Chapter 2

An Aspect ofArchaeology's Recent Past and Its Relevance

in the New Millennium JEREMY A. SAHWFF AND WENDY ASHMORE

Settlement pattern studies are continuing to help form the methodologi­cal, and occasionally the theoretical. basis for examining ancient culture as a whole. including social structure, ideology, iconograp~y, and economy.

It was .. "the emergence of settlement pattern studies that was critical in leading us to take a more complete and systemic view of the ancient world.

Vogt. 1983:xiv, xx

1. INrnODUcnON

Interest in the history of archaeology has grown dramatically in the past t~o decades, and rapidly growing publications, from books to articles to a newsletter devoted to the subject, have provided syntheses of the development of archaeological knowledge and significant new insights into the growth of the discipline of archaeology in both methodology and theory. This chapter is not intended simply as a recapitulation of the results of these publi­cations or an overview of the insights. Rather, the purpose of this chapter, as an introduc­tion to the general scope of this book, is to outline what the new understandings of the history of archaeological research and thought might tell us about the nature of the disci­pline at the dawn of the new millennium, and where the discipline appears to be heading. This chapter is not a comprehensive review, but instead, focuses on one major theme. In addition, the cl)M'ter's concentration is on the history of American archaeology, for rea­

t sons of length and the authors' expertise. I Before exploring that one theme, it is worth providing an initial historical context by

describing briefly the larger scope of changes that have transfonned archaeology over the

'We wish to thank the editors for in~ing our participation in this volume, and Gary Feinman, Joyce Marcus, and Thomas Patterson for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Jeremy A. Sabloff • University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104. Wendy Ashmore • Department of Anthropology, University of California-Riverside, Riverside, California 92521.

Archaeology at the Millennium: A Sourcebook, edited by Feinman and Price. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York. 2001.

11

12 Sabloff and Ashmore

last century or SO.2 The most encompassing change lies in the field's attainment of profes­sional status, shifting from a part-time or "some-time" pursuit to a specialized vocation by individuals with increasingly formalized training. In the process, speculative reconstruc­tion of the past was gradually supplanted with more consciously rigorous inquiry, via im­proved techniques of field data collection and analysis and use of more structured interpre­tive models.

By the close of the nineteenth century, Cyrus Thomas and others had largely settled the central controversy of North American archaeology, drawing on excavated archaeo­logical data to confirm that Native Americans had, in fact, created the monuments and artifacts of pre-Euro-colonial times. Attempts to fit the American archaeological record to Old World developmental models, however, grew increasingly strained. Emergent profes­sional archaeologists, especially as led by Alfred V. Kidder, his students, and colleagues, turned the emphasis away from depicting large-scale schemes toward developing localized culture histories. Sponsored principally by museums and wealthy individual or institu­tional patrons, these practitioners devoted the most attention to careful recovery and analy­sis of the objects of prehistory. Such basic methods as stratigraphic excavation were im­ported from Old World archaeology to the Americas in the nineteenth century and fully established early in the twentieth century (Lyman et aI., 1997).

Classifying cultures and their site and artifact diagnostics depended on precise de­scriptions of material remains. Dating of finds was accomplished by relative means, ar­chaeologists attending especially to both stratigraphic ordering within excavations and seriation of artifact and architectural styles when comparing different excavations or nonexcavated materials. In the 1920s, dendrochronology was invented for studying sun­spot and weather cycles; archaeologists seized on it immediately as an unprecedented means to affix absolute chronometric ages to materials-at least archaeological timbers in the American Southwest. But despite these and other technical advances, the ancient people responsible for the classified and dated buildings, pottery, and other materials were often lost in the quest for ordering and analyzing the artifacts and architecture themselves.

The Great Depression of the 1930s indirectly spawned much archaeological field­work in the United States as part of massive public works programs to build dams and roads and to provide wage labor for thousands of unemployed workers. The Civilian Con­servation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and Tennessee Valley Authority were prominent among government agencies underwriting archaeological surveys and excava­tions. At the same time, private sponsors continued to support research abroad, notably the Carnegie Institution of Washington in its Maya archaeOlogy program. Consequent accu­mulation of immense amounts of data, however, also fueled growing dissatisfaction over what, interpretively, was being done with the information. Although chronological and stylistic sequences were refined, the resulting interpretive picture still often lacked a sense of the lives of ancient people and their societies. Walter Taylor's (1948) A Study ofArche­

2For source material behind the brief historical review see especially Kehoe (1998), Knapp (1997), Meltzer et al. (1986), Patterson (1995, 1999), Trigger (1989), Sharer and Ashmore (1993), and Willey and Sabloff (1993). Since this paper was written, an important new volume on Settlement Pattern Studies in the Americas has appeared (Billman and Feinman, 1999). As signaled by the volume's subtitle, Fifty Years Since ¥irll, contributors adopt a historical perspective, critically assessing accomplishments and advances within specific regions and at particular levels of sociocultural complexity, as well as more generally in the hemisphere as a whole. There is certainly overlap and complementarity between those contributions and ourreview, although a more central theme of that volume is the argument for a full-coverage survey.

13 Relevance of Archaeology's Recent Past

ology offered the most sustained and thorough critique of the status quo and urged consid­eration of the function and context of the finds. Taylor's call for a more behavior-oriented inquiry had little direct impact at the time, however. It was ignored-even rejected-be­cause it came as the publication of a Ph.D. dissertation by a bold but untested new scholar and was built around a frontal attack on the most respected figures of the field, especially A. V. Kidder.

