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Inference in ArchaeologyAuthor(s): Richard A. WatsonSource: American Antiquity, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 1976), pp. 58-66Published by: Society for American ArchaeologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/279041 .Accessed: 24/02/2011 07:13

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INFERENCE IN ARCHAEOLOGY

RICHARD A. WATSON

The science of archaeology is based on a multi-leveled interdisciplinary system of descriptions, laws, and explanations. Archaeologists try to provide systemic descriptions and to confirm hypotheses about past social structures on the assumption that they are represented by selected parts of extant material remains. Inferences are about and based on processes and relations among social structure, material culture, and its unaltered, altered, and selected remains. Archaeological inference depends on principles of cultural behavior, the accumulation and alteration of material, and archaeologists' methods. These physico-chemical, geological, biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and methodological principles derive from the present behavior of men and material.

ARCHAEOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

ARCHAEOLOGY IS in large part characterized as a science by (1) its logical relations to physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology; (2) the status of prediction in archaeological reasoning; and (3) the ability to originate new laws of human and social change. In this section, I conclude that, generally, archaeology depends on other sciences even though it is an independent science, that there is prediction as well as well as explanation in archaeological reasoning, and that archaeological data are necessary for the origination, testing, and confirmation of generalizations about long-term evolutionary change in human societies. The uniqueness of archaeology is that it is evolutionary anthropology. Most self-consciously scientific archaeologists today are evolutionists.

(1) What Are the Logical Relations Among Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Archaeology?

Descripns, laws, and explanations, laws, and explanations given in other sciences are used to establish archaeological descriptions, laws, and explanations. One usually assumes the adequacy of basal sciences in order to make inferences in any other science. For example, the use of established facts and principles in a specific science such as geology to make inferences in another science, e.g., botany, to establish facts and principles that are used to make inferences in a further science, and so on, ultimately to establish facts and principles that are used to make inferences in archaeology itself, exhibits a very complex structure of inference. Fritz (1970) has begun to analyze these systemic relations for the social sciences. There is a continuity of method among the sciences, but there is a logical break between confirmation in any basal science and another science that depends on it. That is, in ordinary circumstances, one does not challenge or test conclusions in the basal sciences on which inferences in another science are made. However, one might challenge or test the conclusions of the basal science with the further inferences, and this feedback complicates the systemic structure; generalizations in a basal science can be affected by findings in a science that depends on it.

One example of the complex structure of inference in archaeology is as follows. One begins with common sense assumptions of "general logic" and "general knowledge," e.g.,

What is found on the bottom of the pile fell first. This informal lawlike generalization is tested and confirmed implicitly in general experience, and is used implicitly and explicitly to explain and to predict sequences of events that have resulted in and will result in the regular configurations of piles of debris. This truism is formalized in geology as the law: Superposition of sediments indicates succession of deposition. This law begins as an hypothesis, a lawlike generalization, which is tested against accepted factual data. A large body of information about sediments, tectonics, and other physical matters allows one, for example, to recognize contorted and overturned sediments, so that predictions and explanations are reliable in many tests. In this way the hypothesis is confirmed as a law. This law is then used to help to confirm the hypothesis in botany: Wild grains are ancestors of domesticated varieties. That is, part of the evidence for this

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conclusion is that in certain ancient piles of debris (e.g., the archaeological site of g(ayonu in eastern Turkey), wild grains are found below and grading up into domesticated grains in the upper parts of the mound. Of course botanical laws and data are used to confirm this hypothesis, as well, but the stratigraphic relationships among the plant debris are strong confirmatory evidence. And although the geological law is accepted as a basis for testing the botanical hypothesis, the discovery that wild grains do occur in the stratigraphic sequence below the domesticated grains also goes some way toward confirming the law of superposition to the extent that this disposition is to be expected (and so is predicted) on the basis of independent botanical evidence that wild grains temporally precede domesticated grains.

If one were quite convinced that wild grains come before domesticated grains in time, but found that the wild ones are not on the bottom of the pile, ordinarily rather than question the law of superposition, one would look for some explanation of why they are not on the bottom. This is because, again, the law of superposition is taken as already confirmed. Suppose that all other items in the pile are in a sequence such that what fell first is on the bottom, and only the grains seem to be out of order. Given that both the law of superposition and the law of superposition and the botanical hypothesis about wild grains coming before domestic were well-confirmed, one would probably hypothesize that in this place wild grains were gathered on occaion after domestic grains wereathered on occasion after domestic grains were introduced. One might, however, use the data to cast doubt either on the geological law or on the botanical hypothesis.

