Prof. Charles Perreault - "Macroarchaeology"
Duration: 27 mins 47 secs
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| Description: | A recording of Professor Charles Perreault (Arizona State University ) speaking on "Macroarchaeology: How Can Arrchaeology Make Novel and Useful Contributions?" as part of the "Cultures at the Macro Scale" seminar series. |
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| Created: | 2022-04-29 13:41 |
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| Collection: | Culture at the Macro-Scale |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Charles Perreault |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Keywords: | Archaeology; Archaeological Theory; Database; Cultural Evolution; |
Transcript
Transcript:
00:00
Hi, thank you for inviting me to this this really great speaker series. I'm very grateful to be part of it. My name is Charles Perreault. I'm an associate professor at Arizona State University in the United States. I'm a trained archaeologist, and I've spent the last few years thinking hard about, about the state of my field, and how archaeology can make useful contributions to the study of human origins, culture and behaviour. Y'know beyond the task of reconstructing cultural history. And I was invited here to speak about the methodological and theoretical recommendations that I made in my recent book.
00:44
I like this quote from Palaeolithic archaeologist Jeff Bailey, who once observed that "Archaeology is reduced to an appendix, at best entertaining, at worst dispensable, of ecology or sociology or whichever study of contemporary behaviour that happens to be in current fashion." His comment is fairly harsh, but I think it's it's still very much accurate more than 35 years later. It is still today. Archaeologists tend to interpret their data in terms of processes borrowed from other disciplines that study human behaviour over timescales that are much much shorter than that of the archaeological record.
01:30
So for various reasons, historical, cultural, psychological, archaeologists tend to view themselves as ethnographers of the past. And that has led to a research programme that is, that is hopelessly flawed. Archaeology as ethnography of the past, tries to translate this heavily fragmented, incomplete, mixed, distorted record, into a series of ethnographic vignettes that a cultural anthropologist would recognise. And just like with ethnography, studies of the primary interests lie in individuals. And... and the microscale processes most... most of which are not are not direct, and are not directly observable, in the archaeological record, but have to be inferred using archaeological data as indirect proxies.
02:24
So when doing this type of archaeology, archaeologists use what I call the test of consistency, right? They... they accept, or they reject a hypothesis, using the test of consistency. So in practice, what that means is that archaeologists accept some interpretation of archaeological data that they came up with—mostly on the basis that this interpretation can be made somehow consistent with their data.
02:53
The problem with this with the test of consistency is that there's such a large gap between the nature and quality of archaeological data, and the scale over which these individual level processes operate, that there are many, many equally consistent ways to interpret the exact same data very often. And these alternative, competing hypotheses are rarely considered in the research process.
03:23
The test of consistencies is a very weak epistemological criterion. It doesn't shield us from confirmatory bias, it makes interpretations and hypotheses—especially the verbal ones—too easy to confirm. And it just opens the door wide to... to false positive and false negative results. So archaeologists today have produced a flow of information about the human past. That is, that is that is impressive in quantity, but it is, for the most part, completely unverifiable. So like the proverbial frog in the pot, we have gotten used to the state of affairs.
04:09
But it explains at least in part, why archaeological interpretations are so rarely cited by scientists outside of archaeology. Scientists outside of archaeology, they may cite, for instance, our date for the earliest occupation of Australia, but they will certainly not cite our interpretation of Acheulian bifaces as costly signals, right. And what I want to argue here is that by emphasising archaeology as ethnography of the past—by emphasising microscale processes—archaeologists are not merely misusing archaeological data, they're, they're under using it. They're missing. They're missing out.
04:53
We have yet to take full advantage of the archaeological record and it's contributed potential to the social sciences. The proper research programme for archaeology is one in which the processes that we study operate over time scales and spatial scales that match the scale of archaeological data.
