals. Maju unsubscribed from this blog because he believes I'm biased against Neanderthals, whom he considers to be among his forbears. What Maju has failed to realize is that I've got lots of reasons to think the way I do about the Neanderthals, based on my 'reading' of the archaeological record. And, rather than making fun of the Neanderthals, I'm much more likely to mock the authors of the extraordinary claims that have been made for their cognitive capabilities.

With Maju's gripe in mind, you might well be wondering if there's any evidence that could make me change my mind about the possibility of the Neanderthals being the cognitive equals of modern humans. You might be surprised to learn that the answer is 'Yes.' But I won't 'believe' just any evidence. In fact, it's my singular purpose to expose bad inference-making for what it is, as you know. I won't accept 'any' evidence if it's wholesale rubbish, untestable imagineering, or just one of two or more possible inferences that could be made from the observations--that's Rule #1.

I do think that Neanderthals were clever bipedal apes, as are we. And, of course I think their genome must have been doing something right to have enabled them to persist as a recognizable morphospecies for so long. We have abundant evidence for that. But when it comes to the notion of what stands as 'evidence' for their cognitive abilities, I think the discipline could use a bit of remediation.

All claims to have 'evidence' of something need to be examined for their veracity. I'll give you a contemporary example: Mitt Romney says 'such and such' in a presidential debate. You may be inclined to believe him, or not. But how you go about assessing the veracity of his statement? In the empirical and epistemological world the answer to that isn't the personage (their electability or ability to drink beer with the good old boys), and it's not about your political stance. Checking a candidate's veracity is about seeing if an argument measures up to a close, empirical examination of the premises behind the statement and the logic of the links between the premises and the conclusion. In political discourse [as opposed to archaeological science--most of the time] it's common for two sides to have wildly different interpretations of the 'facts' in question--this is known colloquially as 'spin.' It's the spin that needs to be examined, in and of itself. However, if it's the case that the polar conclusions are the result of equifinality, and it's logically impossible to choose between them, in politics it's not a problem. That's because, from the point of view of the voters, the political arena can countenance two interpretations that are equally well supported (I suppose). It's okay in a political arena because one of the interpretations will no doubt suit even the most discerning voter if there's no way to distinguish unequivocally between them. [I'm not sure that's the case where Governor Romney is concerned, but that's another question--one for the American electorate to decide.]

It's not okay for two competing explanations of the archaeological record to be treated in the same manner as in the example above. For me, the question of which inference to accept isn't about politics. We're not voting on an issue, we're presumably heading for a more realistic understanding of what came to pass millennia ago. And thus, where there are competing explanations it's illogical and unscientific to choose bipedal apes over nature as the explanation for the archaeological observations. After all, we're talking about determining whether or not the Neanderthals were our cognitive equals (whatever that might mean), and in most cases it means deciding on whether or not to accept what's claimed as evidence to be the very first occurrence of a given behaviour in the history of bipedal apes--one that can be equated with modern human capabilities. To my mind that makes it even more important--crucial, if you must know--to resist accepting one favored 'interpretation'--one 'claim of evidence'--when others are equally (and I mean equally) likely.

I, for one, know how easy it is to get caught up in a belief based on just one possibility when there are other, more parsimonious, interpretations. However, since I began to write as the Subversive Archaeologist I think I've managed to 'expose' as equivocal [at a minimum] a goodly number of well-established and widely accepted claims for 'evidence' of modern behaviour amongst the Neanderthals: hafting, mastic making, eagle-talon beading, featherbedding, insecticidal mattress-making, and so on. Before SA came along, the discipline had incorporated those claims into their 'modeling' of 'hominin' cognitive evolution. Don't ask me whether or not I'm prepared to change my view. What are they prepared to do with their models now that they've been shown there's a whiff of ambiguity about those claims for hafting, mastic making, feathered capes, eagle talon jewellery, and so on, and so on? Are they prepared to unhinge their overall view of the Neanderthals from what they've now come to know are equivocal arguments, and reassess their long-held beliefs? I doubt it.

You might think that my view of the Neanderthals should have changed in light of recent work. Indeed it has! My view of Neanderthals as clever apes--and not the cognitive equals of modern humans--has been reinforced and strengthened of late, simply because of the fantastic nature of most of the recent claims, and their utter failure to overcome the buggaboo of equifinality. Note that, here, I'm including the recent genetic findings of Svante Pääbo and others, which I find incapable of escaping from the noose of ambiguity as to when interbreeding may have occurred between the Neanderthal and the skeletally modern lineages, and whether or not we were like us at the time.

Do I think my view of the Neanderthals might ever change? Yes, although my hunch is that it won't need to. But before I change my mind the discipline will have to be much better disciplined when it comes to making claims based on equivocal 'evidence,' or worse, no evidence at all [and here I'm thinking about Paul Pettitt's extended thesis on the evolution of what he calls mortuary practices, or J. L. Arsuaga's claim that the Atapuerca bipedal apes were flinging their dead down a natural well].