Thus, although there is an assumed logical break between the sciences here-with geological laws being accepted and used ratther than tested in botany or archaeology-sometimes testing and confirmation do crosscut the sciences. Such crosscuttings are often very important sources of relatively independent tests and confirmations of hypotheses. Crosscutting is quite apparent with respect to the hypotheses below in the example being described and analyzed here.

In the sequence of basal sciences underlying archaeology, the next step beyond geology and botany in the example is to consider an assumption of psychology: Human beings have a level of intelligence high enough for them to learn to dlearn to domesticate plants. This assumption is supported by biological data in the form of human bones and other human remains associated in the mound with the grain sequence showing a change from wild to domesticated varieties. Thus, geological, botanical, and biological (that is, animal remains are often found in association with remains of the food the animals ate) evidence helps to confirm a psychological surmise, while they and the independently established psychological fact are used to explain the occurrence of the succession of grains in the (ayonfl pile of debris.

The next step is a suggestion of sociology or anthropology: Social complexity of village level is associated with the domestication of grain. This relationship is recognized in part by discovering in the debris of the mound, or at other places, that the remains of encampments of less complexity than villages are not usually associated with domesticated grains, while the remains of villages often are. This is an example of a principle that is confirmed through a considerable amount of crosscutting observation and tests by anthropologists studying contemporary societies in conjunction with archaeologists studying ancient societies. Much further data are required to answer the further question of whether villages or the domestication of grain came first, or whether they developed concurrently.

The final claim in this example, thus, is one of evolutionary anthropology or archaeology: Villages appeared in the Near East before the domestication of grain. The evidence for this, crosscutting through the sciences to groundlevel commonsense terms, is that there are piles of debris-2like the (ayonu mound-in which the remains of villages are found on the bottom associated with wild grain, while in the same pile in graded sequence, the remains of later villages near the top are found in association with domesticated grain.

In summary, this example or partial model (all models are partial, but in this one in particular many assumptions of and links between many sciences are obviously left out) of inference in archaeology looks like this:

Evolutionary anthropology or archaeology: Villages appeared in the Near East before the domestication of grain.

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Sociology or anthropology: Social complexity of village level is associated with the domestication of grain.

Psychology: Human beings have a level of intelligence high enough for them to learn to domesticate plants.

Botany: Wild grains are ancestors of domesticated varieties. Geology: Superposition of sediments indicates succession of deposition. Common sense: What is found on the bottom of the pile fell first.

In the vertical sequence, what is tested and confirmed within any one science (horizontally) is taken as law or fact in the testing and confirmation of the statements above it. Thus, there is a kind of logical break in the system, in that the laws and facts of a science taken to be basal are not challenged, but are used, by other sciences. However, as indicated above, the break is more apparent than real in the last analysis, because discoveries on any level or in any science can be used to suggest, testo suggest, test, confirm, reject, and alter hypon any other level. In the present example, evolutionary anthropology or archaeology is schematically shown at the apex of all the other sciences. This is justified on the ground that the ascending order of sciences here is based on the degree of complexity of the entinttis and events being investigated; the complexity of thinking human beings organized in societies evolving through time is the most complex object of study in the known universe.

(2) Is There Prediction as Well as Explanation in Archaeology? A positive answer is assumed or implied below, in part because there is formal or logical parity

between explanation and prediction in all sciences. Scriven (1959a, 1959b, 1963) denies this, but Hempel's (1963, 1965) arguments for parity seem conclusive (cf. R. A. Watson 1966, 1969). Of more practical importance thast is on the formal issue, it is obvious-as shown in the next two sections-that predictions are used in archaeological practice because they are used in other sciences on which archaeology depends.

