Graphing Culture Change in North American Archaeology

Abstract

Abstract Documentation, analysis, and explanation of culture change have long been goals of archaeology. The earliest archaeological spindle graphs appeared in the 1880s and 1890s, but had no influence on subsequent archaeologists. Line graphs showing change in frequencies of specimens in each of several artifact types were used in the 1910s and 1920s. Seriograms or straight-sided spindles diagraming interpretations of culture change were published in the 1930s, but were seldom subsequently mimicked. Spindle graphs of centered and stacked columns of bars, each column representing a distinct artifact type, each bar the empirically documented relative frequency of specimens in an assemblage, were developed in the 1940s, became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and are often used to illustrate culture change in textbooks published during the twentieth century. Graphs facilitate visual thinking, different graph types suggest different ontologies and theories of change, and particular techniques of parsing temporally continuous morphological variation of artifacts into types influence graph form. Line graphs, bar graphs, spindle diagrams, and phylogenetic trees of artifacts and cultures indicate archaeologists often mixed elements of Darwinian variational evolutionary change with elements of Midas-touch-like transformational change. Today there is minimal discussion of graph theory or graph grammar in both introductory archaeology textbooks and advanced texts, and elements of the two theories of evolution are often mixed. Culture has changed, and despite archaeology’s unique access to the totality of humankind’s cultural past, there is minimal discussion on graph theory, construction, and decipherment in the archaeological literature.