A Tale of Two Archaeologies

Ohio Hopewell Community Organization. Edited by William S. Dancey and Paul J. Pacheco. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997. xvii + 433 pp., index. $45.00 cloth.)

Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces. Edited by R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. xiv + 304 pp., references, index. $29.95 paper.)

The Prehistory of Missouri. By Michael J. O’Brien and W. Raymond Wood. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. xxxii + 417 pp., plates, introduction, references, index. $39.95 paper.)

Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley. Edited by Michael J. O’Brien and Robert C. Dunnell. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. xvi + 385 pp., references, index. $29.95 paper.)

Archaeology on the Great Plains. Edited by W. Raymond Wood. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 522 pp., introduction, index. $29.95 cloth.)

In the 1970s archaeologists working in the eastern United States were caught up in the controversy swirling around the “new archaeology,” a movement intended to make archaeology a rigorous, empirical science of the past, with a purpose not unlike that which Ranke proposed for history a century before: to know the past “the way it truly was.” Although itself a failure, the new archaeology gave birth to two children, both of which are alive and well in these five recent books. One child I call artifactual archaeology; the other is widely known as processual archaeology. Artifactual archaeology focuses on artifacts and their analysis, and is something of a reaction against the new archaeology idea that cultural patterns and meanings can be identified through the archaeological record, though it tightly embraces the idea of a rigorous, scientific basis to all archaeological work. Processual archaeology is more or less a continuation of the new archaeology but with its “positivist” scientific research agenda softened.

These five books illustrate the range of archaeological approaches currently being used in the eastern United States. The reader quickly realizes that, like most siblings spaced close together, artifactual and processual archaeology have a strong rivalry and are constantly badgering one another. The most belligerent of these books seems to be Michael J. O’Brien and W. Raymond Wood’s Prehistory of Missouri. The title is misleading, for there are no events, no human lives in this book. What is present might better be titled “The Prehistoric Technology of Missouri,” for that is what the book is about—a detailed analysis of technology and technological change over time, wholly devoid of any sense of the individuals who created those technologies or what those technologies meant to their makers. This may seem harsh criticism, but I think the book’s authors would agree. Indeed, they state pointedly that what the reader will get is “just the facts as we think we know them” (3) and not the “hodge-podge” of “‘just-so’ stories” that are “concocted” about the peoples of the past one commonly finds in other works of Americanist archaeology. Indeed, at the end of the book the authors proffer that archaeology should not be focused on examining the lives and cultures of ancient peoples but rather on “how the earth arrived at its present condition,” as part of an “ongoing study of our planet’s past” (365).

The Prehistory of Missouri is a well-produced book. It contains more than 250 illustrations, including several pages of color plates. Five chapters cover the Paleo-Indian, the Early through Late Archaic, the Early and Middle Woodland, the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian, and the Middle and Late Mississippian periods.

O’Brien and Wood open the book with a chapter on archaeological systematics, focusing on chronology and seriation, and they close with a chapter that revisits many of these issues. Primary among these is the failure of processual archaeologists to recognize that they actually cannot do what they claim to do—that is, to study cultural processes through the archaeological record—because of a lack of temporal control, a failure to adequately account for variation...