(3) Can Archaeologists Actually Originate New Laws of Human and Social Change? That is, are there any lawlike generalizations of the form, "In circumstances C, if A, then B,"

that can be specifically or uniquely originated, tested, and confirmed in archaeology? Almost all generalizations utilized in archaeology that do not involve extensive, diachronic, or

evolutionary change over time are originated in the basal sciences. This is in part because the very taking of archaeological data as remains of the past depends on the system of underlying laws, inferences, and factual data. Thu, a while it may be logically possible to derive hypotheses from the archaeologist hypotheses in archaeological practice are applications of generalizations from other sciences. In particular, archaeological hypotheses are generated from the conjunction of the principles of evolutionary biology with those of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. However, when the cultural development of man in the distant past is in question, archaeological data must be used to originate, to test, and to confirm hypotheses. This question is taken up in detail later.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeology is thus seen to be an eclectic, interdisciplinary science. In this section, I discuss some theoretical implications of archaeology based on the model described above; in the next

section, I consider some of the details of actual inference in archaeology. Archaeologists' main goals are to describe, explain, and test generalizations about the cultural

behavior that resulted in the remains of past human societies. Traditionally, archaeological data have been described and explained with reference to two bodies of lawlike generalizations. First, there are those psychological and sociological laws or generalizations concerning human behavior derived from history or observation of contemporary societies; these principles form the explicit or implicit base of description and explanation for any historian. Second, there is the general body of physico-chemical and biological laws.

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Of great importance among the second set are general geologic laws that explain environmental, geographic, or climatic changes that in turn are used to explain cultural changes. Geologic laws and events are often appealed to so generally, however, and on such little evidence, that for some time now archaeologists have discounted them. Grand geographic speculations have crumbled under the deluge of detailed geologic data. Gross geographic or climatologic determinism is not acceptable in the explanation of intricate human affairs, it is said, also because some early attempts to explain the ways of man in a full environmental context put too much stress on the physical environment's control of man, and too little on man's ability to control the environment. So, also, have grand social speculations about the peoples of the past often been seen to be fictions in the light of the explosion of psychological and sociological data, particularly in ethnology, that have been gathered and analyzed since the end of World War II.

Thus, the older generalizations almost all archaeologists have used to describe and to explain the behavior and events that resulted in archaeological debris, and consequently to provide intellectual reconstructions of past human societies, have been in large part exposed as too general, too simplistic, sometimes false, and very often not supported by actual archaeological evidence. At the same time, the new data that are continually being collected about the paleoenvironments of ancient man, e.g., Wright (1968), force us to reconsider the intricate, systemic effects of geology or geography or climate-generally conceived-in the affairs of man. Likewise, although the traditional general sociological explanations of the events that resulted in the debris of the past-as the effluvia of invasions, migrations, plague, religious ectasy, and so on-are widely questioned, new details in the social sciences (cf. Lenski 1966) demand careful consideration. After an initial reaction against environmental and sociological hypotheses, archaeologists now see that the new data and analyses provide grounds for demonstrating the existence of extensive systemic relations between man and his physical and cultural environments. While the old, broad generalizations may be false or trivial if taken literally, the new explanations show man interacting on all levels in complex ecological systems (Watson and Watson 1969).

One result of the systems and evolutionary approaches is that while in the past archaeologists usually regarded themselves as historians of some sort of humanistic, nonscientific bent, most archaeologists today view themselves as scientific historians. Their goals are now to describe, to explain, and to derive laws from the material debris of past societies not simply on the basis of commonsense truisms, but by using all the principles, data, and techniques of any science that seems pertinent.

For the descriptions, systems theory is most useful. The interdependence of factors and the functional interrelations of ancient societies in the total environment as derived from archaeological and other data can be organized in systemic ways that provide intricate understandings of the workings of culture. Most me ntal approaches in archaeology, and all ecological models of particular areas, are systems models. A systemic description can itself be an explanation of an environmental situation. Systems also always incorporate laws or lawlike generalizations that are the ground for explanation (and prediction) of particular aspects that are subsumed under them.

The most significant result of the new awareness of archaeology as a science in which well-founded descriptions, explanations, and laws are the only legitimate results, is the explicit attempt to base the methodology of archaeological excavation and interpretation on the general covering-law model of science (cf. Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971; R. A. Watson 1972). In most general terms, this covering-law model states simply that explanation and prediction depend on relating descriptions of particular events to lawlike generalizations which "cover" them in the sense of providing confirmed ground for their explanation and prediction. The most extreme claims are that new laws of human behavior (or at least of human behavior in the past) can be derived from careful analysis of the archaeological record (Binford 1962; Fritz and Plog 1970). Less grand, but almost all-pervasive, is at least the putative allegiance to the view that one should generate hypotheses (based on established laws of human and environmental behavior) that can be tested by excavation and analysis of the archaeological record. In effect, one predicts that if a certain explanation of the past is true, then such-and-such will be found in the archaeological

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record now. In an ideal situation, other possible explanations are ruled out by the discovery of critical evidence that shows one hypothesis to be the most probable (which means the most psychologically acceptable, or the simplest, or the most comprehensive, etc.) of hypotheses that might equivalently account for the archaeological record being the way it is. Thus, to establish one's explanation, one must predict things about the archaeological record based on already accepted facts and confirmed laws-from both archaeology and other sciences-and then find that these predictions are themselves fulfilled on examination of the record.

