remains strong, and it is still generally taken for granted that the proper purpose of artifact classification is to aid in the development of culture classifications, particularly with chronologies. Debate, therefore, has been largely concerned with the best way of achieving that purpose (cf. especially Graslund et al. 1976; Klejn 1982).

Adams and Adams (1991, 278–304) have undertaken a review and critique of the typological debate, and they argue that much of the debate has been misplaced, partly because it has ignored the question of purpose and partly because it has failed to grasp the full complexity of type concepts. Types necessarily have material, cognitive, and representational dimensions—the actual objects, the archaeologists’ mental perception of the objects, and the words and pictures that are used to convey those understandings. The three dimensions are not wholly interdependent in that any one of them can be changed without necessarily affecting the other two.

Adams and Adams go on to assert that just about everything that has been written about archaeological types is partly true and partly not true because the types that are actually in regular use are partly natural and partly artificial, partly essentialist and partly instrumentalist, partly formal and partly functional. An infinity of types may be actually present in the material, but the archaeologist inevitably selects from among them those that are useful for some purpose by choosing to emphasize some attributes and ignore others. The authors conclude that the ultimate touchstone of artifact types is that they must be consistently recognizable and they must be demonstrably useful for some purpose.

It remains to add that the vast majority of artifact classifications have always been and are ad hoc schemes, devised to permit the archaeologist to describe a large and diverse body of material in a limited number of pages. From this perspective, just about every archaeologist is also a typologist, and just about every monograph involves its own typology.

William Y. Adams

References

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