or both (“academic” archaeology), and that driven by conservation and, of recent, protective legislation, herein termed cultural resource management (CRM). Because these kinds of work are differently motivated, they have often developed along divergent lines.

Histories themselves are usually driven by common sense—and that is why, until recently, the word history basically meant the history of western culture. One cannot get very far with that tack in examining a discipline that includes common sense as part of its subject. It is not necessary, however, to erect a detailed theoretical structure here. Elucidating but a few concepts will suffice to generate a sufficient framework to analyze American archaeological development. First, since science has played such a role in American developments, it is essential to be crystal clear on what the term science denotes. In this context science is an explanatory system that uses theory to explain phenomena and employs an empirical epistemological standard, that is, things don’t explain things, events don’t explain events, and whether something “works” in physical terms is the arbiter of correctness. All of the commonly cited features of science (i.e., the elements of scientific method) can be traced to these two features (Dunnell 1982).

Second, because of archaeology’s particular focus, it is also critical to realize that there are two kinds of structures that meet these general criteria: essentialist (functionalist) science and materialist (historical) science, with the first identifying the ontological position on the significance of variation and the second recognizing different ontological positions on the significance of time. Essentialism sees the variable world as constituted by a finite number of fixed kinds (entities, classes, etc.) between which fixed relations (laws, “generalizations” in the social sciences) obtain. The methodological imperatives that flow from this view can be characterized as ones of “discovery.” Explanation in this view takes the form of timeless, spaceless laws that are often characterized as predictive. They are not, of course; they have this appearance and effect only because in this framework time is an elapsed quantity, not an age; thus, there is, strictly speaking, no past or future. Some sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry) operate wholly within this framework or nearly so. Materialism (not to be confused here with the term as used in anthropology) sees the same variable world as in a state of becoming. Because there are no empirical kinds in this view (kinds are analytic tools), there can be no fixed relations or laws, and without laws there is no appearance of prediction. Kinds are created, not discovered, in order to render variability explicable. Explanation takes the form of sets of contingencies interacting with content-free mechanisms to produce a special kind of “history.” Realistically, although these two approaches have often been opposed (e.g., Kroeber 1935, 1942; Spaulding 1968), there are no strictly materialistic sciences. Rather, disciplines such as evolutionary biology combine both, using the latter to organize the former so that, though there are no laws of history, all history is a consequence of the operation of laws (Popper 1961).

These aspects of our discipline have been discussed at length in other venues (e.g., Dunnell 1982, 1986a, 1992a), and interested readers can consult those items directly. But such aspects require recitation here because they are integral to an attempt to understand the conceptual development of archaeology in the Americas and its present condition in anything other than the most superficial way.

Coming to Grips with the U.S. Archaeological Record

U.S. archaeology is often taken to have begun with the prescient work of thomas jefferson in the excavation and reporting ([1784] 1801) of a small and, as it turned out, rather atypical burial mound at Monticello, Virginia (Heizer 1958; Lehmann-Hartleben 1943). His contribution was by no means isolated. Jefferson’s observations and their reporting were certainly unique for the time, but he was in contact both with European scholarship, hardly advanced over his own work in most respects, and with Americans exploring the “west” in North America. For example, Henry Brakenridge, an important explorer of the southeastern (at that time the southwestern) United States, corresponded