of house and building types, of burial types, of petroglyph and pictograph types, and of artistic styles. Some of these classifications, like some of the artifact classifications, predate the beginnings of scientific archaeology. As far back as the 1750s, william stukeley devised a classification of British earth mounds and megalithic monuments. A generation later, richard colt hoare and william cunnington proposed a fivefold classification of English barrow types. In North America, antiquaries caleb atwater in 1820 and Squier and Davis in 1848 proposed classifications of earth mound types.

The classification of houses and of burials has always gone hand in hand with culture classification, much as did the classification of artifacts before the 1930s. Indeed, the various monument types designated by Stukeley, Colt and Cunnington, and Atwater were initially regarded as the primary diagnostics for the recognition of different cultural periods. Later, house types took their place along with pottery and projectile points as defining characteristics of the various Neolithic cultures of the Old World, as well as of prehistoric American cultures. The importance of house types in culture classification is particularly evident in the U.S. Southwest, where each of the major cultures (Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, and Hakatayan) is characterized by its own distinctive form of dwelling, as are the different developmental phases in some of the cultures. Burial types on the other hand have played an especially important role in defining the early cultures of the Nile Valley, where evidence of housing is largely lacking. In nubia, at the beginning of the twentieth century, george a. reisner recognized and differentiated a whole succession of previously unfamiliar ancient cultures on the basis of burial types alone (Reisner 1909).

Unlike artifact classifications, the classifications of house types and burial types have never really been decoupled from the larger objective of culture classification. Although prehistoric dwellings have been extensively studied from the standpoint of function and of ecology, their formal partitioning into types still serves mainly for the identification of cultures and of horizons. The case is somewhat different, however, in the classification of petroglyphs and pictographs, since many of these cannot be associated with specific peoples or time horizons. Classifications of rock art therefore tend to be more strictly formal and essentialist, based strictly on the exhibited characteristics of the drawings. There is not, however, any one generally accepted classification, or system of classification, of rock art. Every region has its own scheme based on its own distinctive body of material.

Theory versus Practice: The Typological Debate

As long as the basic aim in artifact classification was to define cultures and sequences, the actual procedures involved in the classification were generally regarded as nonproblematical. Artifact types were accepted or rejected on the grounds of their recognizability and their utility or nonutility for the reconstruction of culture history, and the question of their objective reality or meaningfulness to their makers did not arise. Debate often occurred over the legitimacy or the utility of individual types, but it did not touch upon the general methods or the purposes of classification itself.

However, the major shifts of interest that occurred after 1940 gave rise not only to new approaches to classification but also to an extensive and often heated dialogue about the nature and the meaning of classification itself. In one form or another, this discussion persists down to the present day, particularly in North America, where it has been given the name, “the typological debate.” The accumulated body of theoretical and programmatic literature is enormous, yet it bears surprisingly little relationship to what goes on in the practical domain, and it must therefore be discussed independent of actual field practice.

The most fundamental issue that has been debated concerns the “naturalness” or “artificiality” of types, which was raised initially in the context of the “functional revolution” in the 1940s but in one guise or another continues to be debated down to the present day. There is general agreement that “artificial” (i.e., instrumentalist) types can be created that are useful