Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America
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Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America
282Hardcover
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Overview
R. Lee Lyman works to fill these gaps in the historical record and revisits some of White's analytical innovations from a modern perspective. A comparison of publications shows that not only were White's zooarchaeological articles first in print in archaeological venues but that he was also, at least initially, more prolific than his contemporaries. While the other "founders" of the field were anthropologists, White was a paleontologist by training who studied long-extinct animals and their evolutionary histories. In working with remains of modern mammals, the typical paleontological research questions were off the table simply because the animals under study were too recent. And yet White demonstrated clearly that scholars could infer significant information about human behaviors and cultures. Lyman presents a biography of Theodore White as a scientist and a pioneer in the emerging field of modern anthropological zooarchaeology.
R. Lee Lyman is a professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of Quantitative Paleozoology and coauthor of Measuring Time with Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology (Nebraska, 2006).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803285576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2016 |
| Series: | Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology |
| Pages: | 282 |
| Sales rank: | 974,165 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
R. Lee Lyman is a professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is the author of Quantitative Paleozoology and coauthor of Measuring Time with Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology (Nebraska, 2006).
Read an Excerpt
Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America
By R. Lee Lyman
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9052-5
CHAPTER 1
Why Theodore E. White?
In large part because he invented a technique by which one could readily estimate how much edible meat was represented by zooarchaeological materials (animal remains recovered from archaeological sites), many archaeologists the world over are aware of Theodore Elmer White (1905–77). White (fig. 1.1) is well known in North America, where he did all of his zooarchaeological research as well as some paleontological work. Although others had previously suggested or demonstrated that the study of zooarchaeological remains was of value to archaeologists and could reveal aspects of prehistoric human behaviors (e.g., Adams 1949a, 1949b; Brainerd 1937, 1939; Gilmore 1946a, 1946b, 1947, 1949; Neumann 1937; Wintemberg 1919, 1924), it was White's series of papers on zooarchaeological materials published in the early 1950s that were both prescient and influential (Falk 1977). He demonstrated that one could infer aspects of the human behaviors that had accumulated, modified, and deposited the faunal remains that make up the zooarchaeological record. In short, White showed explicitly and clearly that one could do what could today readily be labeled "anthropological zooarchaeology," or the study of archaeological animal remains to derive information about human behaviors and cultures. One would suspect on this basis that extensive knowledge of White would exist in written form or perhaps within the folklore of American archaeology. Such is not the case. For example, White is not mentioned in two major histories of North American archaeology (Fitting 1973; Willey and Sabloff 1993).
With the exception of a few sentences written by each of several zooarchaeologists (e.g., Falk 1977; Robison 1978, 1987), no detailed history of White and his contributions to zooarchaeology has been written. The one published obituary about him appears in a paleontological news bulletin and quickly glosses over his zooarchaeological research (Stucker 1978). One purpose of this volume is to fill these gaps in our historical knowledge and along the way to revisit and evaluate some of White's analytical innovations from a modern perspective. There are a number of reasons to do so.
There are now available several histories of North American archaeology describing the intellectual context into which White waded (e.g., Fitting 1973; Kehoe and Emmerichs 1999; Lyon 1996; Willey and Sabloff 1993; Woodbury 1993); there are even book-length biographies about several of the major players in that history (e.g., Givens 1992a; Lyman and O'Brien 2003; Maca et al. 2010; O'Brien and Lyman 1998). But there is no history of North American zooarchaeology, thus each zooarchaeologist must read widely and deeply to learn the subject. Locating the pertinent literature, some of which is found in unpublished theses and limited-circulation journals or monographs and some in archives of unpublished documents, exacerbates the difficulty and increases the time and energy necessary. Only with much effort can someone wishing to know the intellectual history of North American zooarchaeology actually come to know it. I believe knowing that history is a necessary foundation to complete understanding of modern analytical methods and theoretical currents. Thus this volume begins to fulfill a need in our historical knowledge about a particular branch of archaeology.
The few existing brief histories and isolated statements about the history of North American zooarchaeology either suggest that Paul W. Parmalee, John E. Guilday, Elizabeth S. Wing, and Stanley J. Olsen laid the foundation of the field or indicate that some combination of these individuals were the first generation of professionals in the field (Grayson 1984; Peres 2014; Reitz 1993; Reitz and Wing 1999; Robison 1978, 1987; Stewart 1998). Only occasionally is White included in a list of early American zooarchaeologists who made influential contributions. Historical summaries of Parmalee's (McMillan 1991), Guilday's (Dawson 1984), Wing's (Emery 2003b; Marrinan 1999), and Olsen's (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_John_Olsen) zooarchaeological contributions exist, but they do not deeply explore the nature of archaeology or the history of North American zooarchaeology. Further, no one who has examined the history of zooarchaeology in North America has done comparative analyses of what these early zooarchaeologists accomplished as individuals or gauged individual contributions. I do so here, using various metrics to evaluate White's contributions relative to those others who are typically named as having served foundational roles.
