THE THEORETICAL BASE the environment] This is true from the small Baer acitacs Wh the targets naell bead Bayis tale ean ogregus of por J damental relationship which the archaeologist that It efections in ih effets on the ene vironment must be similorly patterned. and it the expliation of this rlaioshipbe- jor and environment whi hols Toga stndiea} The Imperfection and incompleteness of opal records hus been Seeuaed AS. Levis Binford.”(1968«:5-27) has tines bea. overated eet teeta real problem In very imay cass It gn6 _pecs all portions of whole cultural system THs be representa! in some ty of alban ~the_archacological reeord,/ However, this is 2 toully unvealste expecaion 16 old the fis place, and T hope make. some tuggatons 1s'to how this problem ean bo Looking back ovet the past de seem to be vee major themes which Iypity urrent ends in archaeological thinking. Other workers might perceive these some- what diferenty, but 1 would expeet at last eee agroement, These Include 1) an in Sreanng concer over the Integrated nature of cute and the neces for stesing the focture of the varied content of past cule | tures, 2) a new stress on fincr-grain tech- “igues for the description and integration of hacological materials, aided immensely by pac aaa desea pom a ee See es sae ae ae a eters, ce opens eer ee ee fal ETN dng poe per ete peace cere a ile Gleeiob ate eth ea Gea ai Bee cami ii Er i tag i cari nas te sy oes sade eee rete ae et Teh esenigl armel ie ice onset ie ee eee aes Mecsas mr See ee = earn eee Se eee prea Co NESE a rma pees gc er Neen oe age ce, eee eee ene igo ely oa le Cae eH ieee ieee te ee ee” eee gn ce se rneere aren erpapiem pe ae een pe ce ess mom “id pe ls rote ere oes ee ete aaa eee | which is mark tent, Shellfish sce points ref hunting. These p those from 1 fornia. Mili hopper which bi that's not read th asphaltum, used mortars, to proo The last major size. Standard equi are massive ston: cases hundreds 0 large cylindrical st Cultural historic these data tend te valid_points. There tence technolo; give way to hopp give way to larg points and their ing increase and t relai conclusions when tHement data, The ferent way to loc reach somewhat of some basic ast southern Califort same time make tural histor it should be em form and not ni as a statementArchaeolog ‘James F. Dt 116 ies of this approach\Recent work, a level of efficiency of animal busbandry of fact in an it published by archaeologists, prom sufficient height that hunting was no longer his death, of sharpen our understanding of some necessary. Alternately one might suggest a So you ean | many factors which affect the freque of certain artifact types at_different in the past which go far beyond simple opularty. The method of seriation is based {On the assumption that styles appear, in- © erease and decrease and finally vanish as a function of popularity. This is true, but, in aligning. archacologjcal_ assem cording to this method, it is implicitly as- sumed that these changes are uniformly op- erative on all peoples in a restricted area of time and space. Yet we know now that a simple factor such as socioeconomic status ean create a marked difference in just what artifacts are present in a given household and will produce a significant skew in the proposed temporal is really operating more at the level of tegrative method than it is explanation, but till is a valid point. F One of the contributions of historical ar- ‘chacology is an increased awareness that the record of the past is perhaps fay more com plex than we normally assume/Such a cau- tion is a healthy thing in archaeology today, since, while we are moving toward more de- tailed and specific inferences about the past, it follows that a greater complexity of rela- tionships will be perceived. And 10 oversim- plify at this point can be quite dangerous, if not in fact disasterous, ‘An example will make this clear. We've been studying the faunal remainis from a series of 7 seventeenth-century house sites in old Plymouth Colony for the past year. From mid-century onwards there is a somewhat surprising ‘pattern in the mammalian food sources. Approximately 98 percent of the meat consumed was from domesticated a ‘mals. Hunting was an insignificant factor. ited documentary research shows that this patiern is probably typical of the earlier portion of the century as well. A domestic- to-feral ratio of this type in the absence of controls would be interpreted as reflecting Grastic reduction in the number of game ani- mals. The historical facts, however, provide a very different explanation, one which it is very unlikely could be determined from a chacological analysis, again without the kind ‘of control we've had. Legislation governing hhunting rights in their native England was so restricted on the yeomanry that they en- ured food shortages a number of times without resorting to hunting on any signifi- cant seale, Recent research by Patrick Ma- lone of the University of Pennsylvania, as yet unpublished, develops this and the Yol- Towing quite clearly. This reluctance to hunt would appear to result from a retention of altitudes toward hunting engendered prior to colonization, combined with an unfamiliarity with the use of firearms in hunting. Aiming a1 musket, indispensable to efficient hunting, ‘was s0 totally foreign a concopt that it was not even included in a 40-point manual of arms othe period. This really surprises peo- ple—at least it certainly did me. 1 realize this isnt a session on American history, but the fact is that the whole idea of picking out 4 target and selecting and shooting the target didn’t come until the eighteenth century! Guns of this period were things that you haeld in rows of 20 or 30 people and sired broadside at the advancing company of sol- diets. And if any of them fel, it was an act of God rather than your marksmanship which Jed to this result. So the idea of pointing it at something and letting it go was totally outside their cognitive view of what one did with afrearm, Correlated with this was a scemingly dis- proportionate number of fowling pieces in household inventories of the time and a cor- resporiding high level of waterfowl remains in the sites. (We have up to now transeribed 300 of these inventories and there will be about a thousand of them when we're fin- ished. They are lovely things for archacologi- cal control because they list every single arti- hundred squ years. And y with them. 1 though you » dealing with Shooting dt the difficulty aiming was + ciently great istence even