A similar procedure of prediction and test is required to establish any proposed systemic description of the past. There is thus an overlap of observation and test involved in establishing systemic descriptions and simple covering-law explanations. In fact, any system can be rewritten formally as a law, and all systems are composed of laws. Despite this, a totally vacuous dispute has arisen over whether the purpose of archaeology is to derive laws or to describe systems, and over whether archaeological explanations are lawlike r systemic. The facts are that archaeologists can and do derive and test laws of evolutionary anthropology, that such laws are necessary (but not sufficient) for archaeological explanations, and that they are a necessary part of systemic descriptions. This is why in practice the explanations of so-called systems archaeologists generally merge with those of so-called nomothetic archaeologists. The purpose of archaeology obviously includes several interdependent tasks and goals. Thus, disputes about goals are often based on misunderstandings, or are perpetrated by singularly single-minded persons. Whether an archae- ologist works primarily to derive and to test laws, to provide explanations based on already confirmed laws, or to give systemic descriptions, is surely a matter of individual interest, ability, and choice. No one of these interrelated tasks and goals can be championed legitimately as the purpose (or even as an independent part) of archaeology.

It should be noted that archaeologists who do propose laws of cultural evolution or new laws of human behavior assume-as do other scientists-that the past was like the present, and that although combinations and rates may have been different then from what they are now, the basic behavioral characteristics of men and material were not different then from what they are now. This may in fact be wrong. But if human nature and the environment were radically different in the past from wlat they are now, we assume that there has been lawlike change from the past to the present that can be derived and understood from its physical remains. This general uniformitarianism is the primary procedural or methodological assumption of archaeology, as it is of all other sciences.

INFERENCE IN ARCHAEOLOGY

With this model of scientific archaeology in mind, how would one describe what archaeologists actually do? To answer this question, one must consider what archaeologists have to work with. Materially, they have the physical remains of living and work sites and other places where people spent time in the past. The first step in archaeology is to locate, identify, and accept these places as sites of former human activity. It is seldom pointed out that this initial step itself involves a

large number of assumptions, hypotheses, inferences, explanations, tests, and confirmed laws about past human behavior and its material results. That is, the entire web of inference that is unravelled in the present logical exercise is already implicit in the seemingly simple act of

recognizing a mound, for example, as the remains of an ancient village. And it should be remembered that some, at least, of the inferences implicit in this recognition were painfully worked out by the first modern archaeologists. Certainly it took independent thought and then

great efforts of persuasion to "recognize" and to get others to recognize that hand axes and many other stone tools are the handicraft of ancient man (cf. Daniel 1963).

It is first assumed that the debris is in part the remains of material modified by the activities of man. I call the working out of all that is implied in this assumption a logical exercise, but it is more than that. It is a demonstration that archaeology is the kind of science that we are finding it to be, eclectic and interdisciplinary, and as much concerned with prediction as with explanation and

description. If we assume that a mound is an abandoned village site, we depend on such

generalizations as that men in the past lived in villages, that they made houses of mud and stone,

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that they stayed at the same village site for long periods of time, and so on. We also assume that mud and stone have certain physical characteristics so that under certain climatic influences they deteriorate or are preserved in certain ways. We expect so-called perishable materials to perish, and the more durable ones to remain. If a river cuts through the site, we expect some of it to be washed away; if there is extensive groundwater flow, we expect leaching; and so on. That is, in the mere casual recognition of a place as an archaeological site, we assume the operation of a vast range of laws of human and material behavior.

Given this general beginning, we must generate specific archaeological hypotheses. Here, again, we take a wide range of previous generalizations for granted. We usually know something about the archaeology of the region in which the site is located. We place it generally in an archaeological context, so that our first hypotheses about what we will find are based on this general knowledge. These generalizations are about both human behavior and environmental influences. Again, it is not simply that we assume these generalizations; they have been carefully confirmed in the investigations of other sites in the area. The point is that we do have these generalizations in mind, and that they do stand as background for our proceeding, even when we do not work them out ourselves, or do not explicitly refer to them or think of them, and do not test them. When we talk about the site in a certain context, all these generalizations and data are what make this talk sensible. This procedure is very general and informal, and is not yet at an explicitly scientific stage in which a covering-law methodology is self-consciously used. Yet, for all its informality, it is a scientific procedure logically like the more rigorous methods now being developed and applied.