World War II and its aftermath were watershed times in the worlds of politics, eco­nomics, and academia, with ramifications still playing out today. After the war, the GJ Bill made higher education available to many returning veterans, and the resurgent economy offered growing support for research, especially in the technical sciences. A "can do" atti­tude combined with economic prosperity and the competitive international atmosphere of the Cold War to foster scientific growth in many fields. Further, in the late 1940s, Willard Libby gave archaeology the tremendous tool of radiocarbon analysis, by which archaeo­logical materials could-for the first time-be fixed in "absolute" time, with a method applicable in any part of the world. Although far from the magical tool it first seemed, radiocarbon dating has indeed liberated archaeologists from a "necessary obsession" with establishing ages and time lines for their data. And after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, support for science in the United States took a significant leap through further en­hancement of the nascent National Science Foundation.

These technical and economic developments gave greater opportunity and voice to those archaeologists who felt growing concern for meaningfully reconnecting ancient ma­terial remains with the human agents and activities that produced them. Interest turned from building local culture histories to addressing fundamental questions about the human evolution, including the rise of food production, the advent of village life, and the origin of cities. In 1962, Lewis Binford published "Archaeology as Anthropology," which assumed the role of manifesto for a "new archaeology," the study of cultural processes acting in and on cultural systems through time. Interest in context and function recalled Taylor's argu­ments more than a decade earlier, but this time, conditions and presentation style favored the arguments' impact. In this heady new exploration of the past, an explicitly positivist scientific method was invoked to gather information suited to resolving major questions about cultural and social evolution. Especially prominent was a neo-Darwinian concern with variability instead of norm: key questions dealt with why some individuals' and groups' material legacies differed, and how this reflected their varying adaptive responses to chal­lenge from their social, cultural, and ecological environments. Systematic research designs were developed for problem-oriented, processualist archaeological projects concerning human behavior in the past. Ethnoarchaeology, studies directly relating behavior to its material consequences, emerged as one potent means of interpreting the activities and strat­egies represented in the archaeological record. Federal legislation in the United States spawned tremendous growth in contract archaeology, or cultural resource management (CRM), to try to mitigate destruction of the archaeological record in the seemingly relent­less postwar course of development. Statistical analyses were called upon to aid in han­dling the huge amounts of data collected by archaeologists employed in any of these aca­demic or CRM realms, and the new availability of computers encouraged such ambitious quantitative pursuits.

Even in the midst of this exciting revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, where archaeo­logical study was argued to be truly anthropological at last, from concept to fieldwork to interpretation, new seeds ofconcern began to sprout. In response to processualist approaches,

14 Sabloff and Ashmore

new, "postprocessualist" voices began to be heard, especially in Britain. Some of these were inspired by ethnoarchaeological research in which the role of noneconomic factors, especially symbols, social identities, and other kinds of meaning, had demonstrated an unexpectedly active role in shaping behavior and material culture. Others arose from pro­found recognition of the political implications of investigating, interpreting, and thereby controlling the past. Most pointedly, Ian Hodder and his students argued that processualists gave "little or no attention to the social construction of meaning and the playing out of power relations in the social arena. This critique led to experimentation with poststructuralism, neo Marxism, gender theory, and critical theory ... "(Preucel, 1995: 148). Unfortunately, the literature on these issues has acquired the appearance of an intellectual minefield, and there certainly has, in some cases, been more heat than light (but see Patterson, 1990, and Preucel and Hodder, 1996b, for two exceptions). The result has been needless confusion and wheel spinning. Even basic terms used in polemics have sometimes hin­dered clearheaded discussion of the issues. For example, the terms "processual" and "postprocessual" are not consistently used and have become increasingly cumbersome umbrellas for a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and philosophical Preucel and Hodder (1996a:7), for instance, prefer "interpretive" archaeology to encom­pass the approaches that have emerged from the broad postprocessual critiques of the meth­odological/theoretical practices of the 1960s and 1970s.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of the recent intellectual turmoil, the 1980s and I990s have seen much fruitful and exciting, if often (and we believe, unnecessarily) contentious, debate about the proper goals, methods, applications, and philosophies of archaeology, about which we shall have more to say later. Certainly, humanistic concerns and political issues have now taken their place alongside, and sometimes supplanting, a modified scien­tific positivism in the archaeological literature today. At the same time, technical develop­ments, from microstratigraphy to geographic information systems and from chemical fin­gerprinting of material sources to residue analyses of artifact use, have greatly enhanced archaeologists' abilities to explore a wider range of material data with more subtlety and sensitivity. Thus, as processual approaches expand to include ideology and the individual, among other topics, and as postprocessual approaches develop into less subjective endeav­ors, we are optimistic that archaeologists will continue to break through the polemic to advance fresh understanding of the past in the new millennium.

It should be clear that the last century has been a heady one for archaeology, with many and ongoing changes in the philosophies, technologies, and economics of how ar­chaeologists work. If, however, one were asked what has been the single most critical theoretical or methodological innovation in archaeology since World War II, a strong argu­ment could be made for settlement pattern studies. Settlement pattern studies have served as both a significant vehicle and a mirror for other key developments in the field. We now examine the merits of this argument and then see how such studies might affect the disci­pline in the coming years.

