ABSTRACT
In American archaeology, “objective classification” arose in conjunction with the “New Archaeology” and initially had the goal of replacing intuitively formed typologies by typologies based on explicit procedures grounded in objective measures. A more far-reaching goal, though perhaps more implicit than explicit, was to arrive at a culturally meaningful classification by objective means. If this could be done successfully, then archaeology would have a powerful method for addressing not only space and time reconstruction of cultural systems, but also the broader issues summarized in the notion of archaeology as anthropology. Objectively determined types and typologies that were culturally salient could be mapped independently onto space through the site-based method of data recovery and onto time through direct dating of the antiquity of sites.