05:18
Palaeontology, paleobiology has dealt with a very similar situation. So until the 1970s, palaeontologist had been trying to make sense of the fossil record in terms of the microscale theory developed by biologists to work in labs. So a theory that emphasised changes in gene frequency. And since paleo... palaeontologists cannot recover direct evidence of genetic transmission, palaeontologists largely made themselves unneeded by the field of evolutionary biology. And that's because population geneticists do not need paleobiology or palaeontology to confirm the existence of a process like like, like the founder effect.
06:07
And that is why, as John Maynard Smith, put it, puts it: the attitude of population geneticist to any palaeontologists rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell them to.. "to not bother the grownups and just go find another fossil."
06:30
But during the 70s, a small group of renegade palaeontologists began to look at the fossil record as... as a record of macro evolution instead of as a record of micro evolution. They recognised that expecting the fossil record to measure up to a programmatic agenda designed by and for micro evolutionists would always and forever remain unproductive. The only viable solution was to recalibrate their research interests to the quality of the fossil record.
07:06
(This book here "Rereading the Fossil Record" by David Sepkowski is a is just a great account of this revolution in the field, and I highly recommend it.)
07:18
In this recalibrated research programme, the main goal was to search for macroevolutionary patterns and processes. And and by adopting this perspective palaeonotologists started to make important contributions to the biological sciences by discovering things that were not predicted by microscale Darwinian theory. These include unexpected patterns and trends in biodiversity over time in space, at different taxonomic levels. Things like potential periodic cycles and fossil diversity, like this 62 million year periodic cycle. (I mean, this is this particular pattern is controversial in the field.) They discovered potentially novel evolutionary forces like species selection, right, whereby species level properties like geographic range or population structure, affects lineages. Rate of speciation and extinction patterns and rates of evolutionary change. The view from microevolution is that evolutionary change it changes is gradual over time. But the view from the fossil record is that most of that change takes place during or shortly after speciation events and not much in between. They also identified biogeography, geography factors that have shaped the history of life, such as the size and the organisation of plate tectonics, and its impact on biodiversity.
09:04
And if archaeologists are to provide a useful, novel perspective on human history and the processes that shaped it, they need to do like palaeontologists. They need to recalibrate their research programme to the quality of the archaeological record, rather than expecting the archaeological record to match up with their research interests. This is a topic of one of the chapters in my book, published in 2019, at the University of Chicago Press. And this recalibrated agenda, which I call macroarchaeology, entails a different set of research questions than the ones archaeologists are trying to ask.
09:50
These questions fall into two broad categories. So macroscale patterns and macroscale processes. Macro scale patterns include trends. Trends are, you know, they are self explanatory. Archaeologists can detect macroscale trends in the archaeological record. For instance, what would a plot of global cultural diversity over time look like? Did global cultural diversity increase linearly over time? Or did it increase exponentially? Are there periodic cycles superimposed to it?
10:26
The second category "Expected Values" refers to the description of statistical distributions in global archaeological data set. I think this may be a bit less familiar to archaeologists so so so... so I want to expand a little bit on it. So measuring expected values is nothing new. It's actually one of the... one of the fundamental goals of science. So much of science is not is not so much about testing hypotheses, as it is about measuring things like the speed of light or rate of genetic mutations or continental drift.
11:07
Archaeologists have yet to seize the opportunity of aggregating archaeological contexts from around the world to measure the expected properties of various aspects of human culture. So I think after more than, you know, more than a century, of archaeological fieldwork—conducted on all corners of the planet—it is still somehow shocking to me that archaeologists would still be hard pressed to answer even the most basic questions about human material culture. For instance, how long do stylistic traditions typically last? We may have some intuitions about this, the... our intuitions are probably not that far off. But we don't have a number, right, we don't even know we, we certainly have the data, all the data that we need to produce such a statistical estimate.
12:06
And archaeologists are very much in a unique position to accomplish this scientific tasks of measuring the expected properties of human culture. Because they can cast a very wide nest a... net sorry, they can sample from a universe that is tens of thousands of years long and tens of thousands of kilometres wide, allowing them to measure the average properties of cultural system with much greater precision and accuracy, than any ethnographers could ever achieve.