2. DEFINmONS AND BACKGROUND

By settlement patterns, we refer most simply to the distribution across the landscape of material traces of human presence. Although examples of what we would recognize as settlement research had been discussed and undertaken in the Old World before World War

15 Relevance of Archaeology's Recent Past

II in the fields of geography and archaeology, particularly in Great Britain (e.g., Fox, 1922), as well as in the New World in anthropology and archaeology (see Mindeleff, 1900, and Morgan, 1881, for example, as cited in Parsons, 1972; also see Chang. 1972), it was the 1953 publication of Gordon R. Willey's research in the Vini Valley, on the North Coast of Peru, that brought settlement pattern research to the fore in archaeology (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).

Stimulated by Julian H. Steward, who already had produced two settlement studies on the American Southwest and Great Basin (Steward, 1937, 1938), Willey explicitly focused his research on ancient settlement patterns. He mapped the major settlement features of the Vini Valley with the aid of aerial photographs and assigned ages to the features on the basis of samples of surface ceramic and selected excavated materials. In his now-famous state­ment on the opening page of Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru, Willey (1953:1) wrote:

The term "settlement patterns" is defined here as the way in which man disposed himself over the landscape on which he lived. It refers to dwell­ings, to their arrangement, and to the nature and disposition of other buildings pertaining to community life. These settlements reflect the natu­ral environment, the level of technology on which the builders operated, and various institutions of social interaction and control which the cul­ture maintained. Because settlement patterns are, to a large extent, di­rectly shaped by widely held cultural needs, they offer a strategic start-

point for the functional interpretation of archaeological cultures.

Recall that the Vini Valley research was undertaken in the context of mounting criti­cism of the a-behavioral, a-functional approach that had come to typify American archae­ology. The key advance in Willey's study is, therefore, signaled in the last sentence, where he contends that settlement pattern studies should move beyond the correlation of features

Figure 2.1. General view of the Viril Valley, Peru. (Courtesy of Gordon R. Willey)

16 Sabloff and Ashmore

~x,.,

Figure 2.2. Gordon R. Willey during the Virii Valley research. (Courtesy of Gordon R. Willey)

of the landscape and human settlement to the use of recognized patterning in order to elucidate the functioning of cultures (Trigger, 1989:282-284).

Willey expanded on this point 3 years later in his brief Introduction to the volume he edited on Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the New World (1956: 1) when he stated:

In settlement, man inscribes upon the landscape certain modes of his existence. These settlement arrangements relate to the adjustments of man and culture to environment in the broadest sense. Viewed archaeologicaUy, settlements are, like any prehistoric residue, the incom­plete and fragmentary oddments of something that was once vital and whole. Nevertheless, settlements are a more direct reflection of social and economic activities than are most other aspects of material culture available to the archeologist.

It was this widely read Viking Fund publication that, according to Parsons (1972: 129), really highlighted Willey's 1953 message and brought the promise of settlement research to a broad archaeological constituency (also see Willey and Sabloff, 1993: 172-176).

Little more than a decade later, "new" or processual archaeologists had begun to see settlement research as central to scientific, functional, and evolutionary archaeological inquiry. In a volume on Settlement Archaeology (Chang, 1968), Willey (1968:225) restated his views in more modern terms:

... if we consider the features of settlement patterns, in themselves, as artifacts-using that term in its broadest sense-we see that these fea­tures are adaptations to natural-environmental, social, and ideological factors. A settlement is thus constituted of what Binford (1962) has de­scribed as the" ... three general functional classes of artifacts: technomic, socia-technic. and ideo-technic." Accordingly, the study of settlement

17 Relevance of Archaeology's Recent Past

patterns provides an ideal meeting ground for observations on the inter­action of the cultural subsystems represented by these three classes of data.

However, Willey (1974: 154) admits that he did not appreciate the full prospect of the approach until after his field research:

Unfortunately, I did not realize its centralizing, integrative potential then. In fact, in that 1946 field season, as I walked over the stony and seem­ingly endless remains of Vim prehistoric settlements, I felt I had been misled by Steward and dealt a marginal hand by my colleagues. The latter were getting tangible pottery sequences to delight the heart of any self-respecting archaeologist while I was chasing some kind of wraith called "settlement patterns" that had been dreamed up by a social an­thropologist.

Nevertheless, by the close of the 1960s, Willey (1968:225) clearly understood that although the chase was not an easy one it was indeed worthwhile:

The prehistoric settlement form or pattern ... is an artifact that has been difficult to recover, and, perhaps for this reason, one that has only re­cently been made part of archaeological discourse. It is now, I think, "here to stay" in archaeology, whether we consider that archaeology "new" or "old."

Willey (1956: I) also was firm in his view that his interest in settlement patterns did not constitute a different kind of archaeology or a revolutionary method: "Let it be made clear that there is no 'settlement-pattern approach' to archeology. An awareness of settle­ment data simply extends the net of archeological interest to take in a larger and legitimate part of the record." In an important American Antiquity article on "Settlement Archaeol­ogy-Its Goals and Promise," Bruce Trigger (1967:149) also stressed the continuity of settlement research with past work: "I believe that Settlement Archaeology does represent an approach of some importance, but one that will strengthen rather than replace or destroy the kinds of archaeology that exist at this time."

