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The Goals of Evolutionary Archaeology History and Explanation1

Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, Columbia (Columbia, Mo. 65211, U.S.A.). Born in 1951, he was educated at Washington State University (B.A., 1973; M.A., 1976) and the University of Washington (Ph.D., 1982). His research interests are in the archaeology of the northwestern United States, zooarchaeology, and evolutionary theory. Among his publications are The Prehistory of the Oregon Coast (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991), Vertebrate Taphonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and (with M. J. O'Brien and R. C. Dunnell) The Rise and Fall of Culture History (New York: Plenum, 1997).Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He was born in 1950 and educated at Rice University (B.A., 1972) and the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D., 1977). His research focuses on the application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to the archaeological record and on the prehistory of the southeastern United States. His publications include Evolutionary Archaeology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), (with R. L. Lyman and R. C. Dunnell) Americanist Culture History: Fundamentals of Time, Space, and Form (New York: Plenum, 1997), and Paradigms of the Past: The Story of Missouri Archaeology (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996).

Abstract

In recent critiques of evolutionary archaeology, Boone and Smith (1998) have expressed a preference for evolutionary ecology, Spencer (1997) for processual archaeology, and Schiffer (1996) for behavioral archaeology. These various approaches to explanation ask different questions and employ interpretive principles different from those of evolutionary archaeology. Some of their questions, methods, and principles overlap with those of evolutionary archaeology, but only evolutionary archaeology simultaneously exploits the temporal dimension inherent in the archaeological record, acknowledges the critical distinction between immanent and configurational properties and between essentialist and materialist ontologies, and builds its explanations of the cultural past from a theory employing mechanisms external to the subject of change.