The Archaeology of the Absurd: Comments on ℌCultural Materialism, Split Inheritance, and the Expansion of Ancient Peruvian Empiresℍ

Conrad's discussion bears little relation to the generally accepted outline of Peruvian prehistory. He presents evidence that is not evidence in support of a weak and untestable hypothesis. Since he is apparently unacquainted with a substantial body of recent and current research, he has launched superficial and absurd criticisms at the proposition that changes in climate are reflected in changes in human society and culture. Not only is this theory substantiated by a growing number of independent studies, but ironically enough Conrad joins their ranks by supporting my hypothesis about climate and culture in late prehistoric Andean cultures. His shallow arguments opposing cultural materialism do not deal with issues and are far from convincing. Altogether his work appears to belong to a previously unidentified archaeological specialty, the Archaeology of the Absurd. UNTIL THE LATE 1950s, AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY REMAINED in an era of historical particularism, which relied upon emic data and idealist models and which denied the possibility of explaining or even discovering regularities of processes of sociocultural change. At the time it was said, "So little work has been done at the explanatory level that it is difficult to find a name for it" (Willey and Phillips 1958:5). By the 1960s, however, a methodological and theoretical revolution in archaeological strategy and tactics had occurred, which for the first time emphasized the supreme importance of etic data and rigorously precise chronological control. Fundamental to these operational changes was an explicit materialistic paradigmatic model based on the proposition that subsistence, economics, and other material conditions provide the best road to the understanding of past preliterate human cultures. In the last 20 years, the use of these procedures and principles has satisfactorily subsumed, explained, and predicted larger bodies of previously unrelated archaeological facts than ever before. It has also allowed us to begin to formulate sets of interpenetrating and mutually supportive middle-range theories about hominid extrasomatic adaptation from Australopithecine to Geoffrey Conrad. A wing of this movement toward scientific rigor, led by Peruvianists from the University of California, Berkeley, introduced into New World archaeology methods of artifactual analysis and chronological ordering which in Egypt (Petrie 1900) and in Greece (Richter 1946) had already succeeded in establishing highly refined and internally coherent chronological frameworks. As John H. Rowe pointed out, increased refinement and precision of relative chronology "increases the opportunity for studying cultural process, much as the development of apparatus for studying smaller particles in physics increases the opportunity for studying physical process" (Rowe 1959:317). This approach produced a very detailed and internally consistent regional sequence embracing 3,000 years of the ceramic prehistory of the Ica Valley on the south coast of Peru. This sequence was then adopted as a master sequence to act as a standard framework of chronological reference for all of Peru, where it has been accepted for the last 20 years. The same procedures of analysis and ordering have been diffused elsewhere, for example, to the Santa Elena Peninsula