ABSTRACT
Given that artefacts exhibited demonstrable variation across both time and space, one of the primary aims of traditional archaeology was to bring order to this variability by stipulating redundancies in the form of classificatory schemes often explicitly modelled on the basis of biological analogies in which artefacts were to be sorted and ‘identified’ in a manner equivalent to plants, animals, or mushrooms and toadstools. For example, the 1930 Pecos Conference concerned with the formulation of procedures for classifying American south-western ceramics adopted the following scheme: ‘Kingdom: artefacts; Phylum: ceramics; Class: pottery; Order: basic combination of paste and temper; Ware: basic surface colour after firing; Genus: surface treatment; Type or Subtype’ (Hargrave 1932: 8 cited in Hill and Evans 1972: 237). Clark notes that ‘the fact that industrial and art forms are subject to evolutionary processes is a great aid when it comes to arranging them in sequence . . . [The problem is] to determine the direction in which the development has proceeded, to determine in other words whether one is dealing with progressive evolution or with a series of degeneration’ (Clark 1972: 134-6, cf. Kreiger 1944: 273). One task of the archaeologist was to determine types, usually descriptively labelled according to the locality where first identified (e.g. Flagstaff red pottery; Folsom point; Peterborough Ware), or presumed function, or a mixture of the two (e.g. La Tène fibulae). Artefacts could then, ideally, be assigned to these type groupings on the basis of perceived similarities and differences. Different groups
of artefacts, associated together in hoards, burials, settlements, votive deposits etc., could be grouped together in more inclusive entities, ‘cultures’. But what did the ‘types’ and the ‘cultures’ mean in social terms?
