This has been a fundamental question of archaeology since its beginnings. Some of the assumptions can be traced back to early geologists (such as the 'uniformitarian' approach championed in the early 1800s by Hutton and Lyell, who explained that processes we observe in the present, multiplied over the long-term, can be used to understand the patterns in sedimentary deposits, the basis for much ethnoarchaeology, ethnographic comparison, and ethnographic analogy).

The literature on this problem is to some extent as big as archaeology itself, but a few fundamental readings might help you think about how archaeologists at different times have addressed this question, and hopefully will provide some inspiration to refine your own thoughts on the topic.

The basic story in the Anglophone world is that the first phase of formal archaeology was more or less about identifying materials and trying to figure out what could be done with them in terms of relating them to past peoples. North American archaeology is closely aligned to anthropology, unlike Europe where archaeology was largely its own discipline or more aligned with history, especially in the case of Classical archaeology. In the 1950s, there was increasing dissatisfaction with business as usual as people began trying to find better causal answers to questions about social systems and importantly social change (this diachronic dimension largely distinguished archaeology from ethnography or cultural anthropology from the 1960s onwards). In the late 1960s, there was a widespread effort in the field of archaeology, especially in North America, to use rigorous scientific methods and theories (hypothesis testing) to answer this question. By the late 1980s, there was frustration with the functionalism and lack of reflexivity of the 'processualists', leading to a 'post-processualist' movement, which placed greater emphasis on the contemporary socio-political context and influences in archaeological thought.

The present is very interesting, as we see all kinds of interesting mixes of scientific and philosophical approaches. The history of archaeology is extremely important for understanding why things appear the way they do now in terms of what used to be called 'Middle Range Theory'. Some useful books to check out, if you can access them would be:

Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge University Press)

Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology (W H Freeman & Co; try to get the 2nd or 3rd editions as these were much updated from the first)

Gavin Lucas, Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (Routledge)

Dear Andone

It is very interesting question. I would suggest that social thought would be better term than social system, because the past is not what it is , but how we want it to be in the present. my research on social thought shows how archaeologists are far from the real..

Thanks 

Hi Andone

I recomend You to contact with Prof. Sławomir Kadrow. He is on ResearchGate. Maybe in his works there are some informations and answers to your question.

Best Regards

Maciej Wawrzczak

It seems that often, any given historical-cultural narrative is developed by consensus. Yet even this narrative is usually surrounded by some or much debate, no matter the consensus. Likewise, postulating more than one cause creates an opening for debate.

Any given narrative is constructed by weaving together facts derived from multiple sources, whether they be textual, archaeological, and a mix of these. So I doubt very much, that ambiguity can be reduced more than the scholars of any given time period are able to formulate one or more narratives, based on the evidence unearthed or obtained.

Also, scholars admit when they have no idea about the role of a segment of a past society, because at that current time there is a dearth of evidence.  

I hope this helps. 

Archaeologists generally must apply a lot of guesswork (albeit educated guesswork) to their art. In some situations, some inference can be taken from written or oral histories.

For example:

Archeologists will use Icelandic Sagas when studying artifacts from the Viking Age. While the Norse peoples of the Viking Age did not leave any written histories, their oral traditions were later transcribed to paper (even if they were muddled by the scribes a bit who phrased some bits with verbiage from their own time). They may also use written records of nearby or similar cultures from the same time, especially if that culture interacted with them at that time. 

I agree with Kristina D Williams. The archeology and the sciences that study the biological evolution have many similitudes. The advantage of archeology is that human societies let records ( not only by writing because the rupestrian art contributes a lot of information ) of the events that occurred in the past or transmit themselves by oral tradition. I consider than while more be the number of sources of which the archeologist get the information from, more will be able to be brought near to reality. Also many social relations maintain his structure since the writing exist to leave record of it, for that the comparison among ancient societies and contemporary societies, it can contribute with many indirect evidence.

Hi Andone, you put a question which according to my experience, especially some wellknown professors don´t put themselves any more, as they appareently forgot about it by their fame.

May be i am a Little bad sometims, sorry.

One part is very easy: look in all the surrounding fields and subjects for questions or answers which might be helpful and do this in as many languages as possible and use the Software and Internet as thoruoghly as possible, but not only alone.

For the other part empathy is needed, which some people obviously seem to refuse to learn.

