This paper is an attempt to clarify the meaning of the terms “type” and “variation” when applied to archaeological materials. Although they are used constantly in speech and literature in almost every conceivable context, it must be admitted that archaeology has no generally accepted, impersonal methods of establishing the scope and application of these terms. Kluckhohn has recently written:Our techniques of observing and recording are admittedly still susceptible of improvement, but they seem much further advanced than our development of symbols (verbal and otherwise) by which we could communicate to each other (without loss or inflation of content) the signs and symptoms we observe. In archaeology, for example, methods of classifying pottery wares on the basis of highly technical and rather precisely defined operations have been elaborated. But I am aware of but a single paper (by a Russian!) where there has been even a tentative and fumbling consideration of the implications of the typological method. Such archaeologists as Vaillant, Strong, Setzler, Gladwin, and Paul Martin are (but only very recently) evidencing searchings of their theoretical consciences, and this is a happy omen. Meanwhile typologies are proliferated without apparent concern as to what the concepts involved are likely to mean when reduced to concrete human behaviors ….
Additional excavation in 1955 confirmed the previously reported stratigraphic sequence at Midland, Texas. Within the gray sand, which had yielded a fragmentary human calvarium, there were found additional flint flakes, burned rocks, and animal bones. Besides several small mammals, a four-horned antelope (probably Capromeryx) was present in the gray sand; horse bones occurred in the gray sand and overlying red sand. These finds make the two radiocarbon dates published in the 1955 Midland report, giving an age of about 7000 years to the gray sand, even less acceptable than previously thought. Experimental dating by the uranium daughter products technique suggests an age of about 20,000 years for the gray sand, somewhat excessive in terms of cultural correlations although supported by a single radiocarbon date and not unreasonable for the faunal assemblage. Ten radiocarbon dates from the Midland, Blackwater Draw, Lubbock Lake, and Plainview sites are discussed in terms of three possible correlations of the geological, climatic, faunal, and cultural events in the Southern High Plains.
The classification of cultures into a workable number of types for descriptive or interpretative ends has occupied anthropologists since the science was born. Many kinds of data have been selected. Within the last decade Coon's (1948) subdivision of human societies into six levels on the basis of complexity of institutions, and the attempts by Strong (1948), Armillas (1948), Steward (1949), Willey and Phillips (1955) to distinguish developmental periods in the Mesoamerican and Andean archaeological sequences may be cited. Our excuse for attempting yet another formulation is that the current schemes emphasize either ethnographic criteria that are difficult or impossible to detect archaeologically, or unique features of particular cultural configurations rather than general criteria defining more universal patterns. Starting from a point of view different from those heretofore employed, we have tried to develop a classification of cultures that is usable with both ethnographical and archaeological data and that has functional and evolutionary as well as historical and descriptive significance.
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