Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lyman, R. Lee

Titel

"UNTIL ALL THE DATA ARE IN" A Chapter in the History of American Archaeology

Ist Teil von

• Journal of Anthropological Research, 2010-12, Vol.66 (4), p.505-526

Ort / Verlag

University of New Mexico

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the 1930s Paul Radin argued that Franz Boas refrained from generalizing, claimed that the time was not ripe because all the data were not yet available, and believed that once all the data were available they would speak for themselves. This characterization was applied in the 1940s by Clyde Kluckhohn and his student Walter Taylor to the work of culture historian A. V. Kidder. Processual archaeologists obtained the idea that culture historians in general used the unripe time argument based on philosopher of science Carl Hempel's description of the first step of inductive reasoning as "gathering all the facts," and they used Kluckhohn's and Taylor's characterizations as substantiating evidence. Processualists likely reasoned that because culture historians operated inductively and thus sought to gather all the facts before they interpreted the archaeological record, culture historians also called upon the unripe time argument to warrant their hesitancy to draw conclusions. Evidence that culture historians in fact said they needed more data before drawing conclusions is rare, and in many cases possible evidence is readily interpreted as an unrigorously developed concern for sample sufficiency in the modern sense of a statistically representative sample. The unripe time characterization of pre-1960 archaeology served as one of several warrants for abandonment of the culture history approach in favor of processual archaeology and facilitated the rapid adoption of processualism.