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A History of Normative Theory in Americanist Archaeology

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Abstract

Efforts in the 1960s to demonstrate the value of the “new archaeology” involved showing that the competing culture-history paradigm was inferior. One allegedly weak plank in that paradigm had to do with how culture historians viewed culture—as a set of ideas transmitted in the form of ideal norms or mental templates. Lewis Binford referred to this view as “”normative theory.” In archaeology that view was manifest in the equation of artifact types with prehistoric norms—an equation that, according to Binford, the culture historians had made so that they could track the flow of ideas through time and thus write culture history. Culture historians regularly subscribed to cultural transmission as the theoretical backdrop for their artifact-based chronometers such as seriation and the direct historical approach, but with few exceptions they perceived only a weak relationship between norms and artifact types. It was not until 1960, in a paper by James Gifford, that what Binford labeled as normative theory appeared in anything approaching a complete form. Ironically, the first applications of normative theory were products of the new archaeologists, not the culture historians.

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    R. Lee Lyman & Michael J. O’Brien

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Lyman, R.L., O’Brien, M.J. A History of Normative Theory in Americanist Archaeology. J Archaeol Method Theory 11, 369–396 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-004-1420-6

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