A self-consciously scientific attitude does not even arise, often, during the detail of actual excavation. Yet, here, too, a considerable number of laws about sedimentation, deterioration, preservation, alteration, transportation, and so on of materials are implicitly and explicitly acknowledged. These, also, were once carefully formulated, tested, and confirmed. Now they are part of the operational principles of the archaeologist, but he makes explicit reference to them only when something seems out of order. Actually, the idiosyncratic occurs often enough that even self-proclaimed nonscientific humanistic archaeologists must utilize something of the expertise of geologists to recognize and to record stratigraphic relations while they excavate. Did a stream cover the site for awhile? Could this later material have been transported to lower levels by the burrowing of animals? Where did this unusual type of stone come from? These are questions of the sort that any archaeologist needs geological knowledge to answer. He proceeds by predicting that if one explanation is correct, he should find this, but that if another explanation is correct, he should find that, and then he looks to see what is to be found. It is probably on this level of the problems resulting from the actual deposition, deterioration, transportation, and preservation of materials that most archaeologists first begin to utilize carefully and specifically the general covering-law method of science. Here we are not yet involved with the grand syntheses of archaeology; we are not yet saying just what these ancient people were doing or what their social life was like; we are merely trying to work out what the material looked like prior to its deposition, deterioration, alteration, transportation, etc. It is obvious, once it is spelled out, that we do this with reference to the general laws of many physical and biological sciences. What is of importance to the logical point I am making is that there is a considerable amount of prediction and testing of hypotheses on this level, as well as explanation and description. This infrastructure of prediction and explanation is subsidiary to, but basic to the explanations for which archaeologists are usually credited. Without this underpinning, statements about the ways of life of ancient peoples are speculations, perhaps based on reasonable notions, but unsupported by rigorous scientific comprehension of the actual remains of the past.

To determine what the original material was like given the debris that remains, one does not depend entirely on physical and biological laws. One must consider also the principles of selection utilized by the people who handled the material in the past, and those utilized by the archaeologists digging up the material today. What did ancient people discard on the spot? What did they carry away? What did later people pick up for their own use? These questions are as important and as demanding of answers as are those about mechanical agencies. To give scientifically based answers, we must appeal to general laws of psychology, sociology, and

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anthropology. Similar questions apply to the behavior of the archaeologist. What does he pick up? What does he discard? What are his principles of selection? Questions like these must be answered if one is to give objective evaluations of the archaeologist's results. Archaeologists famous for picking up potsherds and only potsherds, for example, are not in the scientific archaeologists' hall of fame. No precise delineation of the procedures and principles of selection may be possible, but they are operative both for the ancient peoples and for the archaeologists, and what they are makes a difference to the content and value of the ultimate stories that archaeologists tell.

Questions about the physical characteristics of a site, and about the approach of the archaeologist, are secondary and sometimes not very exciting. Yet, a great part of the web of archaeological inference is secured by connections on these levels, inferences that often are not consciously recognized, and that are very seldom seldom spelled out in detail. When an archaeologist says that a village was part of a larger social structure, that it was satellite to a large city, that certain trading relations pertained, and that different classes of people lived in the village and in the city and interacted in this and that way, supposedly all on the evidence of materials dug up from the ground, his inferences are actually based on all the sorts of sciences and generalizations mentioned above. He does not see the social structure in a few potsherds, stone tools, architectural remains, and the evidences of the physical environment, the climate, plants and animals, etc. He infers social structure from this data in conjunction with the vast set of generalizations he has at hand about how men and the e me nt behave and interact. He makes hypotheses consistent with this system of generalizations, and then tests predictions about what might be found in the ground on the sites where men in the past did things. The amount of material may be small, the given evidence sparse, and yet his inferences may be extremely persuasive, not because of what they are in themselves, but because inference in archaeology is based on large bodies of generalizations already confirmed and accepted in the physical, biological, and human sciences.

Having reiterated this point, I can now say in summary that archaeologists test hypotheses about past social structure on the assumption that it is represented by selected parts of material remains that are the results of past human actions. Archaeological inferences are about and based on processes and relations among social structure, material culture, and its unaltered, altered, and selected remains. They depend on principles of cultural behavior, the accumulation and alteration of material, and archaeological method.