12:38
So... So what are these expected values? What are these fundamental properties that archaeologists can measure? So there are some exa... here are... some examples of some of the things that archaeologists can measure include: different aspects of, of the pace, and direction of cultural change the lifespan and range of cultural traditions. These are just some examples. But what's important to note here is that these properties are statistical signals that come into view at a hierarchical level that is well above that of the individual. Rather than focusing on individual level responses, like.. like much of normal archaeology, you know—for instance, "how do individuals typically adjust their toolkit diversity in response to raw materials scarcity"—macroarchaeology instead is interested in the population level properties that emerge out of the interactions between thousands of individuals, or thousands of generations.
13:48
So let's look an example here. So let's look at the first item on the list: The pace of... pace of change in material culture. So I measured in a previous study the pace of cultural change in the archaeological record; compared these rates to the pace of change in the fossil record. And I found that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution by a factor of about 50. So this is a study that provided other disciplines with this useful quantity that now they can incorporate in their theory they can incorporate in their models.
14:24
And at the time of writing this, preparing this presentation, at least 90% of the publications, citing this study, were from outside of archaeology.
14:38
And also know that these examples of macroscale patterns can all be measured while remaining completely agnostic about the microscale, individual-level processes that underlie them. No, we're not trying here to explain why this or that particular tradition, changed at the pace. It did. We're interested in in the pace of change in the aggregate.
15:05
So here's an example of spatial expected value. This time, this is a study by Briggs Buchanan at the University of Tulsa and his colleague. So they measured the spatial extent of point types in North America, and then compared the distribution of these, the area of these point types to the areas of the distribution of areas of cultural groups like tribes, and different levels of language groupings. And they found the point types have spatial areas that are much larger than most cultural groupings, except very high levels of language groupings like phyla. This is a study that really cast doubts on that old zombie idea, right? The idea that that just cannot be killed: that point types equate prehistory cultures.
16:02
Now the second category of questions is about microscale processes. Microscale processes are... are the large scale drivers of microscale patterns. Some examples include external drivers like... like the shape and the size and the orientation of continents and and... and its potential impact on cultural diversity or complexity. It can also include internal drivers like major transitions in in subsistence.
16:34
Archaeologists, but also social scientists in general, have shown relatively low interest in answering questions like these ones. And as a result, it's, I found it rather difficult to find good examples of these. But here's a here's a potential example.
16:54
This is the so-called Neolithic demographic transition. This is a study by Bouquet-Appel in 2011. The Neolithic demographic transition, it can be seen in a change in the age distribution among Neolithic cemeteries that happened around the world over the first 1000 years following the beginning of farming in a region. So here there's an internal driver, right the advent of farming. It can be linked to a rather weak statistical pattern that is buried in noisy archaeological data. And it is revealed by sampling from a universe assembling universe and compasses 1000s of years and multiple continents. So to me this this really examples exemplifies microarchaeology, as I see, right, there's a lot of noise and variants in the data. And you really need to zoom out of a particular site or region or even continent to detect these these macroscale processes.
18:03
So macroarchaeology is concerned with the characterization of statistical patterns, of rates of change of abundance of distribution of diversity. And secondarily, with the explanation of these patterns in terms of macroscale drivers like climate change or biogeography. So as a research programme, it demands a research strategy. So the set of methods that differ from normal archaeology and it differs from normal ar... normal archaeology in several ways.
18:41
First way is that it asks a narrow set of research questions. So macroarchaeology, like paleobiology and macroecology, intentionally sacrifices the details, so that the big picture can emerge. Right—it is about the forest not the trees. And studying the forest it means asking a narrow but deep set of questions in in in.. paleobiology and macroecology. These restricted sets of questions have blossomed into into full fledged, rich busy research programmes. So compared to normal archaeology, macroarchaeology leaves most of the research questions that have kept us archaeologists busy over the last decades, it leaves these questions on the cutting board.
