Reynolds, Natasha

Riede, Felix

English

Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication

HAL Id: hal-02316312
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02316312
Submitted on 15 Oct 2019
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.
L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.
Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License
Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the
European Upper Palaeolithic and beyond
Natasha Reynolds, Felix Riede
To cite this version:
Natasha Reynolds, Felix Riede. Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the European
Upper Palaeolithic and beyond. Antiquity, Antiquity Publications/Cambridge University Press, 2019,
93 (371), pp.1368-1370. ￿10.15184/aqy.2019.156￿. ￿hal-02316312￿
Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural
taxonomy in the European Upper
Palaeolithic and beyond
Natasha Reynolds1,* & Felix Riede2
We begin this response by thanking Antiquity for hosting this debate on the current crisis in
European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy, and by thanking the three commentators
for their perspectives (Marwick 2019; Scerri 2019; Shea 2019). We note that our critique
of the motley crew of contemporary cultural taxonomies and the plethora of practices produ-
cing them is positively received by all of the commentators. Importantly, BenMarwick, Elea-
nor Scerri and John Shea further note that these issues are of much broader geographic
concern, extending to Palaeolithic cultural taxonomies in Africa and North America.
While our primary expertise and hence the focus of our original contribution lies with the
European Upper Palaeolithic, classiﬁcation issues evidently also beset less well-published
records such as the South American Palaeoindian period (Araujo 2015), the Mesolithic of
Northern Europe (Friman 1996) and, most probably, many other regions where European
approaches to lithic classiﬁcation have been applied. The issues that we raise appear as
widespread as they are urgent.
We further note the strong support given to our call for improved data standards and data
sharing. Both Scerri and Marwick rightly ﬂag up structural issues of intellectual ownership
and power in the discipline. The ﬁrmly entrenched notion that excavators or analysts own
data or, even worse, actual material or the right to access it, remains widespread and is likely
to change only slowly. Although it remains true that, as Scerri points out, data are a form of
hard ‘currency’ for many researchers, in other ﬁelds, as Marwick observes, data sharing is
insisted upon, creating a level playing ﬁeld for those confronted with a highly competitive
job market. It should also be noted that we are not recommending that all data are shared
as soon as they are collected and before the researcher has had the chance to analyse and pub-
lish. Rather, we advocate that data are shared alongside any publications that rely upon them,
and that all research projects have a strategy for storing and sharing their data (cf. the data-
management plans required as part of projects funded by Horizon 2020). Fundamentally,
as Marwick discusses, solving the problem of the availability of data about our shared
human past is not just important for doing better archaeology, but is also at heart a question
1 UMR 5199 PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, Bâtiment B8, Allée Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, CS 50023, 33615 PES-
SAC CEDEX, France
2 Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Moesgård Allé 20, Højbjerg 8270, Denmark
* Author for correspondence (Email: natasha.reynolds@u-bordeaux.fr)
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
antiquity 93 371 (2019): 1368–1370 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.156
1368
of equitability and scientiﬁc fairness. Given the pervasive structural inequalities in access to
the archaeological record, those of us who have the privilege of researching the past have a
responsibility to share fully the data collected.
Like Scerri, we also hope that funding agencies and employers will be supportive of basic,
blue-skies archaeological research that tackles both empirical and conceptual issues. Argu-
ably, it has been an accretionist, risk-averse approach to traditional cultural taxonomies
that has largely created the current situation. Marwick’s very welcome situating of the prob-
lem within the wider context of the philosophy of science suggests that signiﬁcant break-
throughs may be forthcoming if we can change our approach, although we cannot expect
overnight results. Following Shea’s pragmatic suggestion, however, we would also urge
reform-minded colleagues to blaze the trail where they can; they will not only most likely
enjoy increased impact (cf. McKiernan et al. 2016), but also contribute to changing practice
by example.
Those of us who teach can multiply our agency in this matter by reaching out to the com-
ing generations of professionals. Guidelines for best practice in open science are now available
(Cook et al. 2018) and, when coupled with critical thinking concerning disciplinary history
and methods, we have a powerful cocktail for change. Those among us who sit on assessment
committees, review panels and editorial boards also play an important role in changing the
standards of scholarly practice within the discipline, as noted by Marwick.
What might such a new practice look like? Shea and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Scerri pro-
mote the radical position of abandoning the now well-known NASTIES—Shea’s (2014)
NAmed Stone Tool IndustriES—of traditional taxonomies. Asmuch as we see the ﬂaws in con-
temporary taxonomies as fundamental, we are hesitant to reject cultural taxonomy outright.
