- Email: [email protected]
Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia
ARA-00001; No of Pages 3 Archaeological Research in Asia xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Archaeological Research in Asia journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ara
Editorial
Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia
1. Introduction On behalf of our publisher, editors, and editorial board, I am pleased to present the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia. As stated in our “Aims and Scope,” we conceived the journal to present high quality scholarly research conducted in Asia on a broad range of archaeological subjects of importance to audiences across Asia and around the world. We define Asia broadly, in the traditional sense, the area running from the Straits of Bosporus east to the Pacific, and from the Russian Far North down to Malaysia and the Indian subcontinent. 2. Goals of the journal Archaeological Research in Asia is intended to remedy problems that many of its editors and editorial board members perceived as hindering the advancement of Asian archaeology and archaeological research, most importantly that the results of Asian research have not until now been not widely available to scholars — even those in Asia. This is more than a matter of inconvenience; it has shaped the character of Asian archaeological inquiry. In the absence of a journal covering Asia as a whole, most work is placed in regional journals, and for that reason tends to be written for and reviewed by the smaller group of specialists already familiar with the issues and data in question, attending mainly to details of local importance without explicitly linking their relationship to the broader problems that made those local details important in the first place. A related problem is of subject representation. Existing journals devoted to Asian archaeology are dominated by pieces concerned with recent time periods, with subject matters and materials relevant mainly to recent time periods, or that figure prominently in the press or public imagination. In many places, less prominent subject matters and more ancient time periods have not attracted a scholarly following large enough for local traditions of research and theoretical discussions to develop. Archaeological Research in Asia was conceived to remedy this, to facilitate and encourage discussion between individual and small groups of scholars previously isolated in different parts of Asia, and in this way promote the development of broadly regional approaches to important archaeological problems. Our thinking is that increasing the accessibility of Asian archaeological research will encourage attention to a suite of more wide-ranging issues without losing sight of their grounding in important regional processes and local culture histories and their relationship to the long-standing research questions surrounding them. It is my personal view that the structural problems outlined above, which have limited the impact of Asian archaeological research, have frequently been obscured by the more obvious one of language, the
problem of Asian scholars having to publish in a language other than their own. This issue must be squarely faced. To promote clarity Archaeological Research in Asia will include some key terms (e.g., site names) in other languages/scripts, but the journal language is English. Elsevier will be able to refer authors to translation/editing services that should alleviate, though of course not entirely eliminate, this problem. As I noted above, however, it is my suspicion that problems of language, while manifestly more obvious, are less a problem than the way in which questions are posed, arguments are structured, and conclusions reached. In short, the problem has more to do with what is being said than the difficulties of saying it in English. The Editors and Editorial Board of Archaeological Research in Asia are committed to changing this. It is our view that the work in this large, culturally diverse, and archaeologically rich region will not attract broad scholarly interest until and unless it begins consistently to address problems of broad scholarly interest. To this end, Archaeological Research in Asia will work with and encourage Asian archaeologists to publish works that highlight theoretical and methodological advances in studying Asia's past, present new data that further illuminate it, and detail patterns that reshape our understanding of it. The matter we will constantly forefront when considering manuscripts is, “What is the question here. How do the data and interpretations presented here relate to broader issues?” As noted above, to specialists the answer to this question often seems too obvious to merit discussion. Unfortunately, if specialists do not discuss the broader relevance of their research, it will have little or no impact beyond the narrow settings in which they work. Worse yet, without open discussion, there is no guarantee specialists working in the same area actually agree on matters of broader relevance. The journal aims to remedy yet another problem that has plagued archaeological publication not only in Asia but around the world, specifically, the unacceptably large gap between the point in time at which a piece is submitted, and when a decision regarding publication is made, and when favorably reviewed pieces actually appear in print. While mindful of the problems likely to crop up with a new journal, the editors of Archaeological Research in Asia are committed to streamlining the editorial process and establishing turn-around times on par with those few existing journals famed for their timeliness. 3. Editorial expertise A glance at our editors and editorial board should convince prospective authors that Archaeological Research in Asia has the expertise and scholarly credentials to improve the visibility, accessibility, and quality
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001 2352-2267/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001
2
Editorial
of Asian archaeological research and the speed with which high-quality research moves from manuscript into print.
comparison to plausible alternatives favored by others. Here are some areas of work that seem particularly promising to me.