White received professional (university) training as a zoologist and worked as a paleontologist before he did his zooarchaeological research. This was standard in the middle of the twentieth century, when those who studied zooarchaeological remains typically were trained as zoologists or paleontologists. No previous historian has examined this aspect of early North American zooarchaeology other than to mention it; a detailed examination of White's experience in zoology and paleontology forms a significant portion of the pages that follow. This is necessary to fully evaluate and appreciate the significance of his zooarchaeological contributions. Such tracking also facilitates our getting to know him as a person and as a scientist.
What This Volume Is and What It Is Not
This volume is not an intellectual history, that is, one that tracks the development of analytical methods and techniques, explanatory models and theories, though such things are mentioned where pertinent to provide the general intellectual context that was North American archaeology and zooarchaeology at the time White was involved. The discussion is inductive in the sense of revealing who White was and what he did and why what he did should be considered important in the history of North American zooarchaeology. It is thus an internalist history, tracing discoveries and methods developed by White that shaped his interpretations. It is not intended to be presentist, to somehow legitimate modern zooarchaeology in North America and to argue that the history of zooarchaeology has somehow been a progressive development from the past to the present. It is nevertheless clear that White's work had a major influence on subsequent research, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, when frequencies of skeletal parts were a major analytical and interpretive focus.
I contextualize White's contributions in two ways. First, I examine what he did in zoology and vertebrate paleontology, the fields in which he was professionally trained and worked and the reason he came to zooarchaeology in the first place. Part of this paleontological context is discussed in chapter 2; other parts of it are mentioned where appropriate in other chapters. In chapter 3 I conclude that White can be viewed as having had three careers during his lifetime. The first was as a paleontologist; the second as a zooarchaeologist; the third was as an educator while working as a paleontologist who had to interpret the paleontological record for curious tourists.
Some space in chapter 3 is devoted to describing the field of paleontology at the time White was trained and the time when he was working. This serves as part of one context from which to view his zooarchaeological research and zooarchaeological research in general at the time. The second context of White's work is the field of zooarchaeology in the 1940s and particularly the 1950s, when he wrote and published his zooarchaeological research; this contextualization is found in chapter 4. Comparisons of White's publications with the publications of those who have been characterized as founding members of the field show that not only was White first in print, but he was also, at least initially, more prolific than his contemporaries in terms of number of articles on zooarchaeology that he published in archaeological venues. Further, his publications described, often by example, several innovative analytical techniques and consistently concerned human behaviors that many archaeologists at the time believed were analytically inaccessible. White demonstrated that knowledge of those behaviors was zooarchaeologically accessible. Why he could and did do so when others thought it could not be done or chose not to try is an important part of the history of modern zooarchaeology.
In chapter 4 I also correct a common misperception of the history of North American zooarchaeology: that prior to about 1970 virtually all zooarchaeological research involved the production of what are referred to, in a derogatory way, as laundry lists — lists of animal taxa represented in a zooarchaeological collection, perhaps with some minimal quantitative data and virtually no interpretation of the human behaviors represented. None of White's zooarchaeological publications can be considered mere laundry lists. And perusal of the literature indicates that a number of zooarchaeological reports that appeared prior to 1970 were more than mere laundry lists (Lyman 2015).
The first goal of chapter 5 is to summarize what previous researchers have said about White's contribution to the development of modern North American zooarchaeology. Chapter 5 is brief in part because little has been said about him. Given the discussion in chapter 4, the second goal of chapter 5 is to show that what has been said about White and those who came after him has not been complete, nor has it been completely accurate. I present evidence that of two historical claims made about White's role in North American zooarchaeology in general, one is false and the other is perhaps only partially true. Respectively, these claims are that the zooarchaeological quantitative unit known as the minimum number of individuals (MNI) was introduced to North American zooarchaeology by White and that White was largely responsible for the increased use of MNI in the second half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 6 presents two superficially disparate topics that are actually intimately related. The first concerns White's programmatic statements regarding research questions that he thought could be answered by analysis of zooarchaeological remains. These questions concern human behaviors of interest to anthropologists, and that is what links this first topic with the second one: the accessibility of the dynamics of prehistoric human behaviors to archaeologists who study static artifacts and faunal remains. In short, past human behaviors were thought to be inaccessible, yet all White's research questions concerned just such behaviors. The summary of opinions in chapter 6 grants insight to the general anthropological context in which White operated and highlights the fact that it was perhaps a good thing he was trained as a paleontologist; such training (as opposed to being trained as an archaeologist) meant he did not know that the questions he asked were ones that most archaeologists and anthropologists believed could not be answered. It likely was precisely because of his naïveté about such matters that he could successfully answer those questions.
White's anthropological zooarchaeology is described in detail and analyzed with respect to how it anticipates modern (late twentieth- and earliest twenty-first-century) zooarchaeology in chapter 7. There I argue that White's approach to zooarchaeological research was strongly influenced by both his understanding of paleontology and the archaeological context in which it took place. In short, White was a paleontologist by training, someone who was used to dealing with long-extinct animals and answering questions about their phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary histories and the paleoecology of long-ago ages. For those working with remains of modern mammals, the typical paleontological research questions were off the table simply because the animals under study were modern taxonomically and morphometrically; they were temporally recent and revealed little (so it was thought at the time) about biological evolution. But because the not-so-ancient mammal remains White studied were recovered from archaeological deposits the formation of which was the result of human activity, then clearly (or so White likely reasoned) the zooarchaeological remains owed their existence and condition to human activity. Not surprisingly, then, White's anthropological zooarchaeology focused on deciphering the major human behaviors that he believed had created particular aspects of the zooarchaeological assemblages he studied.