3. THE SUCCESS OF THE SEITLEMENT PATI'ERN APPROACH

We now examine the reasons for the strength of the impact that settlement research has had on the field and why it still has great promise. As implied by our initial historical review, the very positive reception that Willey's initial effort in the Vim Valley received was attributable in no small part to the burgeoning intellectual ferment present in the disci­pline in the 1950s (Willey and Sabloff, I 993:Chapter 5). We would cite again the growing dissatisfaction with emphasis on time-space systematics and classification, adding here that resolution of this dissatisfaction had been impeded by a continuing paucity of empiri­cal examples of what might replace the traditional practices. This situation was especially true as regards rising interest in functional understandings of ancient cultures and particu­larly the social spheres of past lifeways. In North America, particularly at the University of Chicago, archaeologists who had been stimulated by the lengthy visit of the social anthro­pologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown during the 1930s, as well as by social anthropological colleagues such as Robert Redfield, became interested in functional interpretations of the

18 Sabloff and Ashmore

past (Bennett, 1943; Sartori, 1998). Likewise, WalterW. Taylor, whose published disserta­tion made a strong (if unheeded) argument for archaeological attention to functional analy­ses, had been supervised in his Harvard doctoral studies by the social anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. In that 1948 publication, Taylor could cite only a few works that he thought fulfilled his functional argument. With no further elaboration, he singled out Hiwasee Is­land: An Archaeological Account of Four Tennessee Indian Peoples by Thomas M. N. Lewis and Madeline Kneberg (1946) as "possibly the best archeological report I have had the pleasure of reading" (1948:9), while praising British archaeologist Grahame Clark's (1939, 1940) synthetic works as approaching "archaeological ethnography" (Taylor, 1948: 170). Taylor himself offered only several short examples of how what he called his "conjunctive approach" might be applied, and one of the substantive criticisms of his work was that he did not provide a monograph-length case study (Woodbury, 1954).

Thus the timing ofWilley's settlement research and publication was perfect, as Willey (who was influenced by Taylor [see Willey and Sabloff, 1993:209]) was able to provide a highly promising case example that, at least in part, operationalized Taylor's approach. Moreover, unlike Taylor, Willey presented his Vin! Valley settlement pattern work, as well as the 1956 edited volume, in a nonpolemical manner that in hindsight clearly facilitated the general professional acceptability of the approach. In addition, Willey almost immedi­ately followed up the publication of his Vin! research with a new settlement pattern project (1954-1956) in the Belize River Valley in the Maya Lowlands (Willey et aI., 1965), which reinforced the viability of the approach with the empirically minded majority of the disci­pline. Willey's was not the only settlement work at the time (e.g., Phillips et aI., 1951), but it was the most focused of such research and clearly the most influential.

Another reason for the relatively rapid acceptance of the settlement pattern approach by the field was, as briefly noted, that it fit into the agenda of the new or processual archae­ology and was seen as an important methodological tool by many of the early "new archae­ologists" (see Ashmore and Willey, 1981; Sabloff, 1983). Indeed, as Evon Vogt (1983:xiv) has commented: " ... settlement pattern studies were in the vanguard of the 'new archae­ology' of the late 1950s and early 1960s." In particular, Willey's 1953 definition, quoted previously, related patterning to "widely held cultural needs," which clearly hinted at an interest in cross-cultural regularities (Willey and Sabloff, 1993: 173). Trigger's (1967: 151) somewhat later definition ("I propose to define Settlement Archaeology as the study of social relationships using archaeological data") focused on the ability of settlement re­search to get at those aspects of culture that traditional cultural-historical approaches had considered beyond the reach of archaeology and that the new approaches considered virtu­ally central. Moreover, in practice, settlement research immediately went far beyond clas­sificatory emphases through its holistic or systemic concern for the economic, political, ideological, and, especially, social spheres of culture. Just as importantly, settlement pat­tern studies, unlike traditional emphases, were as much occupied with cultural variability as they were with homogeneity. Such concerns clearly meshed well with the systems and evolutionary interests of the 1960s "new archaeology." As Binford (1992:47) has stated: "Settlement-pattern approaches assumed that cultural systems were internally differenti­ated and hence presented themselves as differentiated phenomena distributed in comple­mentary ways." Thus the methodology and goals of settlement studies fit the broader theo­retical and methodological aims of the new processual directions in American archaeology. They also complemented the burgeoning but deep-rooted interest in spatial archaeology

19 Relevance of Archaeology's Recent Past

that was a significant component of new approaches in British archaeology of the 1970s (see Clarke, 1977; Hodder and Orton, 1976).

Following Julian Steward's intellectual lead, a settlement pattern approach also was adopted early on by scholars with cultural evolutionary views who saw the environment as playing a key role in cultural development. For example, the important settlement surveys of William T. Sanders and his colleagues in the Basin of Mexico were used by these ar­chaeologists in their evolutionary interpretations of the rise of complexity in the region

Parsons, 1990; Sanders, 1981; Sanders et al., 1979), based on the cultural ecological premise that degree of complexity was related directly to demographic expansion and,

to availability of a notably productive environment (Sanders and Price, 1968). Since 1960, more than 15 years of research involving numerous archaeologists have yielded nearly complete coverage of the 7000 km2 basin, the seat ofAztec and earlier civilizations. Settlement information was examined over long time periods and changes were related in part to shifting utilization and control of resources. As Barbara Price (1978: 165) has noted, the settlement data "may be taken as the material isomorph of the entire mode of produc­tion."

