Geographical Areas of Specialization: Eastern
North America and Northern Europe
Topical Interests: Prehistory
of Eastern North America and northern Europe; Culture
Change; History and Philosophy of Archaeology; Computation
and Cognition
Current Courses: A400 Role of History in the Production of Anthropological Knowledge
Profile:
The dimensions of prehistory are staggering. If prehistory is to
cover the greater part of what has been termed the human career,
then perhaps two million years and most of the planet Earth serve
to inscribe its boundaries. As an intellectual, scholarly pursuit,
rooted in the here-and-now, prehistory comes in two interrelated
forms: as prehistory-1, with the emphasis on history, in which it
must anchor its narratives in verisimilitude (in the sense of lifelikeness)
and at the same time be true to the evidence of the historical past;
as prehistory-2, in its anthropological sense and with emphasis on "pre-",
it must attempt to account for the evolution of humankind and culture
(and humankind's capacity for culture) in ways that connect theories
(both grand and small) for such development with the evidence of
that development -- that is, the standard of judgment must be a scientific
definition of truth. In prehistory-1 there can be understanding without
explanation; in prehistory-2 there can be explanation without understanding.
A complete prehistory -- whatever that might mean -- must take into
account both subspecies of prehistory and the subtle relationships
between verity (with a small "v") and verisimilitude (in both its
senses of closer-to-the-truth and of lifelikeness).
I have spent the better part of my career in an attempt to write
the prehistory of a very small patch of the past: a few hundred years
and a few thousand square miles of west central Alabama. My goal
has been to understand and to explain the developments that led from
the genesis, through the florescence, and ultimately to the decline
and destruction of what has been called the Moundville phase, a late
prehistoric agricultural society situated in the middle reaches of
the Black Warrior River Valley. This quest, which has been conducted
in partnership with several other scholars, has included field survey
and excavation, analysis of museum collections, and the application
of techniques and instruments imported from the natural sciences
to answer various historical and anthropological questions. The multiple
foci of this work have ranged in scale from the diet and health of
individuals, to community and settlement structure, to the constitution
and organization of one of the largest prehistoric polities to have
arisen in North America.
When I came to Indiana University in 1985, my research interests
and skills transferred easily from the later prehistory of Alabama
to the analogous period in southern Indiana. The Glenn A. Black Laboratory
of Archaeology had created a rich and productive tradition of research
on the Angel site and phase of the Ohio River Valley. The pre- and
post-doctoral Prehistory Research Fellows attached to the Laboratory
and the Department of Anthropology and I have continued the research
on the Angel phase begun by Glenn A. Black in the 1930s and continued
by Professor James Kellar until his retirement in 1986. This work
has been broadened to include the exploration of a quite different
but contemporary prehistoric agricultural society, designated the
Oliver phase, which flourished throughout the East Fork and West
Fork of the White River of central and southern Indiana. It is too
early in this research to offer firm characterizations of the differences
between these two prehistoric polities, but preliminary analyses
of their diets suggest that they pursued different agricultural strategies
and hence effected different adaptations. A complete prehistory of
either polity will take another two decades of field and laboratory
research.
The technical side of my work has encompassed all aspects of computer
and information science. Perhaps the most mundane but nonetheless
necessary part of this effort has been the design and construction
of databases and management information systems for archaeological
research. Included among these databases was the initial design of
the National Archaeological Database for the National Park Service
(in collaboration with Professor Sandra Parker). Other somewhat more
amusing work with computers has included an outline for the design
of an early hominid mind, the design of expert systems for the analysis
of the structure of archaeological explanations (the "logicist" approach
advocated by Professor Jean-Claude Gardin and his associates at the
French CNRS), work with "fuzzy logic" for classification of artifacts,
and, currently, the creation of a large "hypertext" archive from
the documents contained in the Great Lakes - Ohio Valley Ethnohistory
Archive.
Selected Publications:
| 2002 |
"The Establishment and Management of IT Service
Support Systems"
信息技术服务支持系统的建立及其管理
Shanghai Quality 2002 No. 12, pp. 30-34 (in Chinese) |
| 2000 |
"Lifecycle Costs: More than the Cost of Hardware." Chapter
10, Technology-Driven Planning: Principles to
Practice, pp 59-70 . Society of University
and College Planners (SCUP). |
| 1994 |
"Aspects of a Cognitive Archaeology," Cambridge
Archaeological Journal, 3(2): 250-253 (1994). |
| 1992 |
Representations in Archaeology, (joint editor
and contributor with J.-C. Gardin) Indiana University
Press (1992). |
| 1990 |
"From History to Hermeneutics: The Place of
Theory in the Later Prehistory of the Southeast," Southeastern
Archaeology 9 (1) 23- 34 (1990). |
| 1987 |
"The Rise and Fall of the Mississippian in Western
Alabama: The Moundville and Summerville Phases,
A.D. 1000-1600," Mississippi Archaeology. 22(1):
1-31 (1987). |
| 1987 |
"Database and Management Information Systems
for Archaeologists," PACT 14: 13-44 (1987). |
| 1986 |
"Paradise Lost, Strayed, and Stolen: Prehistoric
Social Devolution in the Southeast," Proceedings
of the Southern Anthropological Society, 1982.
18; 24-40 (1986). |
| 1985 |
Prehistoric Agricultural Communities in West
Alabama, 3 vol. (editor and contributor), U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers, Mobile District (1985). |
| 1977 |
Excavations at Moundville: 1905-1951, University
of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (1977). |
