Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains

8. The Behavior of Surface Artifacts: Building a Landscape Taphonomy on the High Plains

203 More than a half-century ago, Gordon Willey exhibited a thorough awareness of the nature of the relationship between archaeological materials and the people who discarded them. Just as a modern-day paleobiologist would not analyze Willey’s “beach” as the home habitat for the “functioning organisms” that built the shells, archaeologists must consider artifact contexts as different from the “milieu in which they lived.” Willey’s opening paragraph to the Virú Valley settlement pattern survey represents a precocious recognition of the role of formation process studies, or taphonomic perspectives, applied to the study of landscapes. The wisdom in Willey’s observations on the nature of archaeological context has not been fully appreciated by the traditions of settlement pattern analysis and archaeological survey he inspired. Here, we build on Willey’s observations regarding the nature of artifact populations and apply them to the landscape of the northwest High Plains. We contend that e i g h t Oskar Burger, Lawrence C. Todd, and Paul Burnett The Behavior of Surface Artifacts: Building a Landscape Taphonomy on the High Plains The material remains of past civilizations are like shells beached by the retreating sea. The functioning organisms and the milieu in which they lived have vanished, leaving the dead and empty form behind. An understanding of structure and function of ancient societies must be based upon these static molds which bear only the imprint of life. (Wil l ey 1953: 1) Os k ar Burg er, l a Wrenc e c. tO d d , and P aul Burnett 204 Willey’s implied taphonomic orientation is as essential in landscape archaeology as it is in fine-grained analyses of individual sites. Just as paleobiological inferences regarding the context and histories of the “shells on a beach” would be incomplete without interpreting taphonomic processes such as wave action and shifts in ocean currents and temperatures, so too is it unwise to infer distributional patterns of artifacts on landscapes as yielding information on past human actions without assessing the taphonomy of those artifact-bearing landscapes. We refer to this perspective as landscape taphonomy and see it as an approach explicitly confronting Willey’s shell/beach interpretive dilemma, a fundamental concern in archaeological survey and the study of landscape-level patterns (a more detailed definition is given later). We discuss the landscape taphonomy perspective as it developed during our survey project on the Oglala National Grassland (ONG) of northwestern Nebraska (Figure 8.1). This survey project began as an attempt to extend the scale of traditional taphonomic studies of the Hudson-Meng (25SX115) bison bonebed (Todd and Rapson 1999) to interpretations of the surrounding grassland. The geologically complex nature of North America’s High Plains provides an ideal setting to demonstrate the value of this perspective for largescale archaeological investigation. Our surveys on the ONG began with basic experiments aimed at investigating the accuracy and experimental control of archaeological survey methods, a precursor to evaluating observed archaeological patterning in terms of prehistoric behaviors. Archaeological survey is defined as field investigation consisting of archaeologists walking systematically over a landscape looking for exposed cultural material and is here considered the primary field technique of landscape archaeology, as it was for Willey in Virú. While some see taphonomic investigations as providing cautionary tales that restrain interpretation, we hope to illuminate exploratory research questions that build a more holistic and interdisciplinary field, ultimately providing archaeology with a richer interpretive palette. Of particular relevance is avoiding the common interpretive pitfall of an initial optimistic overemphasis on human causality while bringing an understanding of long-term humanlandscape interaction to the forefront. This approach to archaeology is capable of contributing widely to researchers and planners who also study landscape change (e.g., Endter-Wada et al. 1998; Field et al. 2003; Forester and Machlis 1996; Holling and Gunderson 2002; Milne 1992; Naylor 2005; Norton 1998; Stohlgren et al. 1997; Swetnam, Allen, and Betancourt 1999; Turner 1989), many of whom explicitly seek collaboration with the social sciences. The Behavior of Surface Artifacts 205 TAPHonomy And THe ProceSS of ASSigning meAning To PATTern Any claim regarding the origin of patterning is relative to a given perspective, but one certainty is that most patterns can have many possible sources. Different processes can form similar patterns (equifinality), and elements of patterns can figure 8.1. Map of the High Plains, highlighting the location of the Oglala National Grassland within the western United States. Illustration...