These answers are may be not what you suspected, but i hope they are useful anyway.

Good luck andsuccess, Thomas

This has been a fundamental question of archaeology since its beginnings. Some of the assumptions can be traced back to early geologists (such as the 'uniformitarian' approach championed in the early 1800s by Hutton and Lyell, who explained that processes we observe in the present, multiplied over the long-term, can be used to understand the patterns in sedimentary deposits, the basis for much ethnoarchaeology, ethnographic comparison, and ethnographic analogy).

The literature on this problem is to some extent as big as archaeology itself, but a few fundamental readings might help you think about how archaeologists at different times have addressed this question, and hopefully will provide some inspiration to refine your own thoughts on the topic.

The basic story in the Anglophone world is that the first phase of formal archaeology was more or less about identifying materials and trying to figure out what could be done with them in terms of relating them to past peoples. North American archaeology is closely aligned to anthropology, unlike Europe where archaeology was largely its own discipline or more aligned with history, especially in the case of Classical archaeology. In the 1950s, there was increasing dissatisfaction with business as usual as people began trying to find better causal answers to questions about social systems and importantly social change (this diachronic dimension largely distinguished archaeology from ethnography or cultural anthropology from the 1960s onwards). In the late 1960s, there was a widespread effort in the field of archaeology, especially in North America, to use rigorous scientific methods and theories (hypothesis testing) to answer this question. By the late 1980s, there was frustration with the functionalism and lack of reflexivity of the 'processualists', leading to a 'post-processualist' movement, which placed greater emphasis on the contemporary socio-political context and influences in archaeological thought.

The present is very interesting, as we see all kinds of interesting mixes of scientific and philosophical approaches. The history of archaeology is extremely important for understanding why things appear the way they do now in terms of what used to be called 'Middle Range Theory'. Some useful books to check out, if you can access them would be:

Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge University Press)

Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology (W H Freeman & Co; try to get the 2nd or 3rd editions as these were much updated from the first)

Gavin Lucas, Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (Routledge)

This is a good question, as I often feel that proxies are used too frequently without being justified and are just assumed to be valid. Although extremely useful, a proxy is just proxy and its value is only as good as its correlation to thing it represents. Any use of a proxy needs to be justified. For proxies already commonly used, it should be possible to back-track in the peer-reviewed literature and locate studies that proposed and also tested its validity. Ideally this will have been done a number of times in different setting and populations, which can provide insight into the strengths and limitations of the proxy, all of which should be discussed when using a given proxy. Interpreting the archaeological record can be very problematic at times and there is the danger that we may inadvertently impose our own ideologies when trying to interpret past human behaviour – this is why there must always be sound theoretical under-pining to any proxy.

As an example in funerary archaeology, burial goods are sometimes used as an indicator of SES (but depending on the particular culture). So if burial goods are a valid proxy for SES, it should allow predictions to be made that ultimately test its validity. For example, if a group of individuals were indeed high status one might expect their skeletal remains to reflect a life in which they had better access to nutritional resources, including perhaps less physiological stress indicators and increased longevity, relative to those deemed lower SES.

Dear Andone,

First of all, thank you for the relevant and interesting question, and my thanks also go to the contributors of the exciting debate. I have found very informative e.g., Christina's and James' posts and I agree mostly with them.

Many of you have tackled the ambiguity of archaeological narratives, that is in my opinion often true.

However, to be fair, one should also take into account that archaeology cannot be compared to e.g., physics or chemistry.

There is a number of disciplines (I would consider archaeology, paleontology, parts of astronomy, Mars research, and alike) in which the "scientific truth" cannot be verified by repeating the experiment, because there is lack of archaeological finds, fossils, the supernova cannot be repeated, or one cannot go to do (yet) fieldwork on Mars. Consequently, many conclusions are speculative (hopefully they are not simply fairy tales), and, as Kristina mentioned, they are intended to be educated guesswork.

In some disciplines speculative statements are not allowed at all, in other disciplines (e.g., in geology) it is allowed to be somewhat speculative in a paper (e.g. in Discussion and Conclusions), but the speculative part should be clearly separated from the experimental/observational/analytical part of the contribution. In my opinion that is what does not happen often in the case of archaeology. Why? Because many archaeologists have no too much background in natural sciences (yet) so they are not aware of this requirement. (Note: for long time it was not a requirement in archaeology, see James' nice post.)

