culture-historical issues. There was a common feeling that once all the different cultures had been defined and had been placed in their proper temporal order, it was time to move on to new questions. The result was a series of self-proclaimed “revolutions” in American archaeology, each of which had an impact, at least theoretically, on the processes of artifact classification. With each new change of paradigm, archaeologists often found that their previously established type concepts were not adequate to the questions that were now being asked.

The first “revolution,” beginning around 1940, was strongly influenced by concurrent developments in ethnology. It was argued at the time that the appropriate task of the anthropologist, both in ethnology and in archaeology, should not be simply to look at culture and history from the outside but, rather, to “get inside the minds of the people,” to see the world as much as possible as they saw it. This would later be called the “emic” approach to the study of culture as opposed to the “etic” approach that analyzed culture only from the viewer’s perspective.

In the field of artifact classification, it was argued that archaeologists had been splitting hairs over minute differences in pottery temper or the length-width ratio in arrowheads because these differences proved useful for the chronological ordering of sites even though they might have been accidental or meaningless to the actual makers of the artifacts. There was, as a result, a certain turning away from the strict formalism that had characterized the previous generation of classifiers. The basic idea now was that artifact types should be essentialist rather than instrumentalist, they should represent “mental templates” in the minds of the makers, and they should ignore variations and variables that seemed to be unintentional. However, there was never complete agreement as to how this essentialism was to be determined. One school, championed by Alex Krieger (1944) and irving rouse (1960), argued that the most sharply demarcated types could be safely assumed to represent the intent of the makers. These types would have a maximum of internal cohesion and external isolation, to use a phrase that later became popular. Another school, best represented by walter taylor (1948, 114– 123), apparently believed that prehistoric peoples thought more in functional than in formal terms and therefore recommended an approach to classification based more on the function than on the form of objects. Critics were able to suggest, however, that neither approach necessarily captured the original thinking of the artifact makers. Sharply demarcated types represented habitual behavior on the part of the artifact makers that might, or might not, have been a reflection of conscious intent while functional types necessarily reflected the archaeologist’s own system of logic (Ford 1954).

In the end, the would-be revolution of the 1940s had much more effect on the formation of typologies and taxonomies that it had on individual types. Types themselves continued to be designated on formal grounds of shape, size, decoration, and so on. There was a continuing and largely unexamined assumption that whatever criteria appeared salient to the archaeologist must have been salient to the makers as well. Once designated, however, individual types were now often clustered into larger categories on the basis of presumed use rather than of appearance; in other words, into functional rather than formal taxonomies. Pottery vessels were grouped together on the basis of their presumed use for cooking, food serving, storage, etc., rather than on the basis of shared patterns of decoration.

The supposed emic, or functional, revolution had not proceeded very far when it was overtaken in the 1960s by the self-proclaimed “scientific revolution” ushered in by “the new archaeologists.” These archaeologists shared with their predecessors the belief that artifact types should in some sense be “real” rather than mere heuristic constructs of the archaeologist; therefore, there was, at least for a time, a continued assumption that “reality” must reflect the intent of the makers. However, “reality” was now to be determined by strictly scientific and empirical procedures without recourse to interpretation or context. The touchstone of reality was replicability. Any type proposed by one archaeologist should be capable of confirmation by others, using properly scientific measures. Types, like