INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

How is diffusion investigated? The book (p. 206) notes how diffusion is an elusive mechanism of
culture change. In historic times we can clarify it by speaking of trade in material items,
movement of ideas, and movements of people through migration, enslavement, invasion, and
other more specific cultural processes, but these are harder to see in the prehistoric record. We
cannot even use the term “exchange” because it might have been tribute to a ruler or gift-giving
(in other words, one-sided). Sometimes mechanisms such as conquest can sometimes be seen
very dramatically in prehistory, such as shown in the picture on p. 208 of the book, in which
human skeletons are fallen sprawled in the remains of burned buildings at a site in ninth-century
B.C. Iran. Pretty clearly something dramatic happened here! But most of the time even largescale
culture change such as population movements cannot be detected in the prehistoric record
with great certainty.
How can we see archaeologically when culture change is caused by environmental change? The
volcano covering Pompeii in A.D. 79 is a pretty clear example, not only from the deposits in the
ground but from written records. A prehistoric example is noted in the book (p. 209) from
eleventh-century Arizona. It is also mentioned that we can learn of environmental change that
humans create, one of the most useful areas of archaeology, since we can see the effects upon
society of such actions as deforestation and overutilizing other resources.
How do we tell if changes in natural ecosystems caused changes in human systems, or vice
versa? Often it is impossible to look for causal explanations, and we are better off determining
interrelated aspects of the whole system. What are systems models? Developed in cybernetics,
engineering, and computing, such models identify interrelated parts and their operations. In a
closed system, such as your air-conditioning, equilibrium is maintained through negative
feedback. When the temperature rises the air kicks on until the thermostat shows it has reached
the right point, then it goes off. A steady state is maintained by the response from the component
parts.
In an open system, which most are, there might be perturbations of the system, positive feedback
that stimulates changes in the other components. The book describes (p. 211) the classic
archaeological model by Kent Flannery of the origins of plant domestication in Mexico. We can
draw the system on the BlackBoard, showing the component parts in different connected boxes
(or look at the ones in the book, p. 212-213). The yearly round of hunter-gatherers includes
obtaining various resources. One of them, maize, was apparently very responsive to human
action and easily able to change genetically to become a more important component in the
system, a bigger box. Archaeologists want to see which systems are in a steady state and which
change and how and why. But systems models have been criticized for not dealing with causality
at all, just naming and connecting the parts. We will look at this again when we talk about the
origins of food production.
What are multilinear evolutionary models? They are explanations of culture change that
recognize more than one “prime mover” or single cause, and emphasize various factors, natural
and cultural. We can also look at internalist vs. externalist models for change, that is, from
within, such as corruption in the political system or revolution, or without, such as climate shifts
or earthquakes.