19:32
In the questions that asks, macroarchaeology is very much material-culture-centric. It is not individual or behaviour or social centric, right? So its primary interest is in archaeological entities, and their distribution in time and space. It is not about social, economic, ecological ideological processes, at least not directly. So macroarchaeology is much closer to is much close very much close to what British archaeologist David Clarke described in his monograph, "Analytical Archaeology", which is centred on artefacts and the birth and growth and death of archaeological entities—or to what Steve Shannon calls "archaeology as archaeology", as opposed to Binford's "archaeology as anthropology"—you know, that the agenda that Binford argued for in "New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968". So the same year as Clarke's 1968, analytical archaeology book was published. And unfortunately, it's Binford's monograph that became much more influential on the field.
20:51
Macroarchaeology, analyses general properties—general properties that can be measured at any given point in time in space. So archaeologists were very much used to building data sets that are time specific, region specific, technology specific. So the difference between normal archaeology and macroarchaeology is analogous to, to the difference between a zoologist that, say, study bat echolocation system—so echolocation is very much a species specific trade, right—and a macro... macroecologists who analyses the geographic range of terrestrial species. Geographic range is a trade that is not species specific. Every species has a geographic range. So macroarchaeology wants to do the same by studying the general properties of archaeological entities.
21:50
And these these properties include temporal range... ranges, geographic ranges, measures of diversity, complexity, rates of change. What these variables have the advantage of is being observable directly in the archaeological record, right. Many archaeological studies have large spatial or temporal scope. And yet I do not view them as example of examples of macroarchaeology because they are concerned with with second-order data, they're primarily concerned with secondary data, second-order data. They use—much like the rest of normal archaeology—archaeological entities, as mere proxies for for whatever variable truly interests them, like social or economic variables. And it's the second order variables that have that become the research, primary variable of interest. The problem is that these social or cultural economics measurements are all based ultimately, on unverified and unverifiable inferences. By focusing exclusively on archaeological entities and their their properties, macroarchaeology largely avoids this problem.
23:14
The macro ar... macro archaeology, it refers first and foremost to its scope, to the size of the sampling universe of the data it needs to analyse. So archaeologists rarely work with data that is large, both temporally and spatially. So for instance, a study may involve the occupational history of a cave... of a cave site, that is, that is over 6000 years, you may call this macro archaeology. It is a long temporal scope indeed, but it is combined to a very, very narrow spatial scope. So why is that a problem? It's a problem because then noise and sampling errors are likely to dominate your data, even though you have a long temporal scope. Whatever temporal trend you observe or or lack of trend that you observe risks being a false one.
24:12
To unravel macroscale patterns and processes, you most likely need a wide temporal and a wide temporal spatial scope. And the typical spatial and temporal scope of most archaeological studies and sequences is rather small. And I know this because I this is something I measured. So I measured the the scope of hundreds of archaeological studies in in the flagship journals of the discipline over a whole decade, and I found that the vast majority of them are shorter than 5000 years. The median scope is is two thousand five hundre... four hundred years. And this is combined to a spatial scope that is typically restricted to a single site, or a small region, or a single physiographic province. At these kind of temporal and spatial scale, the effect of any macroscale phenomenon I think would be largely undetectable or very difficult to detect. It would be drowned by the noise of microscale processes and historical contingencies and, and distortion of archaeological data.
25:26
So by embracing macro archaeology, archaeologists would be doing the very opposite thing of what they've been trying to do for years, which is to move as far away as possible from an ethnographic scale of analysis. A model for what we need here is the paleobiology database. The paleobiology database is this huge online data set. It catalogues every fossil occurrences across all geological time for the whole tree of life. It is nowadays the standard tool to answer questions about diversity, the diversity of life through time and space.
26:10
We need a database like this for archaeology. The study of macroscale patterns and processes is very much uncharted territory. It is a big blank on our map. Macroarchaeology demands that we enter this new this alien inte... intellectual landscape where the familiar landmarks and signposts are missing. There are no maps, no compasses really to guide us in all the current theories and in the social sciences, have very little to say about what long term trends could exist in the global record of human material culture, or what macroscale drivers may have shaped the history—the course of human history.
