lead when they published A Method for the Designation of Southwestern Pottery Types (Gladwin and Gladwin 1930). The authors recognized that many southwestern pottery types had been widely traded so they were important components in the ceramic assemblages not only of their makers but of neighboring cultures as well. Indeed, in the case of some types, the specific region of origin was far from certain. The Gladwins therefore suggested that pottery classification should be decoupled from culture classification, in effect breaking with a tradition that had been prevalent for 100 years. Pottery types, they said, should not be named after the presumed cultures of their makers (as, for example, the Maya orange) but should instead be given names that were free of cultural or chronological implication. They proposed a system of binomial designation, such as “Tularosa black-on-white”; the first element is a geographical name (usually from the site or area of first discovery), and the second describes the surface color or configuration. This suggestion has since been widely followed in the naming of pottery types in many parts of North America.

Although the Gladwins proposed the rules for pottery classification, it was another southwesterner, Harold S. Colton, who undertook the arduous and painstaking task of putting them into operation. Colton and several associates systematically examined several million potsherds from northern Arizona and eventually produced the monumental Handbook of Northern Arizona Pottery Wares (Colton and Hargrave 1937), which included minutely particularized descriptions and illustrations of no fewer than 150 types. The Colton scheme had also a hierarchical or taxonomic feature: it began with a basic division between oxidized and reduced types, subdivided each into groupings called wares, then subdivided many of the wares into series, and finally subdivided each ware or series into types. The hierarchical approach has not found general acceptance in other areas, but the individual Colton wares have nearly all stood the test of time, owing largely to the painstaking effort that went into their original definition. At the same time that Colton was working in Arizona, Florence Hawley produced a Field Manual of Prehistoric Southwestern Pottery Types (Hawley 1936), based mainly on New Mexico materials, and j. a. ford was introducing similar analyses and descriptions of pottery types in the Mississippi Valley and eastern North America (Ford 1938). Subsequently, comprehensive pottery classifications have been developed for just about every part of North, Middle, and South America.

The frequency seriation method was originally developed in the study of pottery distributions, and it is still much more often applied to pottery than to other materials. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, françois bordes introduced a similar approach in the study of lithic materials from French Paleolithic sites (Bordes 1950, 1961), and his method required a far more precise and comprehensive typology of stone tool types than had previously been attempted. The Bordes method has proved generally effective on its home ground, and attempts have been made to employ it in many other parts of Europe, the Near East, and Africa. Field-workers tried originally to employ the same actual tool types that had been designated by Bordes in France, assuming them to be universal in distribution, but they were unsuccessful. The general conclusion now is that the frequency seriation method itself works well with Paleolithic stone tools but the actual types must be separately classified for each area (Kolpakov and Vishnyatsky 1989).

The partial decoupling of artifact classification from culture classification had a kind of liberating effect on the study of artifacts. No longer treated simply as culture markers, they could be studied more nearly as autonomous data, giving evidence of technologies, activity patterns, and even thought patterns that were not necessarily culture specific. Moreover, by 1940 many North American prehistorians had come to feel that the older, instrumental artifact classifications had done their job insofar as a series of cultures and culture sequences had been devised for nearly the whole continent. It was time therefore to develop new classifications for new purposes.

In effect, North American prehistorians after 1940 ceased to be concerned exclusively with