Nowadays the situation is IMHO improving. As the archaeometry and geoarchaeology slowly but surely take their well deserved place in the archaeological prospection, many statements that were previously written in a paper, become questionable, or possibly would be filtered out.

What I expect to come (and some of my colleagues try to establish, but they find it not easy), to try to see the whole picture: have a look on the current society of a country and see what important aspects would be observable in the (future) archaeological record and what not. How does the road network look like? What would be fossilized of that? How was that in the Antiquity? Certainly the use of SMS or webpages will not be observed in an archaeological site (of the future), but some mobile phones or computer parts would be found. So what could and what should be the conclusion of the future archaeologist with a fossil  mobile phone? What was its use? Was it widespread?

This leads me to the other guesswork (that should be done also): What is the ratio of the findings and their real use? I raise some questions just to make you think about what my colleagues consider to do a better archaeology:

You will find many concrete parts of today's buildings, maybe some pipelines, but very little from WIFI architecture. What is the correct conclusion?

If we go back to Roman times, we will find many sculptures of marble (nice and for us valuable), but were these so important in Roman times in the everyday life? If we reconstruct from where the marble came from in Antiquity, does this have any meaning for other goods? Today we have also statues, but they are not so important part of our life as webpages (BTW. 30 years ago this statement was not true at all.)

What would be an allowed conclusion of an archaeologist who finds a buried, 50 m by 1 km broken concrete flat object in the jungle of an ocean island in the Pacific (actually an abandoned runway) who has no idea about the WWII?

I believe that what now happens (including e.g., . the formulation of Andone's question) indicates that the change of considerations is a part of the inherent development of archaeology (see the post of James for more examples).

Thank you again for the question and for the interesting discussion, kind regards, Balázs

Wow! Most of these answers reflect the difference between Americanist archaeology (anthropological archaeology) with most of the rest of the world, as noted by James L Flexner above.

Beyond Flexner's suggestions about the history of American archaeology, I would start off with Schiffer, M.B. 1976. Behavioral Archeology. Academic Press. You can go to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brian_Schiffer) for a very short discussion of his writings and a bibliography.

Schiffer is just the starting point. There is a very broad literature starting with the "New Archaeology," through behavioral archaeology and processional archaeology to post-procsessual archaeology that impacts on your question.

I think Schiffer is an important starting point because he points out the difference between the archaeological context (archaeological record) that we observe and the systemic context that we are trying to study and the natural and cultural processes that change the systemic context to the archaeological context.

Schiffer's writings are an expansion and criticism of Lewis Binford's polemical assertion that the archaeological record is a fossil record of the social and behavior system that want to study and any aspect is equally accessible. The only limitation on archaeological knowledge is in the thinking of the archaeologist.

Heisenberg wrote about Physics what is true for many other subjects, but unfortunately often overseen: You do not explore physics etc., but you only get an answer (hopefully)on the question you have been putting on your object of reseach. And your question of course is determined by how bright you are, what is important for you from your personal, financial, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, ...... Point of view. Which altogether Shows, there is no neutral, objective, valuefree Research.

Archaeology, as many other sciences, is an interpretative endeavour. And any interpretation is subjective. However, by using the scientific method and the methods and techniques that archaeologists have designed to overcome the limitations of interpreting past events, it is argued that there is legitimacy to this endeavour. In my humble opinion, it would be foolish to assume that archaeologists are objectively describing the "reality" of the past. But that does not mean that it is not useful or not possible to do Archaeology. Look up Processual Archaeology, Post-Processual Archeology and Historical Processualism. 

In the case of Japanese origins of relations between men and Nature, in the wide range of research techniques and instruments used by paleobotanists, paleo-archeologists, archaeo-botanists, archaeologists, geographers and anthropologists, where it has been, we made a synthesis in the sense of combining the advances of scientific disciplines in the multiple sets of data (materials, climatological, botanical, biotic and dates) local and regional neighbors even continental China, Korea and Russia with reconstruction models of social, economic and cultural environments and have sided with those they have more evidence and field analysis models which allow generalizations (the exercise of data interpretation) or by the amount of evidence in certain localities or regions, or by synthesis of factors involved in the processes (climate change, vegetation, volcanic activity, inter-group contacts, etc.) that mark, in a way, certain types of social behavior. Where the factors involved in the socio-cultural processes are complex and have found contradictions between academics, we have left open the discussion that is also typical of researchers and specialists in the various disciplinary matters. Science is perfectible.

