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Americanist Stratigraphic Excavation and the Measurement of Culture Change

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Americanist Stratigraphic Excavation and the Measurement of Culture Change Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999 Americanist Stratigraphic Excavation and the Measurement of Culture Change R. Lee Lyman1 and Michael J. O'Brien1 Many versions of the history of Americanist archaeology suggest there was a "stratigraphic revolution" during the second decade of the twentieth century—the implication being that prior to about 1915 most archaeologists did not excavate stratigraphically. However, articles and reports published during the late nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century indicate clearly that many Americanists in fact did excavate stratigraphically. What they did not do was attempt to measure the passage of time and hence culture change. The real revolution in Americanist archaeology comprised an analytical shift from studying synchronic variation to tracking changes in frequencies of artifact types or styles—a shift pioneered by A. V. Kidder, A. L. Kroeber, Nels C. Nelson, and Leslie Spier. The temporal implications of the analytical techniques they developed—frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy—were initially confirmed by stratigraphic excavation. Within a few decades, however, most archaeologists had begun using stratigraphic excavation as a creational strategy—that is, as a strategy aimed at recovering superposed sets of artifacts that were viewed as representing occupations and distinct cultures. The myth that there was a "stratigraphic revolution" was initiated in the writings of the innovators of frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy. KEY WORDS: chronology; culture change; stratigraphic excavation; stratigraphic revolution. INTRODUCTION As far as we are aware, Willey (1968, p. 40) was the first historian of Americanist archaeology to use the term "stratigraphic revolution"—in quotation marks—to characterize the fieldwork of, particularly, Manuel 1Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211. 55 1072-5369/99/030<MX>55$16.00/0 C 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation 56 Lyman and O'Brien Gamio, A. V Kidder, and Nels C. Nelson during the second decade of the twentieth century. Taylor (1954, p. 563) had previously characterized that work as involving a "time-space revolution," and still earlier had noted that these researchers' use of the "time-and-space approach" comprised a "revolution" (Taylor, 1948, pp. 65, 73). Subsequently, others who have dis- cussed the history of Americanist archaeology have continued to use the term "stratigraphic revolution" (e.g., Givens, 1992; Lyon, 1996; Schuyler, 1971; Willey and Sabloff, 1974, 1993). In some histories, we read statements that do not use the terms "revolution" or "stratigraphic revolution" but instead make it sound as if whatever happened in the second decade of the twentieth century was critically important. Whether the term is used or not, most discussions of this era make it sound as if the event generally signified by the words "stratigraphic revolution" involved stratified (or at least vertically distinct) deposits and a change in excavation technique (e.g., Adams, 1960; Browman and Givens, 1996; Woodbury, 1960a, b). Various statements attribute either the first stratigraphic excavations in North America to Nelson, Gamio, and Kidder (Adams, 1960; Browman and Givens, 1996; Heizer, 1959; Schroeder, 1979; Taylor, 1954; Woodbury, 1960a, b) or at least the first significant stratigraphic excavations (Givens, 1996; Willey, 1953; Willey and Sabloff, 1974). Taylor (1954, p. 564) indicated that Nelson's work in 1914 "was the first stratigraphic test in American archaeology." Heizer (1959, p. 216) stated that "N. C. Nelson's [1916] sum- mary of his Tano excavations marks the beginning of a new era in American archaeology, since it called attention effectively to the results which strati- graphic excavation could produce." Lothrop (1961, p. 10), too, remarked that the "introduction of stratigraphic field studies marks the beginning of a new era in American archaeology." And Woodbury (1973, p. 44) wrote that "by the time Kidder ended his work at Pecos [New Mexico] in 1929 the application of stratigraphy to archeological excavation . had ceased to be the untried experiment that it had seemed to many in 1915 and was standard procedure not only in the Southwest but in other parts of the Americas as well." We argue here that such statements are inaccurate characterizations of the discipline's history because they place undue emphasis on excavation method and ignore the more important issue of how artifacts were studied. Further, we demonstrate that stratigraphic excavation was widely practiced in Americanist archaeology before 1912. We also show that the literature