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The Typological Concept1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Alex D. Krieger
Alex D. Krieger*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas, Anthropology Department
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Extract

This paper is an attempt to clarify the meaning of the terms “type” and “variation” when applied to archaeological materials. Although they are used constantly in speech and literature in almost every conceivable context, it must be admitted that archaeology has no generally accepted, impersonal methods of establishing the scope and application of these terms. Kluckhohn has recently written:

Our techniques of observing and recording are admittedly still susceptible of improvement, but they seem much further advanced than our development of symbols (verbal and otherwise) by which we could communicate to each other (without loss or inflation of content) the signs and symptoms we observe. In archaeology, for example, methods of classifying pottery wares on the basis of highly technical and rather precisely defined operations have been elaborated. But I am aware of but a single paper (by a Russian!) where there has been even a tentative and fumbling consideration of the implications of the typological method. Such archaeologists as Vaillant, Strong, Setzler, Gladwin, and Paul Martin are (but only very recently) evidencing searchings of their theoretical consciences, and this is a happy omen. Meanwhile typologies are proliferated without apparent concern as to what the concepts involved are likely to mean when reduced to concrete human behaviors ….

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , January 1944 , pp. 271 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1944

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Footnotes

1

Prepared in connection with researches in Texas archaeology, as part of a program in Research in Anthropology generously supported by the University of Texas. The analysis of material gathered over a period of twenty-five years by the University, and, more recently, by WPA-University of Texas projects, demands the settling of basic methodologies. I am much indebted to Professor J. Gilbert McAllister, Chairman of the Anthropology Department, T. N. Campbell, J. Charles Kelley, Walter Taylor, and Perry Newell for liberal discussion and unstinted criticism. I wish to emphasize particularly that Kelley has long been familiar with the main principles given here, has experimented for some time with graphic devices for expressing the results, and has been very instrumental in shaping my own convictions on the subject.

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