27:01
So archaeology needs pioneers. We need young men and young woman to explore this brave new world to work out the map, find out what macroscale phenomenon has been waiting, hidden in the vast trove of data that we've produced over the years waiting to be discovered, and report back to us on the novel and and potentially theory challenging discoveries that they will make. So on that note, I'm looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks. Thank you very much.
Hi, thank you for inviting me to this this really great speaker series. I'm very grateful to be part of it. My name is Charles Perreault. I'm an associate professor at Arizona State University in the United States. I'm a trained archaeologist, and I've spent the last few years thinking hard about, about the state of my field, and how archaeology can make useful contributions to the study of human origins, culture and behaviour. Y'know beyond the task of reconstructing cultural history. And I was invited here to speak about the methodological and theoretical recommendations that I made in my recent book.
00:44
I like this quote from Palaeolithic archaeologist Jeff Bailey, who once observed that "Archaeology is reduced to an appendix, at best entertaining, at worst dispensable, of ecology or sociology or whichever study of contemporary behaviour that happens to be in current fashion." His comment is fairly harsh, but I think it's it's still very much accurate more than 35 years later. It is still today. Archaeologists tend to interpret their data in terms of processes borrowed from other disciplines that study human behaviour over timescales that are much much shorter than that of the archaeological record.
01:30
So for various reasons, historical, cultural, psychological, archaeologists tend to view themselves as ethnographers of the past. And that has led to a research programme that is, that is hopelessly flawed. Archaeology as ethnography of the past, tries to translate this heavily fragmented, incomplete, mixed, distorted record, into a series of ethnographic vignettes that a cultural anthropologist would recognise. And just like with ethnography, studies of the primary interests lie in individuals. And... and the microscale processes most... most of which are not are not direct, and are not directly observable, in the archaeological record, but have to be inferred using archaeological data as indirect proxies.
02:24
So when doing this type of archaeology, archaeologists use what I call the test of consistency, right? They... they accept, or they reject a hypothesis, using the test of consistency. So in practice, what that means is that archaeologists accept some interpretation of archaeological data that they came up with—mostly on the basis that this interpretation can be made somehow consistent with their data.
02:53
The problem with this with the test of consistency is that there's such a large gap between the nature and quality of archaeological data, and the scale over which these individual level processes operate, that there are many, many equally consistent ways to interpret the exact same data very often. And these alternative, competing hypotheses are rarely considered in the research process.
03:23
The test of consistencies is a very weak epistemological criterion. It doesn't shield us from confirmatory bias, it makes interpretations and hypotheses—especially the verbal ones—too easy to confirm. And it just opens the door wide to... to false positive and false negative results. So archaeologists today have produced a flow of information about the human past. That is, that is that is impressive in quantity, but it is, for the most part, completely unverifiable. So like the proverbial frog in the pot, we have gotten used to the state of affairs.
04:09
But it explains at least in part, why archaeological interpretations are so rarely cited by scientists outside of archaeology. Scientists outside of archaeology, they may cite, for instance, our date for the earliest occupation of Australia, but they will certainly not cite our interpretation of Acheulian bifaces as costly signals, right. And what I want to argue here is that by emphasising archaeology as ethnography of the past—by emphasising microscale processes—archaeologists are not merely misusing archaeological data, they're, they're under using it. They're missing. They're missing out.
04:53
We have yet to take full advantage of the archaeological record and it's contributed potential to the social sciences. The proper research programme for archaeology is one in which the processes that we study operate over time scales and spatial scales that match the scale of archaeological data.
05:18
Palaeontology, paleobiology has dealt with a very similar situation. So until the 1970s, palaeontologist had been trying to make sense of the fossil record in terms of the microscale theory developed by biologists to work in labs. So a theory that emphasised changes in gene frequency. And since paleo... palaeontologists cannot recover direct evidence of genetic transmission, palaeontologists largely made themselves unneeded by the field of evolutionary biology. And that's because population geneticists do not need paleobiology or palaeontology to confirm the existence of a process like like, like the founder effect.
