Evolutionary archaeology is unlikely to go extinct: response to Gabora

Abstract

As was pointed out in the article that apparently served as the catalyst for Gabora's comments (O'Brien 2005), an already sizable and growing literature suggests that a significant number of archaeologists working in North America, South America and Great Britain are interested in incorporating elements of Darwinism into their analytical work. This interest is not a new phenomenon but one that has been around in various guises for over a century (Lyman and O'Brien 1997; O'Brien and Lyman 2000b). To continue its growth, Darwinian archaeology needs to move beyond a narrow reading of Darwinism and become a more inclusive approach. There are encouraging signs in this direction, as behavioral archaeologists, human-behavioral ecologists and processual archaeologists are adding their perspectives to the mix, especially with respect to such things as cultural transmission, artifact function and style. Five recent or forthcoming collections of essays (Barton and Clark 1997; Lipo et al. 2006; Maschner 1996; O'Brien 2007; O'Brien and Lyman 2003a) bring this ecumenism into sharp focus and point out the synergy that can result from collaborative efforts that crosscut traditional labels and compartments. Gabora's comments notwithstanding, no one has ever suggested that Darwinism can solve all of archaeology's problems. Rather, what we and others have pointed out is that it might solve some of archaeology's historical read evolutionary problems. For these solutions to be meaningful, they have to be grounded in appropriate theory and method and not in someone's uninformed, idiosyncratic view of the natural world. Gabora can join the debates over Darwinian archaeology, but she, like everyone else, needs to understand exactly what is being debated and the context in which it is being debated. Archaeologists can no longer rely on popularized accounts of nature as the source of our understanding of biological evolution. Things are much more complicated than that. If we strip away everything else and attempt to get at the heart of Gabora's criticism (this issue), we find it to be, not surprisingly, Darwinian archaeology's views on the human phenotype. She does not see how artifacts can be phenotypic a viewpoint that we find indefensible from a biological stance but one that nonetheless has deep roots in the social sciences. Brew (1946) pretty well summed up the majority opinion among culture historians of the mid-twentieth century when he pointed out that inanimate objects do not breed and that therefore the term 'evolution' should be restricted to the