of the 1920s and 1930s indicates that the probable source of the inaccura- cies in modern histories is the so-called revolutionaries themselves. Careful reading of the literature of the period 1900-1920 leads us to the conclusion that stratigraphic excavation was initially a confirmational rather than a creational method relative to questions of chronology and culture change. American Stratigraphic Excavation 57 The real "revolution" in Americanist archaeology lay not in a change in excavation technique such as is implied by the term "stratigraphic revolu- tion" and various statements about that event. Rather, the change is found in how archaeologists of the period began using observed shifts in the fre- quencies of artifact types to measure time. Despite the revolutionary nature of several new methods for measuring culture change—frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy—these methods were all but abandoned by the mid-1930s, as archaeologists turned to using stratigraphic excavation to cre- ate chronologies of cultures. We have briefly reviewed this period in the history of Americanist archaeology elsewhere (Lyman et al., 1997). Here, we expand our earlier discussion by providing critical additional details from the relevant literature. To begin, we must make clear what is meant by various key terms. DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS On the basis of definitions of key terms we compiled from various sources, we agree with Cremeens and Hart (1995, p. 17) that "indiscrimi- nate use of the terms such as level, stratum, horizon, and cultural layer has created ambiguities in the archaeological literature." But we also be- lieve that three other factors have contributed to terminological ambiguity. First, definitions of a term are inconsistent from author to author, especially among introductory archaeology textbooks published over the past three decades or so. Second, whereas we suspect many archaeologists would claim to know stratigraphic excavation when they see it, this term is one of the least frequently defined terms we examined, second only to stratum in the paucity of published definitions. The term stratum is not explicitly defined, for example, in a recent encyclopedic entry that refers to the stra- tigraphic revolution (Givens, 1996). And third, definitions of some terms include critical terms that themselves are not defined, such as a definition of stratigraphic excavation that includes, but does not define, the term stra- tum. Importantly, various terms have multiple definitions, each specific to a particular discipline or analytical context (see Holliday, 1990, 1992; Stein, 1990). Thus, the terms we employ here are not intended to become uni- versally standard but rather are specific to the analytical questions of in- terest: What is stratigraphic excavation and when did it occur in the history of Americanist archaeology? We begin with several basic terms before de- fining the terms of greatest concern in the context of examining the history of stratigraphic excavation in Americanist archaeology. Schiffer (1987, p. 200) notes that "archaeologists use the terms soil and sediment synonymously [but] it is important to distinguish between 58 Lyman and O'Brien them," especially when discussing strata or deposits (defined below) as chronological units. Sediment is "particulate matter that has been trans- ported by some process from one location to another" (Stein, 1987, p. 339; 1992, p. 195). Soil "is the result of the complex interaction of a variety of physical, chemical, and biological processes acting on rock or sediment over time. [It] is a natural entity that is a type of weathering phenomena" (Holliday, 1992, p. 102; see also Holliday, 1990). Pedogenic (soil-forming) processes "are responsible for transforming sediments into soils" (Schiffer, 1987, p. 200). Within the context of this paper, the distinction between sediments and soils is important because a soil has "visibly recognizable or distinguishable characteristics," which are used to divide them into hori- zons, but "stratigraphic relations, in particular the law of superposition, do not apply to the vertical relationships of individual soil horizons" (Cre- meens and Hart, 1995, p. 26). Only the relative vertical positions of sedi- ments are significant in terms of superposition. Archaeologists have, over the past two decades, come to focus on for- mation processes (Schiffer, 1987). There also has been increasing termino- logical discrimination within the North American Stratigraphic Code (North American Commission on Stratigraphic Nomenclature, 1983) as well as attempts to modify that code for archaeological purposes (Gasche and Tunca, 1983; Stein, 1990). These factors have, apparently, prompted some archaeologists to favor the term "deposit" over "stratum" (e.g., Schif- fer, 1987; Stein, 1987). For purposes of this paper the two terms
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