In that case, you may well ask what it would take to convince me that Neanderthals were the cognitive equals of people like you and me. Easy. It would take just one Neanderthal skeleton, unequivocally buried, with a string of eagle talon beads around its neck, a hafted knife or spear unequivocally associated with it [preferably gripped in its paw], a treatise on the rationale for the Levallois so-called technique, a wedding ring made with gold from northeastern Africa [preferably around its ring finger first phalanx], a bundle of black feathers flung over its back, wearingf a black feathered cape over a well-tailored wooly mammoth skin jerkin and matching loincloth, a Betty Crocker cook-book in one hand and a box of matches in the other. I think you get my point.

Getting back to the reason Maju unsubscribed, which was my response to Nathan Wales's 'Modeling Neanderthal Clothing Using Ethnographic Analogues.'* I believe the paper falls short of making a convincing argument, even though it's convincing within the context of the data sets that it considers. However, it seems to me that it's premised on the notion that Neanderthal behaviour and modern human behaviour are commensurable--i.e. that one can be understood in terms of the other--that modern analogues can be used to model any bipedal ape's behaviour other than that of modern humans. I believe that this approach is philosophically flawed. Because of how I view the 'evidence' I happen to believe the two species are incommensurable. But it matters very little what I think.

However, until and unless there is clear, unequivocal evidence that the two species' behaviours are commensurable, the discipline ought to proceed with a fair bit more caution. Alas! Regardless of what I think, Wales and many others believe that our behaviours and those of the Neanderthals are commensurable, because of their common belief in a long list of equivocal claims for all sorts of modern human behaviours that have been unjustifiably imputed to the Neanderthals over the years, beginning with purposeful burial [and you know what I think about that]. To conduct oneself as do Wales and others serves no one, least of all the discipline of archaeology, and it certainly doesn't suit me. As long as I'm able, within reason, and within empirical and epistemological bounds, to posit natural causes or alternative interpretations of what others claim to be evidence of Neanderthal cognitive abilities, I'll not go along with the rest of the discipline. And, as long as my alternatives can be upheld, the rest of them cannot imperiously claim to 'own' the correct interpretation.

[Update 20121022.1200 UTC: It occurs to me that we might begin by using ethological analogy when examining the movements of the Neanderthals. Then, at least, if anomalies begin to appear in comparison with other species in the top carnivore guild, we can investigate those for their bearing on the question of cognitive abilities in Homo neanderthalensis.]

*Abstract

Although direct evidence for Neanderthal clothing is essentially nonexistent, information about Paleolithic clothing could provide insights into the biological, technological, and behavioral capabilities of Neanderthals. This paper takes a new approach to understanding Neanderthal clothing through the collection and analysis of clothing data for 245 recent hunter-gatherer groups. These data are tested against environmental factors to infer what clothing humans tend to wear under different conditions. Beta regression is used to predict the proportion of the body covered by clothing according to a location's mean temperature of the coldest month, average wind speed, and annual rainfall. In addition, logistic regression equations predict clothing use on specific parts of the body. Neanderthal clothing patterns are modeled across Europe and over a range of Pleistocene environmental conditions, thereby providing a new appreciation of Paleolithic behavioral variability. After accounting for higher tolerances to cold temperatures, it is predicted that some Neanderthals would have covered up to 80% of their bodies during the winter, probably with non-tailored clothing. It is also likely that some populations covered the hands and feet. In comparison with Neanderthals, Upper Paleolithic modern humans are found to have worn more sophisticated clothing. Importantly, these predictions shed new light on the relationship between Neanderthal extinction and their simple clothing.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

You Must Be Bleeping Joking! JHE: "Modeling Neanderthal Clothing Using Ethnographic Analogues"?

O. M. G. !!!!!!!!!!
R. O. L. M. F. A. O. !!!!!!!!!!!!
Available online today!

Journal of Human Evolution
'Modeling Neanderthal clothing using ethnographic analogues,' Nathan Wales. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.08.006

In the first place, when I saw the title announced I expected to see a parade of plough pullers on a catwalk. But I gave my head a shake the minute I clicked on the link. It was JHE. I knew it was the kind of modelling that always makes me nervous, whether or not there's a stick of a justification for doing it at all.

     Jeebuz. And to think I was getting a little depressed because it's been a while since anything really worth biting on came over the transom. Well. This is it! This is the jackpot! This...is delicious. I could take this apart on soooooooo many levels. But I'll spare you, just for now.