06:07
And that is why, as John Maynard Smith, put it, puts it: the attitude of population geneticist to any palaeontologists rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell them to.. "to not bother the grownups and just go find another fossil."
06:30
But during the 70s, a small group of renegade palaeontologists began to look at the fossil record as... as a record of macro evolution instead of as a record of micro evolution. They recognised that expecting the fossil record to measure up to a programmatic agenda designed by and for micro evolutionists would always and forever remain unproductive. The only viable solution was to recalibrate their research interests to the quality of the fossil record.
07:06
(This book here "Rereading the Fossil Record" by David Sepkowski is a is just a great account of this revolution in the field, and I highly recommend it.)
07:18
In this recalibrated research programme, the main goal was to search for macroevolutionary patterns and processes. And and by adopting this perspective palaeonotologists started to make important contributions to the biological sciences by discovering things that were not predicted by microscale Darwinian theory. These include unexpected patterns and trends in biodiversity over time in space, at different taxonomic levels. Things like potential periodic cycles and fossil diversity, like this 62 million year periodic cycle. (I mean, this is this particular pattern is controversial in the field.) They discovered potentially novel evolutionary forces like species selection, right, whereby species level properties like geographic range or population structure, affects lineages. Rate of speciation and extinction patterns and rates of evolutionary change. The view from microevolution is that evolutionary change it changes is gradual over time. But the view from the fossil record is that most of that change takes place during or shortly after speciation events and not much in between. They also identified biogeography, geography factors that have shaped the history of life, such as the size and the organisation of plate tectonics, and its impact on biodiversity.
09:04
And if archaeologists are to provide a useful, novel perspective on human history and the processes that shaped it, they need to do like palaeontologists. They need to recalibrate their research programme to the quality of the archaeological record, rather than expecting the archaeological record to match up with their research interests. This is a topic of one of the chapters in my book, published in 2019, at the University of Chicago Press. And this recalibrated agenda, which I call macroarchaeology, entails a different set of research questions than the ones archaeologists are trying to ask.
09:50
These questions fall into two broad categories. So macroscale patterns and macroscale processes. Macro scale patterns include trends. Trends are, you know, they are self explanatory. Archaeologists can detect macroscale trends in the archaeological record. For instance, what would a plot of global cultural diversity over time look like? Did global cultural diversity increase linearly over time? Or did it increase exponentially? Are there periodic cycles superimposed to it?
10:26
The second category "Expected Values" refers to the description of statistical distributions in global archaeological data set. I think this may be a bit less familiar to archaeologists so so so... so I want to expand a little bit on it. So measuring expected values is nothing new. It's actually one of the... one of the fundamental goals of science. So much of science is not is not so much about testing hypotheses, as it is about measuring things like the speed of light or rate of genetic mutations or continental drift.
11:07
Archaeologists have yet to seize the opportunity of aggregating archaeological contexts from around the world to measure the expected properties of various aspects of human culture. So I think after more than, you know, more than a century, of archaeological fieldwork—conducted on all corners of the planet—it is still somehow shocking to me that archaeologists would still be hard pressed to answer even the most basic questions about human material culture. For instance, how long do stylistic traditions typically last? We may have some intuitions about this, the... our intuitions are probably not that far off. But we don't have a number, right, we don't even know we, we certainly have the data, all the data that we need to produce such a statistical estimate.
12:06
And archaeologists are very much in a unique position to accomplish this scientific tasks of measuring the expected properties of human culture. Because they can cast a very wide nest a... net sorry, they can sample from a universe that is tens of thousands of years long and tens of thousands of kilometres wide, allowing them to measure the average properties of cultural system with much greater precision and accuracy, than any ethnographers could ever achieve.
12:38
So... So what are these expected values? What are these fundamental properties that archaeologists can measure? So there are some exa... here are... some examples of some of the things that archaeologists can measure include: different aspects of, of the pace, and direction of cultural change the lifespan and range of cultural traditions. These are just some examples. But what's important to note here is that these properties are statistical signals that come into view at a hierarchical level that is well above that of the individual. Rather than focusing on individual level responses, like.. like much of normal archaeology, you know—for instance, "how do individuals typically adjust their toolkit diversity in response to raw materials scarcity"—macroarchaeology instead is interested in the population level properties that emerge out of the interactions between thousands of individuals, or thousands of generations.