Andone -

I think that the logic that Victor and others expressed has to be considered. Just as in determining the truth of an historical account, different motivations and other evidence need to be considerably consistent to be used as independent, partial evidence. When my son was a child he asked me how do we know that a certain historical account is true?  Good question. But this led to a better understanding of the importance of the exercise of logical reasoning.  In the question here, the further concern that for these "proxies" we must consider that we may not have an unbiased basis for logical reasoning, does appear to present a substantial  additional complication. Moving from Ancient Greek logic to the scientific method is harder when you cannot be sure of  'experimental facts.'   Interesting question, and one I did not really encounter - at least not in such a way - as a mathematical statistician.

However, here is something that does relate more directly to statistical science (and other disciplines, I'm sure).  You made the following comment in the explanation of your question:  "...many causes can have the same observable effect in the archaeological register..."  Correspondingly, I have seen more than one question on ResearchGate where someone states that they have a resulting measure, or measures, from a statistical study, and they want to know how to 'back up' to the original data.  The answer in such cases would generally have to be that "You cannot get there from here."  There are many data sets and methodologies that could have led to the same result.  Fortunately in your case, you are talking about an application that is not so narrow, so you can at least apply some indirect evidence using reasoning that you can caveat, and then later amend your reasoning and conclusions when more information becomes available, which does not really sound so different from approaches in the physical sciences.

Thank you all for the question and responses here, which have been edifying for me.

Cheers - Jim 

An indeed interesting question. Causality is always fundamental. However, I propose, in studying such questions, that there is no need to distinguish between archaeology and any other of the sciences. This would (probably) even include quantum theory (both of the past and of the future). 

Andone asks specifically about interpretation of social systems in the past. A classic criticism of some archaeological interpretations has been that the author looks to interpret the relationship among structures or features of a site, e.g.,, residential loci, but actually describes interactions among the persons who may have occupied these structures. There is a disjunction here that can only be bridged with clear statements about the assumptions being made to create that bridge. As James and Ivo point out, you can make your presentation and the reader/listener can judge to what extent the data and assumptions support the conclusion, or can amend the interpretation or propose alternatives. Ultimately, if archaeology is an anthropological discipline studying human behavior based upon preserved and recovered artifacts and structures, it is necessary to present interpretations in the context of human behavior and social systems--else we are merely uncovering pretty or interesting objects. We state our case and recognize that others may present alternative explanations based on different assumptions.

Although archaeology deals with human behavior in the past, I think there may often be some confusion about the scale at which we see those behaviors. Many archaeologists are optimistic that we can infer social systems or other ethnographic behavior at a comparable scale to what I can see if I enter a village of traditional hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, or pastoralists. This is unlikely. Very few archaeological sites preserve short-term moments, except as palimpsest deposits along with many other events and potentially at much longer time scales. An archaeologically inferred "social system" would more likely be an abstraction about human activities and social interactions at a temporal and mixed behavioral scale that would not have been obvious to the participants in that past system, and may be quite distinct from anything that we can appreciate even from very long-term ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological observations. I think that archaeological approaches to past social interactions must first recognize that observable ethnographic models of social systems are not what we are likely to find in the archaeological record. The archaeological scale of resolution in patterns of human behavior is much more likely to present unique, deep-time views of our social organization. These may address important responses to environmental stability or change, cultural practices that change for reasons we wish to further investigate, or evolutionary questions about changing hominin/human adaptations in behavior and/or our biology (i.e., mother/infant relationships, roles of fathers, effects of cooperation on diets and group size, etc.). As in all science this isn't really "justifying" the proxies we use, but a continual search for relevant relationships between many different kinds of archaeological data that our current knowledge suggests may be useful in creating more sophistication in our understanding of human sociality beyond our ability to make inferences about bones and stones. As Lewis Binford once said in class, "Science is about expanding the horizons of our ignorance."