• Loukas Barton is interested in the material record of human behavioral change and the cultural, ecological, and evolutionary factors leading to such changes over long periods of time. He studies the late Pleistocene peopling, the transition to agriculture and emergence of pastoralism in Eurasia. • Mark Pollard has worked extensively on the archaeological applications of physical sciences archaeology, including studies of archaeological materials and biogeochemical processes, numerical applications in archaeology and palaeoclimatic reconstruction. • Carla Sinopoli's research focuses on southern Asia's social and political transformations, changing technologies, consumption and production, and regional and long-distance interactions over the last 4000 years. • Anne Underhill specializes in the archaeology of East Asia, centering on late prehistoric and subsequent settlement, economy, craft production (especially ceramics), exchange systems, diet, and mortuary ritual. • Nicholas Zwyns is a specialist in lithic technology whose research focuses on the onset of Upper Paleolithic behavior in Central and North-East Asia. He seeks to identify and delimit the chronological and geographical ranges of different technological traditions and relate them to the broader debates surrounding different scenarios of human dispersals.
4.1. Foraging theory
My own work has centered on theory and its applications to Pleistocene and Holocene hunter–gatherers, the origins of agriculture, and the evolution of these and other cultural systems through time. Accordingly, I use this opportunity to highlight what I see to be major opportunities for applications of theory to the archaeological record of Asia. 4. Opportunities for contributions to theory in Asian archaeology Theory has played a minor role in Asian archaeological research, partly because for many theory is simply speculation, making it better to stick to the facts, about which one can be certain. The facts, however, are seldom certain. Radiocarbon dates, the archaeologist's stock-intrade, are expressed as probabilistic age ranges, for example, and discordant dates are routinely discounted, suggesting some facts are better than others. More fundamentally, there are too many facts (an infinite number) for the archaeologist to consider them all. It is impossible to recover everything from an archaeological site, and even if one could, it would be impossible to measure and document the infinite number of variables characterizing even one of its artifacts. As a result, site interpretation is not a simple recounting of facts. It is an interpretation of a sample of some facts. How the site is sampled, how much is excavated and where, and what things are (and are not) targeted for recovery, and how those things are analyzed reflect choices about which facts are important and which facts are not. These choices are not selfevident from the facts. They derive from theoretical frameworks that tell us how the world works and from the inference we make about what facts best reflect how the world works and thus should be singled out for attention. So the question is not whether archaeologists should use theory — we're already using it; even the most descriptive archaeological accounts are the end-product of programs of sampling and selective attention to facts that are grounded in some kind of theoretical framework. Rather, the question is whether these theories ought to be discussed explicitly in relation to their bearing on the archaeological interpretations arising from them, and the answer to that is clearly “Yes.” At minimum, we need to be explicit about the ways in which our theories affect how we dig and interpret our sites and collections and the advantages and disadvantages of the theories we favor in
Optimal foraging theory (OFT), the diet breadth model specifically, has played a dominant role in New World hunter–gatherer research for nearly three decades (Winterhalder and Smith, 1981; Bettinger, 1980). The attractiveness of these models is their simplicity (Bettinger, 2009); there are very few variables and their relationships are easily grasped and clearly articulated. In the diet breadth model, for example, there are usually two variables and time and energy (kcals). Resources are ranked according to the amount of energy they contain relative to the amount of time it takes to handle (capture and process) them once they are encountered (Bettinger, 2009). High-ranking resources return many kcals per unit of handling time. Foragers intent on maximizing energetic return will always take the highest ranked resource exclusively, ignoring lower ranked ones, unless the search time for this highest ranked resource brings its overall return rate (energy divided by search + handling time) below the return obtainable by taking a lower ranked resource when it is encountered (i.e., energy divided by handling time). A point often missed is that, like foraging models generally, the diet breadth model makes no predictions about hunter–gatherer behavior; it merely specifies the suite of resources a forager would need to include in a diet to maximize energetic returns. Archaeologists find the model useful on the hypothesis that hunter–gatherer behavior is strongly conditioned by subsistence. Few of them would argue that subsistence is all there is to hunter–gatherer behavior, but nearly all of them would agree that subsistence is a good place to start, a good working assumption being that subsistence resources were ranked according to energy per unit of handling time, facilitating a strategy designed to maximize energetic returns. An alternative, relatively unexplored avenue of research would be documenting instances where the expectations of the diet breadth model are not supported, i.e., where hunter–gatherers were not maximizing rates of return per unit of time. It is certainly possible that hunter–gatherers were sometimes intent on maximizing something other than energy (calories), for instance, fur, hide, or prestige. The problem here would be ability to measure these quantities in the archaeological record. A related line of inquiry would ask whether any of these or other desired quantities (energy, fur, hides, prestige, etc.) was being maximized not in relation to time but some other quantity. It is clear, for instance, that population growth often warrants a shift from behaviors that maximize energy per unit of time to behaviors that maximize energy acquired per unit of space. The point that quickly emerges as we explore these alternatives is that foraging models, including the diet breadth model, are not fixed things but a family of theoretical constructs that can be used to understand a whole range of strategies reflected in behaviors manifest in the archaeological record. Thus, while foraging models have been mostly applied to hunter–gatherers, there is no reason why they should not (and every reason why they should) be modified to ask a whole range of questions about virtually any behavior across a wide range social formations from simple agriculturalists to complex state-level societies. 4.2. Evolutionary theory A second inviting area for future Asian archaeological inquiry is evolutionary theory. Foraging theory can be included under the heading of evolutionary theory, but I am thinking here about work more centered on the evolution of social behavior, cultural norms, stylistic variation, and the like, under the theoretical umbrella of what is termed dual inheritance or culture transmission theory (Richerson and Boyd, 2005), which examines the interaction between biological and cultural
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001
Editorial
evolution and gives special attention to the ways in which cultural transmission can produce human behaviors at odds with predictions arising from standard Darwinian processes alone. So far as archaeologists are concerned, one of the most interesting contributions along these lines has to do with the evolution of ethnic markers (Boyd and Richerson, 1987), showing that culturally distinctive marker traits are likely to arise as a means of distinguishing the quality of different social models — the people whose behavior one should mimic to maximize social, cultural, or reproductive success. These models suggest that where there is a good deal of cultural mixing, these marker traits help distinguish nonlocals from locals, locals being more likely to provide better information about locally effective social and adaptive behaviors. Boyd and Richerson (1987) showed that exaggerated marker traits were more likely to evolve, and the correlation between marker and adaptive traits likely to be the highest, in places with the greatest cultural mixing, normally on cultural boundaries. This is a model fairly begging for application to archaeological problems across Asia, and especially at the boundaries between environmentally, economically, or socio-politically distinct areas. My colleague Jelmer Eerkens and I (Bettinger and Eerkens, 1999) provide a methodology for applying this model by tracking local variations in trait correlation, and while our study centered on chipped stone, it would be as easily applied to objects of many varying materials (e.g., ceramics and metalwork) and uses (e.g., utilitarian and non-utilitarian), and circulating in varying social, economic, and political spheres. 