Anthropology Without Informants

Front matter

ANTHROPOLOG Y

WITHOUT INFORMANTS

Collected Works in Paleoanthropology oy L, G. Freeman

Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xv ll |. TOWARD A WORKING THEORY l

1. Anthropology without Informants (1977) 5 2. A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting Archeological Materials (1968) 19 3. The Fat of the Land (Partial) (1981) 29 Il. AN OVERVIEW OF THE PALEOLITHIC 41 4. By Their Works You Shall Know Them: Cultural Developments in the Paleolithic (1975) 45 5. Paleolithic Polygons: Voronoi Tesserae and Settlement Hierarchies in Cantabrian Spain (1994) 73 vii vili CONTENTS lil, THE LOWER PALEOLITHIC 87 6. Torralba and Ambrona: A Review of Discoveries (1994) 89 7. Were There Scavengers at Torralba? (2001) 141

Foreword

This volume encapsulates some of the most significant published work of Leslie G. Freeman, an important—and, I believe, underappreciated—figure in the history of American participation in the study of Paleolithic Europe.

Leslie Freeman entered this field in the 1960s, a time of intellectual turmoil and important developments in the history of archeology. First came the rise of the movement in American anthropological archeology that came to be known as the “New Archeology.” Led by the charismatic Lewis Binford, a network of relatively junior archeologists challenged prevailing orthodoxy in advancing new claims. They argued that archeology properly was—or should be—a science, and one that promised reliable knowledge of the prehistoric past through careful application of scientific method. Furthermore, since the various aspects of culture were part of an interrelated, systemic whole, information was potentially retrievable about all aspects of past sociocultural systems, including social organization and ideology, that had been conventionally regarded as more or less inaccessible to investigation. Suddenly, the scope of archeological investigation was seen as greatly broadened.

The second notable development was that of the concept—especially associated with Freeman’s mentor, F. Clark Howell—of paleoanthropology. Howell conceptualized the study of human evolution not as an exotic subfield of paleontology x

FOREWORD but as the multifaceted anthropological study of human biological and cultural evolution. All subfields of anthropology had contributions to make to this endeavor (although that of linguistics was admittedly limited because of the paucity of direct evidence of ancient languages before the emergence of writing). In Howell’s view, archeology and even sociocultural anthropology had vital contributions to make to understanding the behavior of the ancient hominins who left behind Paleolithic archeological sites.

Finally, Freeman’s intellectual formation coincided with the first large-scale involvement of American archeologists with Paleolithic prehistory, especially in Europe. American archeologists had always worked largely in the New World, occupying themselves with the relatively narrow slice of the human past represented by occupation of the New World (the last 10,000-20,000 years or so). In the wake of a handful of pioneers like Hallam Movius (whose Old World fieldwork experience long antedated World War ID), a new generation of archeologists chose to work with the deep archeological record of the Old World Paleolithic. Archeological deposits in Europe date back tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and the older parts of that record were left by hominins that were notably different skeletally from anatomically modern humans. For these early humans, one could not necessarily assume cultural capabilities and adaptations comparable to those of recent hunter-gatherers. This was an issue not faced by New World researchers. Enabled by postwar prosperity and a great expansion of U.S. higher education and research funding, this group began to put an American stamp on Paleolithic research. James Sackett, Harvey Bricker, Sally Binford, Alison Brooks, Leslie Freeman, and Richard Klein, among others, began to come to grips with the complexity and depth of the Paleolithic archeological record, as well as its interpretations by their European colleagues, who, as Freeman details in this volume, came from quite a different intellectual tradition from the American one. The most dramatic consequent confrontation of this period was between Francois Bordes and Lewis Binford over the interpretation of stone tool variability in the Mousterian industry (generally associated with the Neandertals). However, for the most part, the Euro-American encounter was quieter, thoughtful, and sustained, and resulted in many long-term and mutually beneficial research collaborations.

Leslie Freeman was a busy participant in these intellectual developments. His mentor, Clark Howell, who persuaded him to eschew socio-cultural anthropology for paleoanthropology, introduced him to Paleolithic fieldwork at Torralba and Ambrona in Spain. Freeman's period as a graduate student also coincided with Lewis Binford's tempestuous tenure on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Binford's sense of the exciting possibilities of a rigorously scientific archeology had a clear influence on Freeman. Freeman’s choice of a doctoral dissertation topic—Mousterian lithic variability in Cantabrian Spain—resonated with Binford's enthusiasm for applying new analytical tools and scientific method to problems in traditional prehistory.

After Freeman’s initial research experience with Howell on the Spanish Meseta, he moved to the archeologically rich region of Cantabria in north-central Spain for his dissertation on Mousterian lithic variability. This area has since remained the geographic focus of his research, although he worked in Catalunya at Abric Agut in the 1970s and returned to Ambrona with Howell in the 1980s. In the course of his career, Freeman has had sustained research collaborations with several colleagues (notably Howell, Richard Klein, and Karl Butzer), but none was as durable as his decades-long collaboration with the eminent Spanish prehistorian Joaquin Gonzalez Echegaray, with whom he worked on two long-term cave excavation projects at Cueva Morin (with Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic deposits) and el Juyo (Upper Paleolithic) and numerous publications.

To a greater degree than many U.S.-based researchers, Freeman became a regularly contributing member of the Spanish Paleolithic research community. He and his wife, the distinguished socio-cultural anthropologist Susan Tax Freeman, have long maintained a home in Santander, where they have spent extended periods. Unlike most of his counterparts, Freeman was not an annual participant at the meetings of the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association, but he frequently lectured and presented papers at meetings in Spain and other countries. His network of Spanish colleagues and collaborators is extensive. Although he has published in the most highly regarded U.S. journals (including American Anthropologist and American Antiquity), about one-third of his research publications are in Spanish outlets. This laudable involvement in the Spanish research community, I believe, had the effect of diminishing somewhat his visibility in Anglophone research circles. Perhaps most significant in this respect is that the monographic publications of his two long-term cave excavation projects (Cueva Morín and el Juyo) have been in Spanish, limiting access among English-language scholars. Furthermore, as of this writing, Howell's and Freeman's work at Torralba and Ambrona has not yet seen final monographic publication—a fact that has doubtless contributed to the controversy and misconceptions over interpretation of the sites about which Freeman writes in this volume.

Leslie Freeman's institutional base during nearly his entire career was the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where after receiving his Ph.D. in 1964, he returned in 1965 as a faculty member, during Clark Howell's effort to build a nucleus of paleoanthropological researchers. After Howell's departure for Berkeley in 1970, Freeman, along with Karl Butzer and Richard Klein, formed the "stones and bones" contingent with Paleolithic interests among the anthropology faculty. Freeman and his colleagues trained a number of students who went on to careers in Paleolithic research, including Geoffrey Clark, Margaret Conkey, Lawrence Straus, Thomas Volman, James Pokines, Heather Stettler, and myself. Butzer and Klein left Chicago in the 1980s, and unfortunately, were not replaced by faculty with Paleolithic interests. The Department of Anthropology had decided to reorient its archeological research interests toward early complex societies. When Freeman retired in 2000, the distinguished history of Paleolithic research at Chicago came to an end. As several chapters in this volume show, Freeman has remained an active scholar since his retirement. In addition to emeritus status in Chicago's Department of Anthropology, he has institutional affiliations with Montana State University and with the Instituto para Investigaciones Prehistóricas in Santander, which he cofounded.

FOREWORD xii

FOREWORD

The pieces collected in this volume represent a sampling of Freeman's thought and writing over more than forty years and touch on many subjects. They reveal several recurring and important issues that have occupied him over the years. One issue is that of human agency in the accumulation of excavated deposits from the deep past of the Lower Paleolithic, especially at sites like Torralba and Ambrona. In such cases, we cannot be sure that our ancient subjects behaved in ways that correspond to the behavior of any ethnographically known human groups. What role then can ethnographic analogy play? Interpretations of the hominin behavior that produced the arrangements of mammal bones and stone tools at Torralba and Ambrona have varied greatly—from depictions of human predators able to conduct well-planned elephant hunts to those of human scavengers quite incapable of hunting mammals of any size. Freeman has always been concerned with careful interpretation of patterning in all relevant prehistoric data that can be demonstrated to exist through replicable, appropriate statistical methods. He has not shied away from controversy, as his discussions of Lewis Binford's interpretations in Chapters 6 and 7 show. But his emphasis has always been not on personalities, but on the best ways of tackling the inherently thorny problems of interpreting the Lower Paleolithic record.

The study of faunal remains for information about ancient subsistence and diet is another recurring theme in Freeman's research and is treated in Chapter 3. Freeman's concern is with reliably separating what we can and do know about these complex ancient systems from what we do not, and perhaps cannot, know. As he notes, these sources of "noise" in the archeological record are not always recognized and accounted for in the archeological literature.

Two further issues closely linked in Freeman's writings are the interpretation of Mousterian lithic variability (see Chapters 8-10) and the appropriate use of statistical methods, in archeology generally and in lithic analysis particularly. Freeman's doctoral research involved him closely with the stone implements of the Cantabrian region and showed him that Bordes's scheme of four Mousterian "facies" defined in southwestern France did not fit Cantabria well. Eventually, he was able to demonstrate that the kind of lithic variation Bordes measured was in fact not parsed into four discontinuous facies but varied continuously among assemblages. As he notes in his preface to this volume, Freeman learned while in the utilities industry, and again in the army, the importance of carefully measuring variables relevant to the problem at hand and manipulating the data with quantitative methods carefully selected for appropriateness given the nature of the data. He never forgot this lesson in his analyses of archeological data.

Finally, Paleolithic art, especially cave art, has been an important research concern of Freeman’s since the 1980s. Initially reluctant to enter a field so characterized by highly speculative theories about ancient religion and systems of thought, Freeman came to find it amenable to careful, systematic investigation. As Chapters 11-15 indicate, painstaking observation and data collection can both disconfirm simplistic theories and reveal interesting patterning in the data that had not been recognized. His careful use of ethnographic and historical information, and of data on the biology and behavior of the animals depicted in cave art, has opened new perspectives in this field.

This volume gives the reader a good appreciation for the range and depth of the scientific contributions of Leslie Freeman. It can only hint at the personal characteristics that have made knowing and working with Les such a rewarding experience for me and many others. The range of his intellectual curiosity is impressive—from ethnography to photogrammetry, from Romanesque art to big-game hunters’ accounts of animal behavior. Les is always finding material in unlikely corners that can help illuminate the study of the Paleolithic. His enthusiasm is almost boyish for new statistical or field methods and new gadgets that might improve how archeology is done. And his sometimes outrageous sense of humor, heightened by a prodigious memory for limericks and song lyrics, has brightened many an afternoon of excavation. Leslie Freeman’s contributions to the study of the Paleolithic have been considerable, and this volume is an excellent introduction to them.

—FRANCIS B. HARROLD DEAN, COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY ST. CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY

FOREWORD xiii

B . hLU dW

Preface

The chapters included in this book are a cross-section of the shorter and more general works I have written during more than forty years as a professional prehistorian, or behavioral paleoanthropologist (as I prefer to consider myself). I was trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist and got my first excavating experience in the New World. Later, my research has focused on the Old World, but the problems that have interested me most should be relevant to the concerns of all archeologists of whatever persuasion. I have selected papers that illustrate those concerns. They are all still relevant today, even though some of the papers selected appeared in print many years ago. Since the chapters I have chosen have been published before, they are reproduced here as they first appeared with one exception. It would have been unfair to revise them to make them seem more "up-to-date" and the major points they make are still as valid as ever.

The choice of chapters for inclusion reflects the extent of my career that has been devoted to Old World prehistory. (I have not included works on investigations in the New World or papers on my work in Medieval religious symbolism here.) The bulk of my research and publication has been in the field of Paleolithic studies in Europe, particularly Cantabrian Spain. Fascinating though I find that material, much of it was published in the form of site reports, detailed analyses of recovered

PREFACE remains, or extensive surveys aimed at a specialist audience. Most of those publications were co-authored in cooperation with other collaborating scientists, and additionally many appeared in foreign languages or in Spanish, French, Czech, and German journals. Consequently, even when it was published in English, my work is better known to Europeanists than to the larger number of Americanist archeologists or those based in British institutions.

So part of the reason for this book is to familiarize others with my stance. I think it is important that all of us—whether we are anthropologists who learn about living societies, archeologists who excavate or read documents from the past, or members of the intelligent reading public at large—ought to know about the various ways those of us who study the past learn about the lifeways of our ancestors and relatives. My background and perspective are different enough from those of others so that it may seem novel (and, I hope, valuable) to professionals working in other areas with other approaches. I was trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist and only decided to become a behavioral paleoanthropologist late in my career. That helps explain some of the peculiarities of my approach.

If there is one thing that an archeologist should always do, it is to question. Affirmations, whether they are one’s own or others’, should always be examined critically no matter how sensible they seem at first glance. Even in the more speculative chapters in this book I have tried to arrive at conclusions that correspond better to what we know about the past (and present) than do previous conjectures. Of course, it is the duty of any scientist, not just an archeologist, to question all observations before they are accepted, and to challenge all of them that are contrary to what is already soundly established. New conclusions should only be accepted after they have been carefully tested, and that holds as well for the conclusions given in this book as for any other affirmations.

I would scarcely consider conducting an analysis of archeological data without employing one or another statistical or mathematical technique for the purpose. That is partly because of the ways I spent my time after a more or less wasted period in college. Drifting aimlessly after graduation, I spent three years working for a public utilities company, where some of my time was spent in boring repetitive tasks such as drawing the standard plans of gas metering stations. I looked forward to the months I was expected to spend each year helping to prepare their five-year prediction of natural gas requirements. That was fascinating. It taught the value of mathematical and statistical analysis. We did not then have access to the giant calculators used for multivariate statistics and so had to do our load forecasts by trial-and-error methods using Marchant™ and Monroe™ desk calculators. I learned how much easier generating the estimates would have been if we could have used the methods of multiple regression and factor analysis. The experience also taught the need for careful, painstaking cross-checking of data entry and results.

While thus employed, I helped one of my superiors conduct land surveys. I was also a member of the New Jersey National Guard, with the occupational specialty of Combat Demolition Specialist; any mistake in calculating explosive requirements might have had devastating results—as I saw when a lecturer almost blew himself up placing a “ring main.” That reinforced the lessons I had learned about care in calculation. Then, during active duty with the U.S. Army, there were more than enough demolitions specialists to satisfy the demand, and so I was assigned to be a topographic survey section chief, a specialty that also called for careful calculation. All these experiences provided the background in the mathematical analysis of data that I use today. Although it was not a deliberate plan on my part, much of this early training seems as though it had been designed to help me along to my later career as a paleoanthropologist.

I finished my preparation at graduate school, where I owe my social anthropological training to my late professors Fred Eggan and Eric Wolf. I am especially indebted to the prehistorian A. J. Jelinek and to my recently departed teacher F. Clark Howell, to whom this volume is dedicated. Jelinek’s sensitivity to paleoecology is reflected in these pages, and so, particularly, is Clark Howell’s definition of paleoanthropology as a kind of anthropology, not simply the study of the skeletal remains of prehistoric hominids. It was Clark who persuaded me to take up the career of paleoanthropologist. As a graduate student at Chicago, I continued to employ statistical analysis, much of the time in collaboration with James Brown and under the guidance of L. R. Binford. I also learned much from other prehistorians who have since passed away (Francois Bordes and Francisco Jorda taught me how to think about the Mousterian). I have a still greater debt to my longtime colleague, mentor, and collaborator, Joaquin Gonzalez Echegaray, for having encouraged me to develop my own approach. Whatever is good in what follows I owe to them.

Now, to address the contents of the book. Many prehistorians seem to believe that if one has not made a “major contribution to theory,” regardless of whether it can be applied to any relevant data, then his or her life’s activity has been worthless. On the other hand, I have never found that any theory in the absence of applicable data is worth a plugged nickel. I have always tried to accompany each theoretical statement with the data to which it has relevance. So all the papers that follow blend theoretical statements with the archeological facts they are intended to help us understand.

Chapters in the first section of this book present some statements of my own theoretical perspective and some observations that ought to be taken into consideration in further interpretations of the data from the past. They do not fit elsewhere so I have brought them together here. The first chapter differentiates behavioral paleoanthropology from the other kinds of archeology and suggests a program to be followed in paleoanthropological research. “A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting Archeological Materials” addresses the use of analogy in the interpretation of early finds. In “The Fat of the Land” I have tried to indicate some dimensions of the promise and limits of research on prehistoric diet. (I cut out the final sections of this paper because they would appeal mainly to a very specialized audience; I also added a few remarks in an appendix to this paper.)

The next section summarizes some of the results of Paleolithic studies. In “By Their Works You Shall Know Them: Cultural Developments in the Paleolithic,” I have provided a general overview of cultural developments in the Old Stone Age as I

PREFACE

PREFACE see them. Despite what we have learned since it was written (more than thirty years ago), it still has much of its original value. The next chapter focuses on the spatial relationships of Cantabrian sites. Spatial geographers have used Thiessen diagrams or Voronoi tesserae to study the distributions and relationships of modern cities: this chapter suggests that they may be useful for the study of Paleolithic sites as well.

The chapters on Torralba try to indicate what we know about that site and its sister, Ambrona, and to dispute the idea that early hominids could only have managed to survive in Europe as scavengers. In the Middle Paleolithic section, “Kaleidoscope or Tarnished Mirror? Thirty Years of Mousterian Investigations in Cantabria” presents the evidence that we should take a new look at the Mousterian, and the two following chapters outline several differences between the behavior of Neandertals and that of modern people, and describe some of the research errors committed by prehistoric archeologists in the past.

The first chapter about Paleolithic art is a more or less theoretical statement about where we should be looking for its meanings, and where they will not be found. In “The Many Faces of Altamira” I have tried to show how many ways present concerns are reflected in our handling of the past and discussed the relationship between the validation of religious shrines and the early debate about the painted cave of Altamira. The chapter on enhancement techniques discusses the ways in which some Paleolithic artists added impact to selected figures. The next chapters try to clarify what is meant by the term “sanctuary” when it is applied to Paleolithic caves and involve speculation about the prehistoric uses of the decorated site I know most intimately, the famous painted cave of Altamira.

Last, there is a chapter about the benefits of international research collaboration, showing that those benefits have flowed in both directions: from America to Spain, and (as importantly) from Spain to the Americas.

As I have indicated earlier, these papers are reprinted here essentially unchanged except for the bibliographies, rectification of misprints, omission of abstracts in languages other than English, and corrections to figures and legends that were incorrect in the originals. It is my hope that others, seeing what I have offered that is of worth and rejecting what they can show is wrong, will find something in these pages that stimulates them to further progress.

PART al,

TOWARD a WORKING THEORY

Each of the three chapters in this section addresses a theoretical issue of considerable importance to archeologists of all persuasions. The first and second distinguish the field of behavioral paleoanthropology from other and very different kinds of archeology. When the pieces were written, archeologists in the United States pretty generally assumed that their kind of prehistoric archeology was the only one. But prehistory is defined as lasting until the peoples who are its subject have begun to produce their own written records. In much of the United States, preliterate people were observed by literate outsiders who left good written descriptions about what they had observed. In other cases, preliterate societies lasted until archeologists began to question living informants about the conditions under which they had previously lived. The anomalous nature of a prehistory with living informants, or recorded by contemporaries, should be obvious, and is the exception rather than the rule for archeologists who study the products of long-vanished societies and kinds of humanity that are often extinct. Some authorities claimed (erroneously) that groups of living hunter-gatherers had been “frozen in time” as living relics, so that all that was needed to fill in the gaps in the archeological record was to supply the missing data by analogy with some living group such as the Australian aborigines.

2 TOWARD A WORKING THEORY

I go on to develop a model for understanding the past, drawn from Malinowski's concept of "institutions." I use a modification of that model of culture because it provides an inherent reason and a plausible mechanism for change, and it includes the physical materials upon which archeological reasoning must be based. I have replaced Malinowski's concept of the institutional charter with that of the "functional mode," which is one purposive aspect of institutional behavior that is more visible archeologically than are his "charters." (The charters of Malinowski's institutions cannot be directly observed by the archeologist, who only recovers traces of the activities the institution has produced.) Years ago, when I was a student, one of my professors discussed the custom of tipping one's hat to a lady. When I asked if the physical nature of the head covering was important, he said that it was not. But, I asked, what if it were a yarmulke? Malinowski would not have had the difficulty with my question that my professor did.

Malinowski was widely (and wrongly) rejected because of flaws in his reasoning about the "function" of institutions, when it would have been easy enough to revise that reasoning instead of throwing his theory out wholesale. I continue to use a restatement of Malinowski's theory for the reasons mentioned, and especially because it consistently works when applied to real archeological remains. I'll persist in using it despite its relative antiquity and in spite of all criticism until someone shows me that there is a more practical solution.

It was fashionable when I was a young professor to define culture in a “more modern" way, as "shared ideas in people's heads." I offended some of my colleagues by observing that unless the ideas came out of the heads into some material embodiment—in the form of a social usage, or at least into language, which after all can be measured physically—it simply could not be observed at all.

These observations lead me to another important one. We are sometimes told that archeology should develop its own theoretical stance and its own research methods, and that it will never be a mature discipline until it has done so. I do not believe that for a moment, and I speak as one who has had to develop his own programs for the analysis of prehistoric data on a few occasions. In fact, modern theoretical physics has always relied on the techniques of mathematics, which should be a sufficient contrary argument. I advocate instead searching out and using any technique that works, no matter where or by whom they were invented. It is even my experience that several of the specially devised programs for archeological data analysis do not work as well as some of the more general and readily available commercial programs, such as SYSTAT™ or SPSSTM; programs that are designed for exclusive archeological use should only be employed (or designed) where no alternative is available.

My second chapter discusses the prevalent idea that the archeologist can only work by making analogies between the behavior of some living or ethnographically known group. I agree that analogy can be useful when it produces hypotheses that are amenable to testing against the realities of archeological data, but the use of analogy to complete a picture of past human behavior where the humans involved are not modern, and may in fact be assumed to be much different from ourselves, is simply wrong. Old as this chapter is, its attempt to indicate the fallacy of such reasoning remains valid despite all later claims to the contrary.

The late Christopher Hawkes claimed that it should be relatively easy to reconstruct prehistoric economic systems. “The Fat of the Land” attempts to show how difficult even the reconstruction of prehistoric diet can be when all one has to go on are archeological residues. There are many complications to the discussion of prehistoric diet from the archeological record that Hawkes was apparently unaware of, although some of them should have been obvious. This chapter is just the first part of the original paper, excised from the rest, which discussed the Spanish Paleolithic in terms that would not interest most readers. I have added some concluding observations, indicating that the interpretation of faunal remains from archeological sites is not as straightforward as Hawkes assumed.

TOWARD A WORKING THEORY 3

Li ONE E]

BB ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SEVERAL ARCHEOLOGIES

Anthropology is unique among the disciplines which study mankind in the breadth and diversity of its approaches. This multiplicity of perspectives is its major strength, lending it a flexibility and adaptability few fields can rival. Ideally, continued feedback among its subfields should ensure that each periodically may come to new insights about the nature of our species. For that ideal to be realized, communication between the subfields must be kept easy and open.

Just a few years ago, ease of communication could be guaranteed by exposing students in depth to all branches of anthropology. Then, anthropologists shared a basic vocabulary and a common set of referents. With the tremendous increase in quantity of anthropological data that has accumulated in the last twenty years, anthropological subfields have tended to multiply, specialize, and diversify, developing unique interests and multiplying esoteric jargon. As a result of this fission, some anthropological subdisciplines have begun to lose sight of one another. The increased complexity of our field makes it ever more difficult for the individual to become a competent anthropological generalist.

Although the changes that have taken place make it considerably harder for individuals to learn each other's specialties, they are by no means to be regretted, as some seem to think. Such changes always accompany the development of any discipline; they are a sign of the increasing maturity of anthropology. If we devote more attention to the growing differences between subfields in the process of individualization and force ourselves to be more fully aware of the uniqueness of each specialty, we shall eventually see the way to a new and more realistic synthesis. Only when we appreciate what each field has to offer will we be able to draw from the strengths of each what it is best equipped to contribute to the study of man.