13:48
So let's look an example here. So let's look at the first item on the list: The pace of... pace of change in material culture. So I measured in a previous study the pace of cultural change in the archaeological record; compared these rates to the pace of change in the fossil record. And I found that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution by a factor of about 50. So this is a study that provided other disciplines with this useful quantity that now they can incorporate in their theory they can incorporate in their models.
14:24
And at the time of writing this, preparing this presentation, at least 90% of the publications, citing this study, were from outside of archaeology.
14:38
And also know that these examples of macroscale patterns can all be measured while remaining completely agnostic about the microscale, individual-level processes that underlie them. No, we're not trying here to explain why this or that particular tradition, changed at the pace. It did. We're interested in in the pace of change in the aggregate.
15:05
So here's an example of spatial expected value. This time, this is a study by Briggs Buchanan at the University of Tulsa and his colleague. So they measured the spatial extent of point types in North America, and then compared the distribution of these, the area of these point types to the areas of the distribution of areas of cultural groups like tribes, and different levels of language groupings. And they found the point types have spatial areas that are much larger than most cultural groupings, except very high levels of language groupings like phyla. This is a study that really cast doubts on that old zombie idea, right? The idea that that just cannot be killed: that point types equate prehistory cultures.
16:02
Now the second category of questions is about microscale processes. Microscale processes are... are the large scale drivers of microscale patterns. Some examples include external drivers like... like the shape and the size and the orientation of continents and and... and its potential impact on cultural diversity or complexity. It can also include internal drivers like major transitions in in subsistence.
16:34
Archaeologists, but also social scientists in general, have shown relatively low interest in answering questions like these ones. And as a result, it's, I found it rather difficult to find good examples of these. But here's a here's a potential example.
16:54
This is the so-called Neolithic demographic transition. This is a study by Bouquet-Appel in 2011. The Neolithic demographic transition, it can be seen in a change in the age distribution among Neolithic cemeteries that happened around the world over the first 1000 years following the beginning of farming in a region. So here there's an internal driver, right the advent of farming. It can be linked to a rather weak statistical pattern that is buried in noisy archaeological data. And it is revealed by sampling from a universe assembling universe and compasses 1000s of years and multiple continents. So to me this this really examples exemplifies microarchaeology, as I see, right, there's a lot of noise and variants in the data. And you really need to zoom out of a particular site or region or even continent to detect these these macroscale processes.
18:03
So macroarchaeology is concerned with the characterization of statistical patterns, of rates of change of abundance of distribution of diversity. And secondarily, with the explanation of these patterns in terms of macroscale drivers like climate change or biogeography. So as a research programme, it demands a research strategy. So the set of methods that differ from normal archaeology and it differs from normal ar... normal archaeology in several ways.
18:41
First way is that it asks a narrow set of research questions. So macroarchaeology, like paleobiology and macroecology, intentionally sacrifices the details, so that the big picture can emerge. Right—it is about the forest not the trees. And studying the forest it means asking a narrow but deep set of questions in in in.. paleobiology and macroecology. These restricted sets of questions have blossomed into into full fledged, rich busy research programmes. So compared to normal archaeology, macroarchaeology leaves most of the research questions that have kept us archaeologists busy over the last decades, it leaves these questions on the cutting board.
19:32
In the questions that asks, macroarchaeology is very much material-culture-centric. It is not individual or behaviour or social centric, right? So its primary interest is in archaeological entities, and their distribution in time and space. It is not about social, economic, ecological ideological processes, at least not directly. So macroarchaeology is much closer to is much close very much close to what British archaeologist David Clarke described in his monograph, "Analytical Archaeology", which is centred on artefacts and the birth and growth and death of archaeological entities—or to what Steve Shannon calls "archaeology as archaeology", as opposed to Binford's "archaeology as anthropology"—you know, that the agenda that Binford argued for in "New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968". So the same year as Clarke's 1968, analytical archaeology book was published. And unfortunately, it's Binford's monograph that became much more influential on the field.