4.3. Empirical contributions to theory While I am a strong advocate for archaeological theorizing, the relationship between archaeological theory and archaeological data is two-way. Theory can help make sense of an otherwise confusing archaeological record, permitting us to detect archaeological patterns we might otherwise have missed, for example, or to quantify archaeological relationships we would otherwise have ignored. At the same time, strongly patterned empirical evidence will often clarify otherwise ambiguous theoretical relationships, and empirical evidence is critical to any application of theory. Resource return rates are a case in point. Optimal foraging theory requires that we know return rates but it cannot tell us the return rates for individual resources, how they should be ranked, or whether they should be included in the diet. These are empirical questions requiring that we know resource-specific search times, handling times, and energetic costs and returns. There is nothing “theoretical” about this kind of fact-finding research (e.g., documenting search times), but it is absolutely critical to the application of foraging theory to specific archaeological cases. Americanists have spent a good deal of time profitably documenting return rates for key regional resources (Simms, 1985), and while there are excellent examples of this in Asia (e.g., Lu, 2002; Barlow and Heck, 2002), there is great potential for additional work. Rates of diffusion and culture change are another potentially productive area of theory-driven empirical research. Theory suggests that rates of diffusion should vary — be faster or slower, depending on a variety of conditions (environment, population density, technology, etc.), but provides few specifics regarding absolute rates or rates of increase/decrease (e.g., linear vs. exponential), even though these
3
details are critical elements of building and testing theory. The archaeological record is an essential source of information regarding these very important questions, the archaeological record of Asia specifically, because the region is so environmentally and culturally diverse. For example, I am particularly interested in the diffusion of bow and arrow technology, which likely evolved just once, somewhere in Eurasia, and subsequently diffused to the rest of the Old World and eventually the New World. Documenting the appearance of bow and arrow technology in different parts of Asia and integrating the results would provide theoretically valuable information about rates of diffusion and their variation in response to a variety of conditions, not to mention providing key data regarding local culture histories. 5. Conclusion I conclude with the observation that while theory will not play an important role in every contribution to Archaeological Research In Asia, that the subject has been so neglected presents prospective authors a multitude of attractive opportunities for cutting-edge contributions. I have suggested a few possibilities, and while I am less familiar with the bodies of theory that are more prominent in studies of more complex social formations, of ancient human adaptations and dispersals into Asia, and of a host of other matters that play a central role in understanding the archaeology of Asia, the Editors and Editorial Board of Archaeological Research in Asia provide more than enough expertise to evaluate such theoretical contributions. We urge you to consider submitting your work, and encouraging your colleagues to submit their work, to Archaeological Research in Asia. References Barlow, K.R., Heck, M., 2002. More on acorn eating during the Natufian: expected patterning in diet and the archaeological record of subsistence. In: Mason, S.L.R., Hather, J.G. (Eds.), Hunter–gatherer Archaeobotany: Perspectives From the Northern Temperate Zone. University College Institute of Archaeology, London, pp. 128–145. Bettinger, R.L., 1980. Explanatory–predictive models of hunter–gatherer behavior. In: Schiffer, M.B. (Ed.), Advances in Archaeological Theory and Method vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 189–255. Bettinger, R.L., 2009. Hunter–gatherer Foraging: Five Simple Models. Eliot Werner Publications, Clinton Corners, NY. Bettinger, R.L., Eerkens, J., 1999. Point typologies, cultural transmission, and the spread of bow and arrow technology in the prehistoric Great Basin. Am. Antiquity 64, 231–242. Boyd, R., Richerson, P.J., 1987. The evolution of ethnic markers. Cult. Anthropol. 2, 65–79. Lu, T.L.D., 2002. A green foxtail (Setaria viridis) cultivation experiment in the Middle Yellow River Valley and some related issues. Asian Perspect. 41, 1–14. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R., 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Simms, S.R., 1985. Acquisition costs and nutritional data on Great Basin resources. J. Calif. Great Basin Anthropol. 7, 117–126. Winterhalder, B., Smith, E.A., 1981. Hunter–gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic and Archaeological Analyses. University of Chicago, Chicago.
Robert L. Bettinger Editor-in-Chief Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA E-mail address: [email protected].