ORIGINATING AND TESTING LAWS

Having provided a model of archaeological inference and discussed both its theoretical and its practical implications, I must now face the most widely debated question in archaeology today: Can archaeologists actually originate new laws of human and social change, as well as help to test and to confirm old ones?

Evolutionary change of man and society can take place only over time. However, what we observe of man and society now is a relatively static cross section of a possibly changing situation, one in which no extensive change itself can be observed. Further, the archaeological data with which we can test lawlike generalizations about regular or evolutionary change in the past exist only in present, relatively unchanging, material remains of past processes and events. Consequent- ly, any non-genetic description of contemporary man and society, and of archaeological materials as they are now, is synchronic; it thus provides no diachronic or evolutionary generalizations about man and society. The lawlike generalizations of evolutionary anthropology must be originated by the archaeologist from the interpretation of archaeological data in conjunction with laws and facts of the other sciences, particularly those of the human sciences and of evolutionary biology, cosmology, and other sciences in which diachronic laws are well developed and confirmed. The

hypotheses of archaeology are then tested by independent checking to see whether the predictions they make possible are borne out by archaeological data.

Archaeology done explicitly on the general covering-law model uses two sets of specifically archaeological hypotheses or lawlike generalizations that are tested to see if they can be confirmed as archaeological laws: those that are direct applications of, and thus of the same complexity as,

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the laws of other sciences on which they are directly dependent; and those more complex than, and in that sense independent of, the laws of other sciences from which they derive. The first set is distinguished by the direct application of (usually) non-evolutionary generalizations from other sciences to archaeological problems. Examples are Longacre (1970), who tests hypotheses about the relation of ceramic remains to matrilocality, and Redman and Watson (1970), who test hypotheses about the relation of surface to buried artifactual material in mounds. These hypotheses are specifically archaeological because they pertain to archaeological materials, even though they are directly dependent on laws of ethnology, geology, etc.

In the second set, a degree of complexity greater than that exhibited by hypotheses in the first set distinguishes hypotheses originated to explain the evolution of culture. Although these evolutionary generalizations about culture do derive from the general ideas of evolution and sometimes from particular evolutionary laws in other sciences, the complexity of human culture is such that lawlike generalizations about its evolution cannot be direct applications of generaliza- tions from other sciences, but must be augmented adaptations or creative modifications of them. That is, the complexity of human culture requires for its explanation evolutionary hypotheses of a greater degree of complexity than those adequate in other sciences. Thus, lawlike generalizations about the evolution of human culture are uniquely originated, tested, and confirmed in the science of archaeology. Examples are found in Braidwood (1952), Braidwood and Howe (1962), and Binford (1968), who present alternate evolutionary hypotheses concerning the beginning of food production in the Near East. The work of Hole, Flannery, and Neely (1969) is an independent test of these two hypotheses. Their systemic analysis of archaeological and environmental data can be generalized as a model for testing evolutionary hypotheses in archaeology. They utilize all the general environmental and specifically archaeological information available about a particular area to describe a system that both accounts for the archaeological remains and is more consistent with-and thus confirmatory of-one of the evolutionary hypotheses than of the other.

In conclusion, given the immense system of laws and inferences in the other sciences, then archaeological data can be understood, and specifically archaeological generalizations can be originated and tested. The larger context of general science is enriched by the new archaeological data, which may even suggest revisions of that context. However, there is a gap between the basal sciences, that is, between what the archaeologist knows and takes for granted, and the uniquely archaeological hypotheses he originates-and must test-about the evolution of culture. This gap between the basal data and the intellectual constructions that provide new understanding is not peculiar to archaeology, but it must be comprehended by archaeologists who aspire to the derivation ot new laws. They must recognize how greatly dependent archaeological data are on established bodies of scientific laws and facts if the data are to be taken as records of the past, or even if they are to make any sense at all. And as remarked above, these laws and facts are not only those of the human and social sciences, but also those of the physical and biological sciences.

On the other hand-and finally-it is only by examination of the archaeological record-broadly conceived to include both prehistoric and historic remains-that hypothesis about long-range human and social change, development, or evolution can be originated, tested, and confirmed. So archaeologists do actually originate new laws of human and social change. They do it through application of the pattern of archaeological inference outlined above.

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1962 Southwestern Asia beyond the lands of the Mediterranean Littoral. In Courses toward urban life, edited by Robert J. Braidwood and Gordon R. Willey. Aldine, Chicago.

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