This immensely rich database, together with Teotihuacan Valley, continues to support a wide range ofproductive inquiries on economic and social integration in prehispanic times. Methodologies developed for these surveys were adapted in the 1 970s by one of their veterans, Richard Blanton, and his colleagues in implementing a multiyear full-coverage survey in the 2150 km2 Valley ofOaxaca (Blanton et aI., 1982, 1993, 1999; Kowalewski, 1990a; Kowalewski et al., 1989). Interpretive as­sumptions also were different in the Oaxaca case, taking greater account of noneconomic, extra-ecological, and-especially-sociopolitical factors affecting settlement growth and social complexity. On the other side of the world, pioneering settlement pattern surveys by Robert McC. Adams and his colleagues in the Near East played a comparable key role in illuminating the rise of social, economic, and political complexity in ancient Mesopotamia (Adams, 1965, 1981; Adams and Nissen, 1972), drawing inspiration explicitly from Willey's VirU Valley work. Here, however, the ecological relationships were viewed as more mutualizing, with artificial irrigation systems culturally redefining the productive and cen­tralizing potentials of the specific places where these developed. Inspired in part by devel­opments in Mesopotamia, settlement pattern studies have developed strongly in the Medi­terranean (e.g., Cherry, 1983; Cherry et aI., 1991; Jameson et aI., 1994; Knapp, 1997). Even in the already data-rich field of classical studies, archaeologists found that settlement pattern research could significantly expand understanding of the classical world (e.g., MacDonald and Rapp, 1972).

Perhaps the most important aspect of the settlement pattern approach that helped it gain adherents from both the new and traditional camps was its attention to the social dimension at all levels of cultural complexity, from mobile hunter-gatherers to sedentary states, and its concern with cultural variability at a variety of spatial scales. In particular, the growing emphasis on settlement research at regional scales fit a range of theoretical agendas, as variability could be observed beyond individual sites and in relation to mul­tiple environmental features and zones. These scales were evident in the varied levels of integration-from housemound to region-invoked in Willey's work in the VirU and Belize Valleys (Willey, 1953; Willey et al., 1965). Perhaps the most striking example of such application of the settlement approach was Howard Winters' (1968) pathbreaking study in

20 Sabloff and Ashmore

Illinois, where he was able to argue for differential seasonal occupation of a series of sites on the basis of a carefully controlled regional settlement survey. And surely its most en­gagingly provocative illustration is Kent Flannery's (1976) edited volume, The Early Mesoamerican Village, with its admixture of wittily pungent parables and settlement case studies, at scales from individual domestic activity areas to expansively integrative regions.

Interest in regional surveys also required archaeologists to pay attention to sampling strategies and statistical analyses, which were part of the new archaeological agenda, and so further reinforced new archaeological interest in settlement pattern work (e.g., Struever, 1971). The pathbreaking research of the Southwestern Anthropological Research Group (SARG) in the American Southwest, and especially that of Fred Plog (1974), Steadman Upham (1982), and their colleagues, offer some excellent examples in this regard. Given the wide range of cultural variability and differentiation that the new archaeology posited, the capacity of settlement pattern research to encompass fuller ranges of data in social, spatial, and topical terms through the use of rigorous sampling strategies and the concomi­tant statistical manipulation of the data uncovered by such strategies clearly made this research approach highly appealing.

4. THE SOCIAL CoNTEXT OF THE RIsE OF SETfLEMENT PATrERN REsEARCH

The success of the settlement pattern approach obviously has been inextricably linked with the rise of nonelite, middle-class perspectives and emphases in the field of archaeol­ogy. These, in turn, were closely tied to the opening of job opportunities for the middle class in archaeology in the post-World War II years, especially in the huge growth of the field in the 1960s and 1970s, and the expansion of governmental research support in pro­portion to traditional private support (for other views, see Kehoe, 1998; Patterson, 1995, 1999; Trigger, 1989). In Maya archaeology, for instance, settlement research in the Belize Valley and at Tikal, among others, helped usher in broader views of the ancient Maya than had been traditionally held and led to new attention to the role of the peasantry in the growth of complexity in the Maya Lowlands and ultimately to new perspectives on the general development of Maya civilization (Ashmore, 1981; Sabloff, 1990). The "humble" remains of the houses of ancient Maya peasants (e.g., Webster and Gonlin, 1988) began to receive as much attention in Maya settlement work as palaces and temples had in tradi­tional research, and understanding of the lives of the nonetite began to play an important role in theories about the ebbs and flows of Maya civilization.

Settlement pattern studies also have tracked expansion of nonacademic employment in archaeology attendant on the rise of CRM opportunities and contract funding. Obvi­ously, the design of CRM projects is shaped by the needs of the particular area and extent of impact to be mitigated, whether this be a linear tract for pipeline right-of-way, a com­pact area for a new highway cloverleaf, or an extensive zone to be flooded by construction of a new dam. Settlement patterns are traced in such research at clearly variable scales beyond the control or dictate of the archaeologist. But behind interpretation of the results are evolving settlement models, predictive models derived from cumulative research by government, commercial, and academic projects. Indeed, in the late 1970s, relatively early in the current wave of CRM research, state archaeologists were charged with developing state plans, so that the necessarily piecemeal accumulation of research locales, guided by other than intellectual priorities, could be dealt with most efficiently on interpretive as well

21 Relevance ofArchaeology's Recent Past

as economic grounds. That is, development of settlement pattern models allowed better prediction of what a CRM inquiry was likely to encounter, thereby allowing both more compelling interpretations and more efficient design of mitigative investigation strategies.

