ABSTRACT
As research progresses in science - any science - levels of inquiry tend to become increasingly complex, for sophisticated problems require equally sophisticated methods of analysis. One corollary of Parkinson’s Law is that as research objectives become more complex, methodological advances will tend to fill the void. The physicist, for example, hardly needed a cyclotron until he became aware of the existence of the atom. In archaeology a similar relation ship exists between research progress and analytical complexity. As long as cultural chronology was the focus of the archaeologist’s attention, complex analytical methods were unnecessary. But as archaeologists began to take seriously their role as social scientists, the vagaries and nuances of socio cultural reconstruction required increasingly advanced techniques. Perhaps Analytical Archaeology by David Clarke ( 1 9 6 8 ) stands as a benchmark in this regard. The ‘ new perspective’ views culture as a ‘ point of overlap (or “ articu lation” ) between a vast number of systems, each of which encompasses both cultural and non-cultural phenomena - often more of the latter. . . . Cultural change comes about through minor variations in one or more systems, which grow, displace or reinforce others and reach equilibrium on a different plane’ (Flannery 1 9 6 7 , p. 1 2 0 ; also see Judge, 1 9 7 0 , p. 4 1 ) . It is hardly coincidental that the popularity of multivariate statistical techniques in archaeology arose with the emergence of the ‘ new’ or ‘ systemic’ archaeology.