Available online xxxx
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Archaeological Research in Asia journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ara
Editorial
Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia
1. Introduction On behalf of our publisher, editors, and editorial board, I am pleased to present the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia. As stated in our “Aims and Scope,” we conceived the journal to present high quality scholarly research conducted in Asia on a broad range of archaeological subjects of importance to audiences across Asia and around the world. We define Asia broadly, in the traditional sense, the area running from the Straits of Bosporus east to the Pacific, and from the Russian Far North down to Malaysia and the Indian subcontinent. 2. Goals of the journal Archaeological Research in Asia is intended to remedy problems that many of its editors and editorial board members perceived as hindering the advancement of Asian archaeology and archaeological research, most importantly that the results of Asian research have not until now been not widely available to scholars — even those in Asia. This is more than a matter of inconvenience; it has shaped the character of Asian archaeological inquiry. In the absence of a journal covering Asia as a whole, most work is placed in regional journals, and for that reason tends to be written for and reviewed by the smaller group of specialists already familiar with the issues and data in question, attending mainly to details of local importance without explicitly linking their relationship to the broader problems that made those local details important in the first place. A related problem is of subject representation. Existing journals devoted to Asian archaeology are dominated by pieces concerned with recent time periods, with subject matters and materials relevant mainly to recent time periods, or that figure prominently in the press or public imagination. In many places, less prominent subject matters and more ancient time periods have not attracted a scholarly following large enough for local traditions of research and theoretical discussions to develop. Archaeological Research in Asia was conceived to remedy this, to facilitate and encourage discussion between individual and small groups of scholars previously isolated in different parts of Asia, and in this way promote the development of broadly regional approaches to important archaeological problems. Our thinking is that increasing the accessibility of Asian archaeological research will encourage attention to a suite of more wide-ranging issues without losing sight of their grounding in important regional processes and local culture histories and their relationship to the long-standing research questions surrounding them. It is my personal view that the structural problems outlined above, which have limited the impact of Asian archaeological research, have frequently been obscured by the more obvious one of language, the
problem of Asian scholars having to publish in a language other than their own. This issue must be squarely faced. To promote clarity Archaeological Research in Asia will include some key terms (e.g., site names) in other languages/scripts, but the journal language is English. Elsevier will be able to refer authors to translation/editing services that should alleviate, though of course not entirely eliminate, this problem. As I noted above, however, it is my suspicion that problems of language, while manifestly more obvious, are less a problem than the way in which questions are posed, arguments are structured, and conclusions reached. In short, the problem has more to do with what is being said than the difficulties of saying it in English. The Editors and Editorial Board of Archaeological Research in Asia are committed to changing this. It is our view that the work in this large, culturally diverse, and archaeologically rich region will not attract broad scholarly interest until and unless it begins consistently to address problems of broad scholarly interest. To this end, Archaeological Research in Asia will work with and encourage Asian archaeologists to publish works that highlight theoretical and methodological advances in studying Asia's past, present new data that further illuminate it, and detail patterns that reshape our understanding of it. The matter we will constantly forefront when considering manuscripts is, “What is the question here. How do the data and interpretations presented here relate to broader issues?” As noted above, to specialists the answer to this question often seems too obvious to merit discussion. Unfortunately, if specialists do not discuss the broader relevance of their research, it will have little or no impact beyond the narrow settings in which they work. Worse yet, without open discussion, there is no guarantee specialists working in the same area actually agree on matters of broader relevance. The journal aims to remedy yet another problem that has plagued archaeological publication not only in Asia but around the world, specifically, the unacceptably large gap between the point in time at which a piece is submitted, and when a decision regarding publication is made, and when favorably reviewed pieces actually appear in print. While mindful of the problems likely to crop up with a new journal, the editors of Archaeological Research in Asia are committed to streamlining the editorial process and establishing turn-around times on par with those few existing journals famed for their timeliness. 3. Editorial expertise A glance at our editors and editorial board should convince prospective authors that Archaeological Research in Asia has the expertise and scholarly credentials to improve the visibility, accessibility, and quality
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001 2352-2267/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001
2
Editorial
of Asian archaeological research and the speed with which high-quality research moves from manuscript into print.
comparison to plausible alternatives favored by others. Here are some areas of work that seem particularly promising to me.