     My first response is to shower JHE with expletives. I always new those guys were Very Serious Scientists. But I had no idea. This paper takes archaeological science completely out of the ground, pumps it up with hot air, let's it go, and whaddayaknow, it floats. Okay. Okay. I know. I shouldn't be so hard on them. After all, they clearly have no inkling of the degrees of separation between the theoretical space in which Nathan Wales exists and any theoretical framework that resides in reality. Did I imagine it? Did I not live through a time in archaeological thought when [archaeologists actually thought] Middle Range Theory, philosophy of science, and reality coincided on a sensible approach to inference making? Diane. Help !@&*

     At best this is a 'thinking' paper. A 'what if' scenario. You might even call it a momentary lapse of sanity. At worst, it's a thinly veiled attempt on the part of JHE's referees to publish anything that aims to reify yet another category of presumed Neanderthal behaviour--in this case, making clothing. There is not a shred of evidence. Not a shred. [heh, heh. Just realized I made a bad pun.] There's less than a fragment. There's not just an emperor without any clothes. There's no damned Emperor!

     Analogy. *catches his breath* Analogical reasoning depends for its veracity on the linkages between the object under examination and the objects being used as the source of hypotheses as to how things might have been. Show. Me. The. Linkages.

     No. Wait. I've just found the linkages. Wales isn't suggesting that the Neanderthals made clothes, he's arguing that the traditional societies supplying the ethnographic analogues are, in fact, modern Neanderthals. Else, why could he use them against which to compare the 'modelled' Neanderthal fashions. It's inherently racist. It's obscene [even if you ignore the vapid referees]. Show me where I'm exaggerating!

     Indeed, the corollary implicit in Wales's paper compels me to ask, why should anyone accept the premise that modern humans are anything like the Neanderthals? 'If they build it Neanderthals will come,' is the best answer I can come up with. I'm beginning to think that the weight of the so called-evidence supporting a modernized view of the Neanderthal cognitive abilities is so damned heavy that there's no getting out from under it. I might as well fold up the tent and steal away into the night.

      Argh.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

A Kick-Ass Scientific Illustration to Illustrate an Ass-Kicker of an Epistemological Dilemma

I'm gonna treasure this.

'Remains of Holocene giant pandas from Jiangdong Mountain (Yunnan, China) and their relevance to the evolution of quaternary environments in south-western China,' Nina G. Jablonski, Ji Xueping, Liu Hong, Li Zheng, Lawrence J. Flynn, and Li Zhicai. Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology 24:527-536, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2011.640400

Thank you Nina Jablonski of the Cal Academy et al. for this beauty of a graphic. I can't wait to erect it the next time I'm forced to comment on the idea of purposeful anything at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. In fact. I might just say something right now, because this illustrates what I mean when I talk about equifinality.

I suppose we can't altogether rule out purposeful disposal of the panda dead by other pandas. No, wait! That's not true. We can. If today's pandas aren't capable of it, it's unlikely that yesterday's pandas were. And so, if this can happen naturally to a panda it can equally naturally happen to one or more members of the species Homo antecessor. [Take a deep breath before saying the following out loud] You can take Paul Pettitt's* position and say that the Sima de los Huesos bipedal apes could have been cacheing their dead in a depositional environment virtually identical to that of the unfortunate panda's (something that neither Pettitt nor anyone else could ever in a million years verify empirically), or you could take the only truly logical position and say that, while it may have been the case that someone dropped each and every Homo antecessor individual into the Sima de los Huesos, it's equally likely that, panda-like, those Iberian Penisula exponents of Homo heidelbergensis were unfortunate enough to lose their footing at the top of a 13-m deep natural trap. Ergo, there's no power whatsoever in the Pettitt hypothesis, which is merely a restatement of the same claims made by Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the principles of the Atapuerca projects. [Yep. The guy even has his own Wikipedia entry.]
     A tip o' the hat to Trina MacDonald for first bringing this to my attention, all the way from (near) Melbourne by internet Pony Express.

* You could pay the $115 for the hardcover, or just $7.48 for the Kindle edition. You can probably guess which one I purchased!

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

The Real Meaning of 'All Things Being Equal'

Over the past few days, and indeed months [and decades, if you want to know], I've been hammering, implicitly if not ex-, on a theme. That theme boils down to this: however much the Neanderthals 'R' Us crowd crows about raptor talon jewellery, black feathered stoles, ceremonial ochre use, bitumen hafts, birch tar hafts, the Levallois technique, and all the rest, they're falling prey to a presumption--that theirs is the only possible or likely interpretation of the observations they make and the objects they recover from Middle Palaeolithic archaeological sites. 
      They're perfecty within their right and within reason [most of the time] to make whatever inference they desire. 

 [Please excuse the shouting in the sentence that follows--it's done for emphasis, and because I'm constrained by the ability of the written word to convey one's tone of voice].