Chapter 8 concludes the volume with an examination of the chronology of contributions by White and several others to zooarchaeology. The chronology is examined in several ways and consistently demonstrates that White was among the first to make contributions to anthropological zooarchaeology and thus should be placed among the group of individuals who founded North American zooarchaeology as a legitimate research arena.
This volume is not intended to be a thorough history of zooarchaeology in general or even just in North America. Were it either of these it would be several hundred pages longer. Such a book may eventually be written, but for now this biography of one early zooarchaeologist provides a general overview of some of the events and trends that will need to be included in far more detail in a larger, more inclusive volume. This volume is intended to be a first attempt at writing and deciphering much of the history of North American zooarchaeology between about 1900 and 1970; its form is the biography of one zooarchaeologist.
Evaluating Discipline Founders
In the remainder of this chapter I sketch my strategy for evaluating White's role in the emergence and founding of anthropological zooarchaeology. To reiterate, by this term I mean studying and analyzing zooarchaeological remains in order to make inferences about human behaviors and cultures. Inferences could be about diet (which animal taxa made up what proportions of human diet), selective (or nonselective) predation (selecting individuals of particular taxonomy, age, or sex), seasonality (when during the year a particular resource was exploited), butchering (how animal carcasses were reduced to usable and consumable portions), and sharing or distributing carcass parts among individuals or households. White would grapple with each of these kinds of inferences to one degree or another, and he would address other issues of concern to his archaeologist colleagues as well.
How, one might ask, are those who were responsible for founding a scholarly field of research distinguished from among the population of dabblers, avocationalists, and serious investigators? What attributes single out a founding individual and identify him or her as such? One might turn to the "great man" theory of history, popularized in the 1840s by the Englishman Thomas Carlyle, who suggested history was driven by highly influential individuals who through their wisdom and charisma had decisive impacts on history's trajectory (Grinin 2010).1 Although now largely out of favor among professional historians (but see Grinin 2010), the "great man" theory sounds a bit like the definition of a "founding father": a person who starts or helps to start a movement or institution, the originator of a movement or institution. To use this definition in historical analysis we need to know what the movement or institution is; in this case it is anthropological zooarchaeology.
A number of attributes of White's work can be used to assess whether or not, and the degree to which, he should be given the status of a founding father. I believe that White helped in major ways to establish what is now recognized as American anthropological zooarchaeology. Attributes of his work that substantiate my belief could be any variable that demonstrates he was among the first to infer human behaviors that he believed had influenced the zooarchaeological materials he was studying. The chronology of when White published his zooarchaeology articles is therefore important, but so too is when others who are often identified as the founding members of the field published.2 As well the frequency of publications illustrating by example the fruits of anthropological zooarchaeological analysis is critical if we assume that one example could be taken as idiosyncratic, whereas a series of examples, especially if some involve comparisons or syntheses of multiple data sets, would suggest interpretive claims were legitimate. A related and equally important attribute is the frequency of citation of an individual's publications. Citations imply people are paying attention to what the author is saying, and usually (though not always) the citations are favorable toward the title being cited; whatever the case, citations are evidence that others are aware of the original author's work. Indices based on both variables are often used today to evaluate an individual's professional contributions and stature (e.g., Van Noorden 2010; Wang et al. 2013). With respect to White, I examine both variables — frequency of publication and frequency of citation — in various places in this volume.
Another attribute signifying that an individual is a founder involves that individual introducing an innovative analytical technique that is subsequently used by a large number of people. Here tallies of citations of the article(s) that introduced the innovative technique plus examination of a sample of the citations to determine if the technique is in fact being used serve to demonstrate the perceived value of the technique. Finally, to alter a discipline's standard practices may require programmatic statements as well as exemplary analyses. Novices will want to know the rules and analytical protocols for making contributions and furthering the aims of the new research field. Examples may illustrate analytical protocols and might guide a novice, but statements of how, why, and in what order particular analytical steps should be taken often render the learning curve less steep and facilitate rapid adoption of a new analytical approach. White published two programmatic statements on zooarchaeological methods that are not cited much today, but reading them will richly repay one's time. I review these statements in chapter 6.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables Preface Series Editors' Introduction 1. Why Theodore E. White? 2. White’s Academic Training and Work History 3. White’s Contributions to Paleontology 4. The Emergence of North American Zooarchaeology 5. Zooarchaeologists’ Knowledge of and Opinions of White 6. White’s Programmatic Statements 7. White’s Substantive and Methodological Contributions 8. Theodore E. White and the Emergence of Anthropological Zooarchaeology Appendix: “Observations on the Butchering Technique of Some Aboriginal Peoples, No. 10: Bison Bone from the Oldham Site,” by Theodore E. White Notes References Index