• Loukas Barton is interested in the material record of human behavioral change and the cultural, ecological, and evolutionary factors leading to such changes over long periods of time. He studies the late Pleistocene peopling, the transition to agriculture and emergence of pastoralism in Eurasia. • Mark Pollard has worked extensively on the archaeological applications of physical sciences archaeology, including studies of archaeological materials and biogeochemical processes, numerical applications in archaeology and palaeoclimatic reconstruction. • Carla Sinopoli's research focuses on southern Asia's social and political transformations, changing technologies, consumption and production, and regional and long-distance interactions over the last 4000 years. • Anne Underhill specializes in the archaeology of East Asia, centering on late prehistoric and subsequent settlement, economy, craft production (especially ceramics), exchange systems, diet, and mortuary ritual. • Nicholas Zwyns is a specialist in lithic technology whose research focuses on the onset of Upper Paleolithic behavior in Central and North-East Asia. He seeks to identify and delimit the chronological and geographical ranges of different technological traditions and relate them to the broader debates surrounding different scenarios of human dispersals.
4.1. Foraging theory
My own work has centered on theory and its applications to Pleistocene and Holocene hunter–gatherers, the origins of agriculture, and the evolution of these and other cultural systems through time. Accordingly, I use this opportunity to highlight what I see to be major opportunities for applications of theory to the archaeological record of Asia. 4. Opportunities for contributions to theory in Asian archaeology Theory has played a minor role in Asian archaeological research, partly because for many theory is simply speculation, making it better to stick to the facts, about which one can be certain. The facts, however, are seldom certain. Radiocarbon dates, the archaeologist's stock-intrade, are expressed as probabilistic age ranges, for example, and discordant dates are routinely discounted, suggesting some facts are better than others. More fundamentally, there are too many facts (an infinite number) for the archaeologist to consider them all. It is impossible to recover everything from an archaeological site, and even if one could, it would be impossible to measure and document the infinite number of variables characterizing even one of its artifacts. As a result, site interpretation is not a simple recounting of facts. It is an interpretation of a sample of some facts. How the site is sampled, how much is excavated and where, and what things are (and are not) targeted for recovery, and how those things are analyzed reflect choices about which facts are important and which facts are not. These choices are not selfevident from the facts. They derive from theoretical frameworks that tell us how the world works and from the inference we make about what facts best reflect how the world works and thus should be singled out for attention. So the question is not whether archaeologists should use theory — we're already using it; even the most descriptive archaeological accounts are the end-product of programs of sampling and selective attention to facts that are grounded in some kind of theoretical framework. Rather, the question is whether these theories ought to be discussed explicitly in relation to their bearing on the archaeological interpretations arising from them, and the answer to that is clearly “Yes.” At minimum, we need to be explicit about the ways in which our theories affect how we dig and interpret our sites and collections and the advantages and disadvantages of the theories we favor in
Optimal foraging theory (OFT), the diet breadth model specifically, has played a dominant role in New World hunter–gatherer research for nearly three decades (Winterhalder and Smith, 1981; Bettinger, 1980). The attractiveness of these models is their simplicity (Bettinger, 2009); there are very few variables and their relationships are easily grasped and clearly articulated. In the diet breadth model, for example, there are usually two variables and time and energy (kcals). Resources are ranked according to the amount of energy they contain relative to the amount of time it takes to handle (capture and process) them once they are encountered (Bettinger, 2009). High-ranking resources return many kcals per unit of handling time. Foragers intent on maximizing energetic return will always take the highest ranked resource exclusively, ignoring lower ranked ones, unless the search time for this highest ranked resource brings its overall return rate (energy divided by search + handling time) below the return obtainable by taking a lower ranked resource when it is encountered (i.e., energy divided by handling time). A point often missed is that, like foraging