HOWEVER, we're under no obligation to accept their inferences, if only because they inevitably downplay or ignore the possibility that other processes are capable of producing the traces that they're using to make those inferences. The theme about which I've been harping can be encapsulated in a term well-known to philosophers of science [particularly those who seek to understand the epistemological underpinnings of the concept of uniformity, whence the term Uniformitarianism] and those in the business of understanding the taphonomy of animal bone from archaeological sites. That term is 'equifinality.' Succinctly, it refers to the ability of more than one process to result in the same outcome.

 I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about--one that's near and, as you know, dear to my ticker. The Levallouis technique, so called, is just one of the ways that widespread patterns in Middle Palaeolithic lithic assemblages can be interpreted. Just one way. Remember that it's predicated on the belief that the desired outcome is a flake of certain proportions, which are classified as follows. Note how each is presumed to be the result of deliberate choices made along the way so as to acheive a core of just the right shape to enable removal of the flake of the desired morphology. Notice that the cores appear as if their margins are pristine, as if, indeed, the purpose of the knapper was to prepare the core in just such a way that the desired end product could be acheived with a single, final blow.  

Bordes Levallois flake types, and the cores from which they're presumed to have been removed. (Bordes, François. 1980. Le débitage Levallois et ses variantes. Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 77:45-49.)

Notwithstanding the confidence exuded by those who hold to this interpretation of these lithic assemblages, the standard story is easily shown to be just one of at least two possible processes. In fact, if you take away the inference that the so-called Levallois flake is a desired end product, you're left with the second interpretation, which has equal valence, philosophically speaking.
     That process amounts to the use of a block of raw material to remove useable flakes--i.e. as a core--and the inevitability that at some point the core will become marginally useful for that purpose. At that point the knapper has the choice of whether to discard the core or to prepare an uncrushable platform and attempt to rejuvenate the core by splitting it through the middle. Succeed and the knapper has two new cores from which to choose. Fail and the knapper produces a simple flake, or two [the Levallois flakes] and discards the exhausted core [the Levallois core].
     As you can see from the array of Levallois cores recovered from Douara Cave, Syria, the reality of the so-called Levallois flake repertoire is an idealized, indeed, reified category, and one that desparately needs to be taken down to size.

The so-called Levallois flake removals are outlined in red. Notice that in all cases the cores themselves are at a stage where the removal of useful flakes would be unrewarding at best. And, judging from the outlines of the flakes that were, as the story goes, the desired end product of the entire process, the standard story leaves a lot to be desired (Credit Akazawa in Suzuki and Takai 1974).

Thus, there's no necessary reason to infer the complex--and ultimately mystifying--process that the Bordesian lithic analysts have adhered to from the beginning, that of a knapper removing flake after flake with the sole purpose of creating a core of a certain shape from which to remove a flake of the desired morphology. And, other than tradition and a particularly well-established orthodoxy, there's no reason for archaeologists to accept this inference uncritically.
     Equifinality is a spectre that's with archaeologists at all stages in the recovery and interpretation of traces from the human/hominid past. It's the reality that underpins my stance on the reality of Middle Palaeolithic purposeful burial, the reality of the so-called handaxe [and cleavers, picks and choppers], and quite literally every one of my critiques of archaeological inference, whether in the 'pages' of the Subversive Archaeologist, in private, or in public. It was the impetus behind my Ph.D. research, and it remains the singular theoretical point of view that drives my passion for this subject.
      Equifinality isn't going away. And, although I'm pessimistic for the short term, equifinality will be an indispensable part of the theoretical framework for any 'final' interpretation of the archaeological record, from here 'til the cows come home [metaphorically speaking].

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That Sinking Feeling...

Recently discovered shipwrecks on the Mediterranean Sea floor (Credit).

The almost pristine fragments of amphorae and other bits and pieces illustrated above are being reported today in the New York Daily News (dot com) as the deepest yet found in the Mediterranean, between 1200 and 1400 metres down. As an example of what I was talking about yesterday, I'm struck by the shock and amazement brought out in the Associated Press article.
     Those making the discovery were, evidently, astonished that they've been wrong all along in assuming that the vessels involved were too small to chance the open ocean, and instead clung to the coast in their passages around that vast inland sea. One wonders what made the ancients (actually quite recent--3rd century C.E. Roman) deviate from the norms imposed on them by modern-day armchair argonauts! A perspicacious old friend of the Subversive Archaeologist, Mickey Dietler would know what I'm talking about [his work on the commercial booze trade in the Iron Age of Europe is wonderfully nuanced and insightful]. 
     WTF? Did these classical archaeologists think that commercial activities 2,700 years ago were bucolic? That there'd never be a temptation to push the limits of the vessel in getting to a market ahead of a competitor, or to trim the sail a little tighter to cut down on overhead? I think these discoveries at depth say more about the way some archaeologists think than anything we might have gleaned about past behaviour from these antique failures.
   

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