Writing of the history of settlement and landscape studies in Europe, Andrew Sherratt (1996) traces successive periods of prominence in what we would call settlement studies and links them to times of greater prosperity, political stability, Enlightenment positivist philosophies, and generally positive societal outlook. He sees in these the analytic and integrative approaches embodied in settlement studies. Certainly such a correlation would fit the trajectory of growth, to date, for settlement archaeology in the Americas, particu­larly tying the almost meteoric rise of such study to the economic, demographic, educa­tional, and scientific "boom" times of the first three decades following World War II. In contrast, Sherratt would relate times of global political and economic instabilities to ex­pansion of less strictly scientific, more humanistic, or (in his terms) romantic European approaches to occupation on the land; we pursue this further in discussing recent landscape studies.

5. SE1TLEMENT PATIERN Snmms AS A MIRROR

OF GENERAL ARCHAEOWGlCAL TRENDS

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, settlement pattern studies had begun to be widely used by archaeologists in many parts of the world. Since that time, they have been critical to furthering a broad range of archaeological interests, and, because of this utility, appear to have served as a microcosm and occasionally as a lightning rod for trends in archaeol­ogy as a whole. Some of the key topics or areas of interest reflected in the development of settlement pattern work can be characterized briefly as including (1) basic time-space issues, in providing broader canvasses for chronology building and in facilitating the re­finement of chronologies; (2) ecological and systems analyses; (3) socioeconomic and sociopolitical modeling, with settlement pattern studies playing significant roles in such endeavors, from understanding seasonal movements among hunter-gatherers to the nature of trade in state societies; (4) cultural evolutionary questions of the rise of settled village life, social complexity, and cities; (5) diffusion versus independent invention; (6) the role of ideology in ancient societies; (7) the roles of households in ancient societies, with settle­ment pattern studies helping, for example, to focus attention on nonelite living areas in complex societies; (8) the relation of analytic scales in archaeological data, by moving the foci of comparative analytic attention along the continuum from households to regions; (9) cultural resource management and preservation/conservation issues, with settlement pat­tern research, for instance, supporting a shift in preservation attention from individual sites to larger zones; (10) social variability, including gender, class, and other social identities; and (11) middle-range or bridging methodological concerns. Let us briefly examine three of these topics: evolutionary thresholds, household archaeology, and scalar variability.

A dominant theme of processual archaeology has been investigation of important thresholds in cultural and social evolution. Central to the whole are studies of the origins of sedentism, urbanism, and social complexity, the latter especially as recognized in the label "civilization." Although there are many avenues for study ofeach of these domains, settle­ment patterns are key in all cases. Particularly in the study of sedentism and urbanism, charting the distribution of settlement across the land is absolutely fundamental to docu­

22 Sabloff and Ashmore

menting the existence of settled villages, towns, and cities (e.g., Fletcher, 1995; Ucko et 1972). Settlement surveys on a local and regional scale were consequently recognized

immediately as crucial methods for addressing such evolutionary questions. Even with the somewhat more problematic categories of civilization or complex society, the myriad ma­terial indices of social differentiation and centralizing control of food, labor, and precious materials depend not only on perception of disparate degrees of autonomy and control, but also on the spatial distribution of such disparity, as expressed in or in relation to settlement patterns (e.g., Wright and Johnson, 1975). The role of settlement patterns in evolutionary study is evident in many of the works cited earlier, especially in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia, but also has proven central in diverse other settings, from coastal Peru (Wil­son, 1988) to Polynesia (Kirch, 1984, 1997).

Household archaeology is an outgrowth of settlement pattern studies and their inter­section with the aforementioned growing interest in understanding a greater social con­tinuum than simply the elites of complex society (e.g., Rathje, 1983; Wilk and Rathje, 1982). Parallel interests in cultural anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines helped underwrite creation of archaeological approaches to defining and studying these "building blocks" of social and economic organization. The now burgeoning field of household ar­chaeology studies activities and occupants of individual domestic compounds, as well as neighborhood or village assemblages of the same. This particular scale of settlement and its domestic nature have proven important media for examining issues of great interest to processualists, including kin and class systems and structure (e.g., Hill, 1970; Sanders, 1989), ethnic identity and interethnic interaction (e.g., Aldenderfer, 1993; Blanton, 1994; Stanish, 1992), or economic systems (e.g., Bogucki, 1993; McAnany, 1993; Santley and Kneebone. 1993). Some of these household studies incorporate the kinds of long-tenn evolutionary concerns cited earlier (e.g., Marcus and Flannery, 1996; Mehrer, 1995; com­pare Hodder, 1990). Others reduce both temporal and spatial-social scales to the same household level, as in studies of household developmental cycles (e.g., Haviland, 1988; Tourtellot, 1988a). Still others focus on essentially synchronic relations (e.g., Hill, 1970; Meskell, 1998). But all look to increase understanding of society beyond an undifferenti­ated communal whole or study of elite leaders alone.

Besides the broadening of social inferences from household studies, settlement pat­tern research has encouraged greater appreciation of the virtually continuous variation in scale of settlement features and arrays. Growing slowly over the last quarter century, con­sideration of scalar variability has moved us away from the dominant "site" focus of tradi­tional archaeology to finer grained conceptualization. Often termed "nonsite" or "siteless" archaeology, this mode of archaeological research attempts to eliminate the bias that a focus on sites brings (e.g., Dunnell and Dancey. 1983; Ebert, 1992; Foley, 1981; Rossignol and Wandsnider, 1992; Thomas, 1975) and greatly facilitates study of settlement traces that resist "site" categorization, whether these be diffuse artifact scatters, agricultural field systems, or road networks (e.g., Erickson, 1993; Trombold, 1991). In the process, the gen­erally more ephemeral traces of hunting and foraging societies have become more acces­sible, as have a more comprehensive range of traces from sedentary and even urban societ­ies. Coupled with calls for full-coverage surveys (Fish and Kowalewski, 1990; Kowalewski, 1990b), nonsite approaches allow archaeologists to better recover and understand observ­able variability in the archaeological record, and thereby also to examine and interpret a more complex range of contexts in which people lived.

