ABSTRACT
Classification is both an implicit and explicit process. When we did fieldwork in the Chevelon Drainage in Arizona in the 1970s, artifact material was bagged in the field and brought to our field camp for initial sorting into major groupings such as lithics, pottery sherds, ground stone, and so on. Some of these groupings were divided further, such as pottery sherds separated into plain ware versus fine ware and lithic material into retouched flakes, debitage, and so on. Further separation would take place during the analytic phases of the work. The division into kind of material—pottery, lithic, ground stone, and so on—is normally taken for granted as part of the fundamentals of analyzing artifact material. Discussions of classification in the literature barely mention this kind of division by kinds of material, since it seems self-evident that pottery material and lithic material represent different domains of artifacts and a typology for lithics would be irrelevant for a typology for pottery. Historically, we find a division in the archaeological literature between lithic typologies and pottery typologies and individual archaeologists have often focused on one or the other kind of material when concerned with formulating typologies. Measurements made on artifacts also tend to separate between qualitative and quantitative measurements, with qualitative measurements being used more frequently with pottery typologies and quantitative measurements more often arising in the context of lithic typologies.
