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context and to write, edit, or coordinate insightful syntheses such as Prehistory of Africa (1970) and the Atlas of African Prehistory (1967).
References
For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 754–757.
(1936–1976)
David Leonard Clarke, a British archaeologist, never directed a major excavation but was noted for his outstanding contributions to theoretical archaeology. He studied the ceramic vessels of the Beaker assemblage of the third millennium b.c. in Europe and gained his accreditation as an archaeologist more in the Continental museum tradition than in the British excavation mode. Clarke remained in Cambridge, England, all his professional life, and his career spanned only ten years from the completion of his Ph.D. to his sudden death in 1976.
He is famous for radicalizing British archaeology, and in Analytical Archaeology (1968), Clarke argued that archaeology must become a science by developing an explicitly archaeological theory based on general systems theory. Clarke argued that the variability in cultural assemblages required attention. Cultural assemblages varied—there were no discrete cultures, only overlapping suits of slightly different collections of items—and the artifacts varied as well. Concentrating on the special but calling it typical, in the sense of the unique and supposedly diagnostic, could lead to conclusions quite different from those reached when looking at the most common or typical forms. The variability in specific types of objects was a fascinating insight into the obvious. Variability of form suggested to Clarke a past of unceasing fluctuation. He believed that what was possible for biology should be feasible for culture, with variability lodged within a taxonomic frame for ordering the allocation of entities to classes, not directed to a systematic operational concern with the causes and effects of variability.
His second profound contribution to archaeological theory was the recognition of the critical importance of scale in our understanding of the past and the different scales of phenomena within it. If archaeology was to be systematic, as Clarke wished, it was not difficult to envisage that the established rigor and precision should be extended to include precise statements about magnitude and variability. Clarke’s great insight was that by extension, the rigor of acquiring data should also be applied to its interpretation.
Clarke wanted to find the taxonomic system that meshed all archaeological phenomena together, coinciding, by accident or intent, with “natural” categories of culture, and doing for archaeology what the sixteenth-century Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus had done for biology. Even without a high-level theory, a system of classification that coincided with a natural taxon would allow coherent research propositions, just as it did for biology before the modern synthesis. The addition of variation to the description of archaeological entities should lead toward a proper theory of culture. In this respect, Clarke had something in common with “the new archaeologists” in the United States. The correct procedure, whether based on Hempellian logic in the U.S. scheme or taxonomy in Clarke’s scheme, was intended to produce good and appropriate theories.
The quandary at the core of Clarke’s agenda is the absence of a systematic high-level theory about what matters—an explanation of the nature of human behavior. This weakness was common to the entire program of the new archaeology, and it still is a fundamental limitation of archaeological theory. No current paradigmatic position in archaeology has overcome this quandary.
References
For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 866–868.
Classification is the most fundamental of all interpretive activities, not only in archaeology but also in all of science. There comes a time, sooner or later, when the sheer accumulation of
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