Such work has been facilitated by the use of a variety of new techniques whose use

23 Relevance of Archaeology's Recent Past

has been promoted by settlement pattern research. These innovations include expanded aerial and, now, satellite imagery and side-looking radar, as well as the use of new equip­ment such as electronic distance measure (EDM) theodolites and global positioning sys­tem (GPS) locators. The growing use of key analytic tools, such as geographic information systems, also has been directly stimulated by settlement pattern studies, and has allowed archaeologists to manipulate large data sets with greater ease and insight than was previ­ously feasible. These technical developments are to the archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s what computer technology was to research of the 1960s and 1970s.

6. CURRENT AND FuuJRE ROLES OF SETILEMENT PATfERN STUDIES

By the close of the twentieth century, settlement pattern studies clearly have become a significant, broadly accepted part of archaeologists' methodological resources and have facilitated development in conceptual and theoretical domains as well. Equipped with a wide array of technological tools that have strongly enhanced settlement pattern work, archaeologists are currently using settlement pattern studies to tackle a number of critical research questions from the refinement of time-space systematics throughout the globe to the formulation of new insights into the development and nature of cultural complexity. Traditional time-space systematics are often punctuated, for example, by dramatic epi­sodes of settlement and regional abandonment, and these have been critically reassessed in light of greatly expanded settlement pattern data. In some cases, such as Copan, models of abrupt collapse have been replaced by ones of more gradual societal dissolution (e.g., Webster and Freter, 1990; compare Fash and Sharer, 1991). In other instances, such as the Chaco and Mimbres regions of the American Southwest, archaeologists have suggested that traditionally identified instances of abandonment actually involved more subtle settle­ment shifts and cycles, including occupation of related locales often quite nearby (e.g., Fowler and Stein, 1992; Nelson, 1999; Varien, 1999; compare Cameron and Tomka, 1993). In a similar manner, understanding of ancient cultural and social complexity has been greatly enhanced by embracing a broader range of settlement pattern data and by consider­ing alternative models for interpreting those data. These innovative developments are illus­trated, for example, by recent volumes on Archaeological Views from the Countryside (Schwartz and Falconer, 1994), Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies (Ehrenreich et a\., 1995), or the several syntheses of Oaxacan social evolution (e.g., Blanton et aI., 1993, 1999; Joyce and Winter, 1996; Marcus and Flannery, 1996). Many of the current directions are outgrowths of themes described earlier, but their forms reflect theo­retical trends of more recent times.

Just as importantly, as settlement pattern research proved a crucial meeting ground between traditional and new, or processual, archaeological approaches in the 1960s and 1 970s, so it appears that it can serve a similar role for processual and postprocessual, as well as evolutionary, approaches in the coming years. This potential can best be seen in the recent attention to "landscape" in its broadest sense (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Gosden and Head, 1994; Knapp, 1997; Rossignol and Wand snider, 1992; Ucko and Layton, 1999; Wagstaff, 1987). Although landscape as space has been, along with time, one of the two basic interests of archaeology from the beginnings of the field, current approaches have provided several new foci of attention.

Studies of landscape also offer a significant means to understand the role and impact

24 Sabloff and Ashmore

of past ideologies on cultural developments. In recent years, archaeologists have begun to move beyond the dichotomous view of the landscape either as a passive recipient of cul­tural action or a direct determinant of cultural development to examinations of the active roles that landscapes might have played in past social relations. For instance, archaeolo­gists have identified what they argue were sacred or otherwise meaningful places and then have extended these arguments to posit how and why such places functioned socially. Ar­chaeologists also have begun to explore the complex interrelationships between ideology and both the built environment and natural landscapes. Most such analyses have been asso­ciated with British and Australian authors (e.g., Bradley, 1993), but examples from the New World and elsewhere are growing rapidly and substantially (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Derks, 1997; Fritz, 1978; Stein and Lekson, 1992; Townsend, 1992). Examples from the Maya Lowlands, the area we know best, range from James Brady's (1997) studies of caves, Vernon Scarborough's (1998) investigation of water management and ritual, and Ashmore's (1991; Ashmore and Sabloff, 1997) analyses of urban settlement and city plan­ning and their relationships to religion and politics. These types of studies are processual in intent but incorporate many postprocessual concerns and interests.

