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The most basic postulate of science is that nature itself is orderly. In taxonomy . . . the aim is that the ordering of science shall approximate or in some estimable way re®ect the order of nature. (G. G. Simpson 1961:5) McKern began thinking in 1929 about a means of allowing comparative analyses of the myriad archaeological manifestations of the upper Midwest (Fisher 1997). Later that year his colleague Alton Fisher suggested that the Linnaean biological taxonomy might prove to be a good model for a classi¤cation method. McKern cited no biological or paleontological publications in his several articles on the midwestern taxonomic method, so the sources he used for inspiration and guidance are dif¤cult to determine. McKern told Julian Steward in a December 15, 1939, letter (MPM) that he had “minored” in paleontology, and in various letters of correspondence with other archaeologists he occasionally referred to “paleontological method” and “paleontological classi¤cation.” McKern might have consulted then-current articles on biological taxonomy (for example, Matthew 1926, 1929, 1930) while drafting various versions of the MTM, although there is no direct evidence that he did so. As we point out in chapter 6, however, there is at least indirect evidence that he had more than passing knowledge of published statements on biological taxonomy. McKern continually downplayed the phylogenetic implications of his taxonomy, but this is not surprising in light of the general feeling in anthropology that biological evolution was a poor model on which to base cultural evolution. For McKern to have consulted the Darwinian version of evolution for ideas about how to detect relationships between cultural units would have pitted him against some of the leading ¤gures in anthro3 Developing the Midwestern Taxonomic Method, 1930–1935 pology (Lyman and O’Brien 1997), including A. L. Kroeber, who had been McKern’s adviser at Berkeley. Kroeber was one of the most vocal opponents of a biological model, writing that “the designation of anthropology as ‘the child of Darwin’ is most misleading.” (Kroeber 1923:8). This point was made by many of McKern’s contemporaries (for example, Boas 1932; Gladwin 1936). The critics, however, were not always consistent in their admonitions against using a biological model. Paradoxically, McKern had started building his method when Kroeber (1931) published a statement in which he pointed out two things that would have been critically important had McKern been attempting to classify cultures on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships. First, Kroeber noted that biologists of the early twentieth century used a particular method to determine whether organisms were related by shared ancestry or were simply phenotypically similar . They differentiated between homologous and analogous characters and character states. Not only did Kroeber use these two terms correctly in the sense of their modern evolutionary meaning—something not regularly done in the biology of the 1920s and 1930s (see Lyman [2001] for details and references)—but the signi¤cance of the distinction was clear in his discussion. Second, Kroeber argued that precisely this same method should be used by anthropologists interested in distinguishing between such things as independent invention and diffusion (for example, Steward 1929) and by those interested in writing the history of a culture’s lineage. McKern, as far as we can tell, never cited Kroeber’s paper. Instead, he and his collaborators followed basic anthropological and archaeological practice and recognized formally similar archaeological materials as being “culturally” or “historically” related (Lyman 2001). The terms phylogenetically or genealogically related were never used by McKern or any other anthropologist or archaeologist with respect to cultures; the term genetically related, when it was used at all, was used metaphorically. McKern accepted Fisher’s suggestion of using the architecture of the Linnaean taxonomy as a model for his archaeological classi¤cation. McKern would take the simple notion of nested sets of biological taxa and modify it for application to sets of archaeological materials. One major modi¤cation involved proposing a set of terms for the taxonomic categories, and this turned out to be a contentious modi¤cation. The other modi¤cation was less contentious, perhaps because it was rather less well understood. It took place midway through the development of the MTM and involved the distinction among certain kinds of characters. These were not the homologues and analogues of biologists, and they were not meant to serve the same functions, although they could have in part. The history of how 52 / W. C. McKern and the Midwestern T axonomic Method McKern developed the method, and the...

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