akin to the European three-age system, though paying more attention to ecological factors. This schema has proved useful for the evolutionary pigeonholing of specific prehistoric cultures, but it makes no effort to express historical relationships among them, as the Gladwin and McKern systems are intended to do.

The Gladwin and McKern systems remain almost the only efforts to introduce anything like formal or rigorous systematics into the classification of New World cultures, and neither has come into general use. Insofar as formal methods have been employed, they have largely been devoted to the differentiation of sequential phases within the same culture (e.g., Pueblo I-V) rather than to the differentiation of spatially distinct cultures. Overall, archaeological culture classification in the Americas remains mostly an ad hoc process, guided by no rigorous rules, and the same is true for Europe and Africa. There is a continuing, largely unexamined premise that preceramic cultures are defined most importantly by projectile point types and ceramic cultures, by pottery types. The establishment and acceptance of a particular culture, and of its successive phases, is still very much a matter of dialogue among the relevant specialists, resulting eventually in a general agreement on norms and boundaries.

Although there has been a great deal of highly sophisticated debate about the epistemology as well as the methodology and the utility of artifact classification, there has been relatively little debate concerning culture classification. There is, rather, a general recognition that archaeological cultures are for the convenience of the archaeologist so that the question of their “reality” does not arise.

The Development of Artifact Classification

Scientific artifact classification developed initially as an adjunct to culture classification. The early prehistorians, like Thomsen and de Mortillet, were not really interested in tools and pots as evidence of activities, technologies, or thought patterns but only as identifiers of chronological horizons. The objective in artifact classification was to identify those types that could be associated specifically with the Stone, Bronze, or Iron Age and could help in the allocation of sites to one or another of those periods. Individual types were of course defined on the basis of formal characteristics, but they were then grouped together on the basis of chronological contexts rather than the internal evidence of form or function.

So long as they were undertaken for purposes of culture definition and of site attribution, artifact classifications were dominated by the concept of “the index fossil.” That is, primary attention was given to those artifact types that were found to be diagnostic of specific periods. On the other hand, artifact types that were considered nondiagnostic were often ignored. Thus, for example, Mediterranean archaeologists gave names and definition to a few pottery types, like Minyan Ware, that had a high degree of historical significance, but a great many other and more ubiquitous pottery wares went unnamed. In the same way, North American prehistorians developed comprehensive and highly detailed classifications of projectile points, but nothing comparable was done for the more generalized stone tools like scrapers and choppers.

A long step forward was taken when Montelius introduced the typological method in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Using this procedure, cultures and chronological horizons were defined on the basis of total assemblages rather than of a few diagnostic types, and as a result, artifact classifications became more comprehensive. There was not, however, any attempt to introduce formal systematics into the classifications.

Not all nineteenth-century artifact classifications were instrumentalist. The problem confronting the museum curator was fundamentally different from that of the field archaeologist, since a museum’s mission is to inform or entertain the public rather than to answer culture-historical questions. Moreover, a great many museum collections had been donated by amateurs, with little or no accompanying provenience information. This was especially true in the case of arrowhead collections, which have always had a special fascination for Americans. As a result,