Judging from an article cited earlier, Sherratt (1996) would likely portray much of the latter work as settlement pattern studies, in contrast to landscape studies, which he sees as more humanistic, even romantic. Although his analyses of the difference are intriguing, we would not partition the larger domain so decisively; indeed, we would reiterate that it is in precisely such studies that processual and postprocessual archaeologists are productively finding common ground (e.g., Crumley, 1999). A growing number of archaeologists­who might individually shun one or both labels of being processualists or postpro­cessualists-fruitfully explore multiple, convergent perspectives to inform study of settle­ment and landscape, including Buikstra and Charles's (1999) examination of changing mortuary locations in the North American midcontinent, Knapp's (1997, 1999) modeling of settlement systems and landscape in Bronze Age Cyprus, and recent studies of Native American landscapes of the Southwest (e.g., Snead and Preucel, 1999; Stein and Lekson, 1992). Examples of more thoroughly postprocessual analyses, particularly in their human­istic phenomenological and political aspects, would include Christopher Tilley's (1994) interpretations of British landscapes, Barbara Bender's analyses of Stonehenge (e.g., 1992, 1998), their joint program at Leskarnik (Bender et aL, 1997), Julian Thomas' studies (e.g., 1991, 1993) of Avebury and other locales of Neolithic Britain, or Colin Richards' (e.g., 1996) of Orkney or Brittany. Such efforts are preliminary indications of how broad settle­ment pattem/landscape research might accommodate both theoretical approaches. The rela­tively recent attention of historical archaeologists in the United States to formal gardens is another example of such potential accommodation (e.g., Leone, 1984; Yamin and Metheny, 1996). All of the foregoing relate, in turn, to a larger emerging domain of cognitive archae­ology, or the "archaeology of mind." Although initial endeavors in this latter have tended to be mostly artifact oriented, there are examples where landscape studies have been em­ployed (see Bradley, 1994, 1998; also see Flannery and Marcus, 1976; Hall, 1977; Renfrew, 1982, 1994; Renfrew et al., 1993).

Issues of settlement variability find new expression in settlement pattern research via explorations along several lines. One is time. Traditional views of settlement as constitut­ing a rather static, palimpsest record is giving way to greater active recognition of ancient flux in perception and use of both settlement and the landscape it occupies. Tim Ingold's widely cited 1993 article on "The Temporality of the Landscape" captures the seasonal

25 Relevance ofArchaeology's Recent Past

rhythms of social life relative to the land and the predictable succession of activities that take place on a single piece of land. More recently, Clive Gamble (1998:441; compare Conkey, 1980; Tilley, 1994) has invoked similar ideas for modeling Paleolithic life specifi­cally, contending that the

image foragers have of the world is linked to an itinerary ... not to a concentric surface area as proposed by site catchment analysis ... Fur­thermore, the image that any individual has of the world is of a similar track. This is due to our ambulatory mode of perception ... Paths and tracks link individuals to each other and so to the wider landscape and region.

Gamble does not discard settlement or landscape but, like Ingold, proposes a more intricately nuanced view of the inferences they can yield. In addition, John Barrett (1999), Richard Bradley (1993; Bradley and Williams, 1998), and others have explored the promi­nent impact extant landscapes of earlier settlement likely had in shaping subsequent "in­habitation." Settlement traces still constitute a palimpsest record, but we now perceive them to have played more continuously assertive roles through time.

Similarly, the synchronic organization of settlement traces is increasingly viewed as susceptible to multiple, alternative orders. Carole Crumley has long argued for the utility of heterarchical models, in which "each element possesses the potential of being unranked (relative to other elements) or ranked in a number of different ways, depending on sys­temic requirements" (Crumley, 1979: 144). Although some isolated analyses have recog­nized this potential multiplicity of ordering (e.g., Chang, 1972), only now are archaeolo­gists exploring the interpretive possibilities to any significant degree (e.g., Ehrenreich et aI., 1995). Again, the yield is a potentially far more intricate understanding of ancient social complexity and organization.

Expanded concern with social variability finds expression in such still-emergent de­velopments as gender studies in archaeology. Gendered spaces are most firmly recognized in settlement patterns at household or activity-area levels (e.g., Meskell, 1998; Sweely, 1998; Tringham, 1994); wider spatial scales of analysis are just beginning to be explored (e.g., Conkey, 1991; Gilchrist, 1994; Jackson, 1991). Although the focus in these studies is gender, the larger feminist theoretical goal is to reveal the fuller complexity of social iden­tities and relations (e.g., Conkey and Gero, 1997)-in these instances, in the spatial con­texts of ancient settlement.

As regards the future potential of settlement pattern research, it also should be noted that although settlement studies, from the Virli Valley research in the 1940s to those more than 50 years later, have combined surface and subsurface work, the former aspect, survey, has typically been the dominant component of the overall strategies. The growing political and economic obstacles worldwide to intrusion and destruction by archaeological excava­tion, particularly on any large scale, join with mounting conservation concerns and escalat­ing costs of excavations to make surface survey highly attractive in some parts of the globe. Although some archaeologists would argue that settlement studies, especially full-cover­age ones, can be exclusively surface ventures (e.g., de Montmollin, 1989), the goals of most settlement pattern projects necessitate some excavations (compare Derks, 1997; Hendon, 1992; Sherratt, 1996), and scholars will have to work hard to surmount the prob­lems posed by the current political biases against excavations. Nevertheless, surface settle­ment surveys, particularly in the contexts of studies of broad, regional landscapes, will

26 Sabloff and Ashmore

become increasingly important to the field, given the worldwide political realities at the beginning of the new millennium.

7. CONCLUDING REMARKS

As the new millennium dawns, archaeology faces many challenges. If archaeologists are to continue the tremendous strides they have made in the past half century toward understanding past cultures through time and space, one of the key challenges they must surmount is the unproductive split between the adherents of processual and postprocessual perspectives. Although these theoretical positions cannot be readily married into a single unified approach (see, e.g., Sabloff, 1992), that is not to say that they are completely in­compatible. As we have suggested, settlement pattern studies could well serve as the ve­hicle in which both camps can take seats. The research projects cited earlier-from various parts of the Americas as well as the Old World--offer just a few examples of the continu­ing potential of settlement work to lead to new insights into the systemic interactions among ancient cultures and both their physical and socially constructed environments.

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