Tal vez el mejor resumen de lo que fue el espíritu verificacionista de la vieja "nueva arqueología" (escrito desde las entrañas de la tormenta imperial)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40976938?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40976953?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Aquí mi versión semiótico-cuasi fenomenológica de la epistemología en arqueología

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271825857_Comentarios_al_margen_sobre_la_arqueologa_en_Colombia

La versión arqueológico-estructural-genealógica de Criado Boado

http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/34973

http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CMPL/article/viewFile/39597/38102

Article Comentarios al margen sobre la arqueología en Colombia

Rusty has some interesting points, but  they may point out some interesting conundrums. First, when you visit a hunter-gatherer or agricultural, or pastoral village, you cannot truly elucidate the cultural system based on a momentary or short term view. On the other hand, there are many instances of archaeological sites presenting a snapshot in time--a burned kiva in a southwestern US pueblo, a defensive wall across structures in a Mayan center. The complex remains of an ancient city, however, may provide evidence of contiguous or adjacent contemporaneous structures across a site, as well as developmental changes through time. The archaeologist may need to be attuned to the types of inferences that may be logically made from these records, as well as the techniques necessary to recover data from the record and the limitations in the range of inferences possible. Perhaps you cannot identify family structure or kinship at a site, but social stratification may be observable. Specific characteristics about the social hierarchy may be absent, but anthropological principles may inform us as to the role of hierarchies in social behavior. So while it is true that analogy with current ethnographic models may be an inappropriate proxy, these ethnographic models may be useful so far as they provide abstractions of "laws" of human bahavior.  Perhaps  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-011-9055-0  OR  http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/the_americas/v070/70.2.abrams.html  can provide some information.

Thomas, I certainly agree with your point that even ethnography has a very difficult time addressing what cultural or social system may be. I also have had a few rare opportunities to see short-term events that can be analytically seen in the archaeological record (the burned and unretrieved stored sample of maize from a SW pithouse, or a short-term seasonal occupation in the Plains). Gone (I hope) are our simplistic expectations that social systems are entirely contained within the minds of the participants, and the perspective that "culture" is purely an ideational construct. The interest in social systems as the sum of many diverse events and behaviors, not just as the emic perspective on cultural "rules", makes a much more exciting challenge to better understand the tremendous variation in these aspects of uniquely human behaviors, through time and in many different environments. I still think however, that it can be hard to further abstract social systems in relation to the archaeological record's resolution that can be even more opaque as a view or concept of the complexities of human sociality, even in hunter-gatherers systems. My concern in archaeology are some of the trends alleging we can address particular participant level dynamics or the roles of "individuals" in the past, without the development of more robust inferential methods. In the theme of this discussion, I see many of those interests not to be as concerned with the methodological challenges to either "see" individuals in the past, except to identify those as topics of interest, but even more problematic is the stipulation that those represent the appropriate scale of relevance to improved archaeological knowledge, despite the time-averaging nature of most archaeological deposits.  

All of these discussions are good. Generally, we use examples of the present and past to compare with what we encounter in the archaeological record. This interpretation often is a consensus agreed upon by past researchers or those working on a particular site. However, as in many branches of science, we are finding that some earlier interpretations were based on inaccurate or false assumptions. The Early Archaic period Dalton culture in the southern United States is an excellent example. Originally, it was said to have been a riverine based culture derived from southeastern Paleo-Indian peoples transitioning from big game hunting to a more sedentary eastern woodlands subsistence strategy. We now know that early observation of Dalton sites being clustered along rivers was biased due to all of the WPA work done in the river basins and that Dalton is equally represented in the uplands.

Still, we also have to be willing to accept or evaluate other theories. The Sherlock Holmes' logic test should be the archaeologist's mantra. Until we list all of the possibilities, however improbable, and then eliminate them one by one can we arrive at an explanation or list of possible explanations. At one Late Archaic through Woodland site in the SE U.S. we had numerous in situ piles of fired clay cooking balls with the occasional piece of ferruginous sandstone within the Late Archaic horizon. These were interpreted as cooking hearths. However, one feature at the edge of the site consisted exclusively of large to medium chunks of ferruginous sandstone that had evidence of burning. I hypothesized that it might be evidence of a sweat lodge, which are mentioned as being utilized by Native Americans throughout the Southeast in numerous early historical accounts. However, the principle investigator thought that the sweat lodge idea was ridiculous and that the pile of ferruginous sandstone was an atypical cooking hearth. Without considering the sweat lodge hypothesis and then rejecting it for sound scientific reasons, the feature interpretation is then biased. Thus our most important job as archaeologists is to use every resource at our disposal to correctly interpret the archaeological record and to give alternate explanations when ambivalent about the interpretation.