| With deep roots in the geological and historical life sciences, and in Antiquarianism, and with only shallow roots in ethnology, archaeology is both methodologically and theoretically a form of "cultural paleontology", committed to a macro-concept of cultural evolution parallel to that configured in the historical life sciences as "patterns above the species level". Archaeology's precarious commitment to the more holistic, population-oriented Boasian ethnological culture concept, its academic context within American cultural anthropology, and its traditional sources of funding, have tended to obscure both its origins and its scientific character.;Although nominally a senior Boasian and an ethnologist, Alfred Louis Kroeber offered archaeologists both methods and components of theory that served them in developing a more observable and approachable version of the culture concept, one that was suited to the strengths and compensated for the weaknesses of their discipline. These components emerged from his actually rather non-Boasian meta-structural (and meta-cultural) thinking, the most characteristic and persistent example of which was his version of the Spencerian Superorganic.;Kroeber, who turned to archaeology to compensate for lost preeminence in linguistics, probably did not intend to have such an extensive impact upon archaeologists, but his several-year foray into Peruvian prehistory during the 1920s, in particular, was well timed and produced a viable chronological model for the Andean Culture Area, the sine qua non of empirical culture history. It also produced a cadre of New World archaeologists who thereafter deferred and referred to him, and who collectively accomplished the first synthesis of "Culture Historical Archaeology" during the 1950s, just before the storm of the "New Processual Archaeology".;Kroeber's contributions to theoretical archaeology were hampered by vacillation regarding cultural evolution, a concept he derived partly from the 19 th Century traditions of Tylor and Spencer, partly from Darwin, and which he was at some pains to downplay in the context of the Boasian Ascendancy. His later work was more openly evolutionary in an emergent sense, but strains of this mode of thought were visible in some of his earliest writings. |