There is structure in the archaeological record, and abandoning taxonomies altogether would
limit, we fear, the types of questions that we can ask and the resolution at which we can address
culture change. This is especially the case for the European Upper Palaeolithic, where techno-
typological patterning in the record, in space and time, is clearer than it is elsewhere.With Scerri
(2019: 1364), we plead for describing lithic “variation on its own terms”, that is, from the
bottom up and in ways that allow objects, measurements and interpretations to be followed
and replicated; as these data are aggregated across assemblages, structure inevitably emerges.
Taxonomic descriptions of this structure do have their uses, not least for communication.
Naturally, we agree entirely with Shea’s point that archaeologists should deﬁne their own
research goals, but the absence of a robust cultural taxonomy in the Upper Palaeolithic makes
it much harder than it should be: we are currently burdened with an unreliable framework for
describing the record. This makes it extremely difﬁcult to design and conduct large-scale
investigations of variation and change. We need better understanding of the cultural tax-
onomy of the Upper Palaeolithic not just to enable comparison with results from other ﬁelds,
but also so that we can formulate better archaeological questions. That said, Scerri is right to
observe that our failure to create more robust datasets has led to the devaluation of archae-
ology within interdisciplinary studies of prehistory: our present shortcomings have repercus-
sions for the status of our ﬁeld as a whole.
Rather than rejecting cultural taxonomy, we would prefer to see renewed attention and
debate well beyond this forum. We also hope to see rapid changes in archaeological practice
to provide more shared data and methodological descriptions that can inform this debate. In
Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy
D
eb
at
e
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2019
1369
their comments, both Marwick and Scerri note the many new tools—for data acquisition,
analysis and sharing—that have become available in recent years. These developments are
encouraging. The last time Stone Age taxonomies were debated in the pages of Antiquity
(see Neeley & Barton 1994, and the responses reviewed by Barton & Neeley 1996), no reso-
lution was apparent, and despite the wide citation of this debate within the literature, it
appears to have had little concrete impact on classiﬁcation practice. By taking advantage of
the new means of open science, however, we will not be restricted to arguing our points
based on the limited evidence traditionally available, but can bring a transformative dose
of data to bear on this most longstanding of archaeological problems.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the respondants, Ben Marwick, Eleanor Scerri and John Shea, for their perceptive
commentary. N.R. thanks the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 747400; F.R. thanks the Independent Research Fund Denmark for
grant 6107-00059B and the European Research Council (Consolidator Grant agreement 817564 under the
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme).
References
Araujo, A.G.M. 2015. On vastness and variability:
cultural transmission, historicity, and the
Paleoindian record in Eastern South America. Anais
da Academia Brasileira de Ciências 87: 1239–58.
https://doi.org/10.1590/0001-
3765201520140219
Barton, C.M. & M.P. Neeley. 1996. Phantom
cultures of the Levantine Epipaleolithic. Antiquity
70: 139–47.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00082995
Cook, K., C. Çakirlar, T. Goddard,
R.C. DeMuth & J. Wells. 2018. Teaching
open science: published data and digital literacy in
archaeology classrooms. Advances in
Archaeological Practice 6: 144–56.
https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2018.5
Friman, B. 1996. Does the Kongemose Culture
exist? About the concept of culture. Archaeologia
Polona 34: 143–63.
Marwick, B. 2019. Galisonian logic devices and
data availability: revitalising Upper Palaeolithic
cultural taxonomies. Antiquity 93: 1365–67.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.131
McKiernan, E.C., P.E. Bourne, C.T. Brown,
S. Buck, A. Kenall, J. Lin, D. McDougall,
B.A. Nosek, K. Ram, C.K. Soderberg,
J.R. Spies, K. Thaney, A. Updegrove,
K.H. Woo & T. Yarkoni. 2016. How open
science helps researchers succeed. eLife 5: e16800.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800
Neeley, M.P. & C.M. Barton. 1994. A new
approach to interpreting Late Pleistocene
microlith industries in Southwest Asia. Antiquity
68: 275–88.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00046585
Scerri, E.M.L. 2019. Cultural taxonomy for the
European Upper Palaeolithic: a wide-ranging
problem. Antiquity 93: 1362–64.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.135
Shea, J.J. 2014. Sink the Mousterian? Named stone
tool industries (NASTIES) as obstacles to
investigating hominin evolutionary relationships
in the Later Middle Paleolithic Levant.
Quaternary International 350: 169–79.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.01.024
– 2019. European Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxa:
better off without them? Antiquity 93: 1359–61.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.117
Natasha Reynolds & Felix Riede
© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2019
1370


Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the European Upper Palaeolithic and beyond

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02316312/file/Reynolds%20Riede%202019b%20House%20of%20cards%20response.pdf

Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the European Upper Palaeolithic and beyond

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication