Then and now

Abstract

American archaeology was formally launched in 1935 with the creation of the Society for American Archaeology and its flagship journal, American Antiquity. Dissatisfaction with the status quo, however, was already in the air and grew significantly in the 1930s (e.g., Strong 1936; Steward and Setzler 1938). Then in 1940, Clyde Kluckhohn, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, raised the commentary to an assault level: he published a short, sharp critique of Mesoamerican-particularly Maya-archaeology, exposing the shortcomings of one of the more prestigious research programs in Americanist archaeology (Kluckhohn 1940). A few years later, Kluckhohn's friend and student, Walter W. Taylor, built upon his mentor's assessments when he submitted his 1943 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, titled "The Study of Archaeology: A Dialectic, Practical, and Critical Discussion with Special Reference to American Archaeology and the Conjunctive Approach." Several years later, having returned from the war, Taylor dramatically transformed his dissertation into the most stinging dissection of Americanist archaeology ever published, issued as Memoir 69 of the American Anthropological Association and titled simply A Study of Archeology (Taylor 1948). To this day, his book remains archaeology's greatest example of dissension in the ranks. It launched a new era in American archaeology, but it closed another and its author paid the consequences. Taylor's monograph-length study provided a number of firsts: the first history (and historiography) of Americanist archaeology; the first complex examination of the concept of culture in archaeology; the first in-depth discussion of a theory of typology; the first substantial recommendations for a coherent program of Americanist method and theory; and the first major critiques of American archaeology, Maya archaeology, and the "pan-scientific" program of the Carnegie Institution. Many leaders in the field and their students saw the critiques as an affront (e.g., Burgh 1950; Woodbury 1954). They responded personally to Taylor's pronouncements and ridiculed him openly and furtively until the final decade of his life (Sabloff 2004; Longacre, this volume). Walter Taylor died in 1997. This chapter provides background to what we might call the "case" of Walter W. Taylor. It places his dissension in the context of the last sixty years in American archaeology and serves as a general introduction to the volume as a whole. © 2010 by The University Press of Colorado. All rights reserved.