20:51
Macroarchaeology, analyses general properties—general properties that can be measured at any given point in time in space. So archaeologists were very much used to building data sets that are time specific, region specific, technology specific. So the difference between normal archaeology and macroarchaeology is analogous to, to the difference between a zoologist that, say, study bat echolocation system—so echolocation is very much a species specific trade, right—and a macro... macroecologists who analyses the geographic range of terrestrial species. Geographic range is a trade that is not species specific. Every species has a geographic range. So macroarchaeology wants to do the same by studying the general properties of archaeological entities.
21:50
And these these properties include temporal range... ranges, geographic ranges, measures of diversity, complexity, rates of change. What these variables have the advantage of is being observable directly in the archaeological record, right. Many archaeological studies have large spatial or temporal scope. And yet I do not view them as example of examples of macroarchaeology because they are concerned with with second-order data, they're primarily concerned with secondary data, second-order data. They use—much like the rest of normal archaeology—archaeological entities, as mere proxies for for whatever variable truly interests them, like social or economic variables. And it's the second order variables that have that become the research, primary variable of interest. The problem is that these social or cultural economics measurements are all based ultimately, on unverified and unverifiable inferences. By focusing exclusively on archaeological entities and their their properties, macroarchaeology largely avoids this problem.
23:14
The macro ar... macro archaeology, it refers first and foremost to its scope, to the size of the sampling universe of the data it needs to analyse. So archaeologists rarely work with data that is large, both temporally and spatially. So for instance, a study may involve the occupational history of a cave... of a cave site, that is, that is over 6000 years, you may call this macro archaeology. It is a long temporal scope indeed, but it is combined to a very, very narrow spatial scope. So why is that a problem? It's a problem because then noise and sampling errors are likely to dominate your data, even though you have a long temporal scope. Whatever temporal trend you observe or or lack of trend that you observe risks being a false one.
24:12
To unravel macroscale patterns and processes, you most likely need a wide temporal and a wide temporal spatial scope. And the typical spatial and temporal scope of most archaeological studies and sequences is rather small. And I know this because I this is something I measured. So I measured the the scope of hundreds of archaeological studies in in the flagship journals of the discipline over a whole decade, and I found that the vast majority of them are shorter than 5000 years. The median scope is is two thousand five hundre... four hundred years. And this is combined to a spatial scope that is typically restricted to a single site, or a small region, or a single physiographic province. At these kind of temporal and spatial scale, the effect of any macroscale phenomenon I think would be largely undetectable or very difficult to detect. It would be drowned by the noise of microscale processes and historical contingencies and, and distortion of archaeological data.
25:26
So by embracing macro archaeology, archaeologists would be doing the very opposite thing of what they've been trying to do for years, which is to move as far away as possible from an ethnographic scale of analysis. A model for what we need here is the paleobiology database. The paleobiology database is this huge online data set. It catalogues every fossil occurrences across all geological time for the whole tree of life. It is nowadays the standard tool to answer questions about diversity, the diversity of life through time and space.
26:10
We need a database like this for archaeology. The study of macroscale patterns and processes is very much uncharted territory. It is a big blank on our map. Macroarchaeology demands that we enter this new this alien inte... intellectual landscape where the familiar landmarks and signposts are missing. There are no maps, no compasses really to guide us in all the current theories and in the social sciences, have very little to say about what long term trends could exist in the global record of human material culture, or what macroscale drivers may have shaped the history—the course of human history.
27:01
So archaeology needs pioneers. We need young men and young woman to explore this brave new world to work out the map, find out what macroscale phenomenon has been waiting, hidden in the vast trove of data that we've produced over the years waiting to be discovered, and report back to us on the novel and and potentially theory challenging discoveries that they will make. So on that note, I'm looking forward to our discussion in a few weeks. Thank you very much.