models generally, the diet breadth model makes no predictions about hunter–gatherer behavior; it merely specifies the suite of resources a forager would need to include in a diet to maximize energetic returns. Archaeologists find the model useful on the hypothesis that hunter–gatherer behavior is strongly conditioned by subsistence. Few of them would argue that subsistence is all there is to hunter–gatherer behavior, but nearly all of them would agree that subsistence is a good place to start, a good working assumption being that subsistence resources were ranked according to energy per unit of handling time, facilitating a strategy designed to maximize energetic returns. An alternative, relatively unexplored avenue of research would be documenting instances where the expectations of the diet breadth model are not supported, i.e., where hunter–gatherers were not maximizing rates of return per unit of time. It is certainly possible that hunter–gatherers were sometimes intent on maximizing something other than energy (calories), for instance, fur, hide, or prestige. The problem here would be ability to measure these quantities in the archaeological record. A related line of inquiry would ask whether any of these or other desired quantities (energy, fur, hides, prestige, etc.) was being maximized not in relation to time but some other quantity. It is clear, for instance, that population growth often warrants a shift from behaviors that maximize energy per unit of time to behaviors that maximize energy acquired per unit of space. The point that quickly emerges as we explore these alternatives is that foraging models, including the diet breadth model, are not fixed things but a family of theoretical constructs that can be used to understand a whole range of strategies reflected in behaviors manifest in the archaeological record. Thus, while foraging models have been mostly applied to hunter–gatherers, there is no reason why they should not (and every reason why they should) be modified to ask a whole range of questions about virtually any behavior across a wide range social formations from simple agriculturalists to complex state-level societies. 4.2. Evolutionary theory A second inviting area for future Asian archaeological inquiry is evolutionary theory. Foraging theory can be included under the heading of evolutionary theory, but I am thinking here about work more centered on the evolution of social behavior, cultural norms, stylistic variation, and the like, under the theoretical umbrella of what is termed dual inheritance or culture transmission theory (Richerson and Boyd, 2005), which examines the interaction between biological and cultural
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001
Editorial
evolution and gives special attention to the ways in which cultural transmission can produce human behaviors at odds with predictions arising from standard Darwinian processes alone. So far as archaeologists are concerned, one of the most interesting contributions along these lines has to do with the evolution of ethnic markers (Boyd and Richerson, 1987), showing that culturally distinctive marker traits are likely to arise as a means of distinguishing the quality of different social models — the people whose behavior one should mimic to maximize social, cultural, or reproductive success. These models suggest that where there is a good deal of cultural mixing, these marker traits help distinguish nonlocals from locals, locals being more likely to provide better information about locally effective social and adaptive behaviors. Boyd and Richerson (1987) showed that exaggerated marker traits were more likely to evolve, and the correlation between marker and adaptive traits likely to be the highest, in places with the greatest cultural mixing, normally on cultural boundaries. This is a model fairly begging for application to archaeological problems across Asia, and especially at the boundaries between environmentally, economically, or socio-politically distinct areas. My colleague Jelmer Eerkens and I (Bettinger and Eerkens, 1999) provide a methodology for applying this model by tracking local variations in trait correlation, and while our study centered on chipped stone, it would be as easily applied to objects of many varying materials (e.g., ceramics and metalwork) and uses (e.g., utilitarian and non-utilitarian), and circulating in varying social, economic, and political spheres. 4.3. Empirical contributions to theory While I am a strong advocate for archaeological theorizing, the relationship between archaeological theory and archaeological data is two-way. Theory can help make sense of an otherwise confusing archaeological record, permitting us to detect archaeological patterns we might otherwise have missed, for example, or to quantify archaeological relationships we would otherwise have ignored. At the same time, strongly patterned empirical evidence will often clarify otherwise ambiguous theoretical relationships, and empirical evidence is critical to any application of theory. Resource return rates are a case in point. Optimal foraging theory requires that we know return rates but it cannot tell us the return rates for individual resources, how they should be ranked, or whether they should be included in the diet. These are empirical questions requiring that we know resource-specific search times, handling times, and energetic costs and returns. There is nothing “theoretical” about this kind of fact-finding research (e.g., documenting search times), but it is absolutely critical to the application of foraging theory to specific archaeological cases. Americanists have spent a good deal of time profitably documenting return rates for key regional resources (Simms, 1985), and while there are excellent examples of this in Asia (e.g., Lu, 2002; Barlow and Heck, 2002), there is great potential for additional work. Rates of diffusion and culture change are another potentially productive area of theory-driven empirical research. Theory suggests that rates of diffusion should vary — be faster or slower, depending on a variety of conditions (environment, population density, technology, etc.), but provides few specifics regarding absolute rates or rates of increase/decrease (e.g., linear vs. exponential), even though these
3
details are critical elements of building and testing theory. The archaeological record is an essential source of information regarding these very important questions, the archaeological record of Asia specifically, because the region is so environmentally and culturally diverse. For example, I am particularly interested in the diffusion of bow and arrow technology, which likely evolved just once, somewhere in Eurasia, and subsequently diffused to the rest of the Old World and eventually the New World. Documenting the appearance of bow and arrow technology in different parts of Asia and integrating the results would provide theoretically valuable information about rates of diffusion and their variation in response to a variety of conditions, not to mention providing key data regarding local culture histories. 5. Conclusion I conclude with the observation that while theory will not play an important role in every contribution to Archaeological Research In Asia, that the subject has been so neglected presents prospective authors a multitude of attractive opportunities for cutting-edge contributions. I have suggested a few possibilities, and while I am less familiar with the bodies of theory that are more prominent in studies of more complex social formations, of ancient human adaptations and dispersals into Asia, and of a host of other matters that play a central role in understanding the archaeology of Asia, the Editors and Editorial Board of Archaeological Research in Asia provide more than enough expertise to evaluate such theoretical contributions. We urge you to consider submitting your work, and encouraging your colleagues to submit their work, to Archaeological Research in Asia. References Barlow, K.R., Heck, M., 2002. More on acorn eating during the Natufian: expected patterning in diet and the archaeological record of subsistence. In: Mason, S.L.R., Hather, J.G. (Eds.), Hunter–gatherer Archaeobotany: Perspectives From the Northern Temperate Zone. University College Institute of Archaeology, London, pp. 128–145. Bettinger, R.L., 1980. Explanatory–predictive models of hunter–gatherer behavior. In: Schiffer, M.B. (Ed.), Advances in Archaeological Theory and Method vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 189–255. Bettinger, R.L., 2009. Hunter–gatherer Foraging: Five Simple Models. Eliot Werner Publications, Clinton Corners, NY. Bettinger, R.L., Eerkens, J., 1999. Point typologies, cultural transmission, and the spread of bow and arrow technology in the prehistoric Great Basin. Am. Antiquity 64, 231–242. Boyd, R., Richerson, P.J., 1987. The evolution of ethnic markers. Cult. Anthropol. 2, 65–79. Lu, T.L.D., 2002. A green foxtail (Setaria viridis) cultivation experiment in the Middle Yellow River Valley and some related issues. Asian Perspect. 41, 1–14. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R., 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Simms, S.R., 1985. Acquisition costs and nutritional data on Great Basin resources. J. Calif. Great Basin Anthropol. 7, 117–126. Winterhalder, B., Smith, E.A., 1981. Hunter–gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic and Archaeological Analyses. University of Chicago, Chicago.
Robert L. Bettinger Editor-in-Chief Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA E-mail address: [email protected].
Available online xxxx
Please cite this article as: Bettinger, R.L., Editorial marking the inaugural issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, Archaeological Research in Asia (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2014.11.001