Consensus and the Fringe in American Archaeology - Springer Link

Consensus and the Fringe in American Archaeology Alice B. Kehoe, 3014 N. Shepard Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53211-3436, USA E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT ________________________________________________________________

DISCUSSION ARTICLE

Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2010) DOI 10.1007/s11759-010-9132-x

Is the ‘‘consensus of the scientific community’’ to reject transoceanic diffusion as an explanation for cultural change in the Americas justified by logic, data, or disciplinary politics? ________________________________________________________________

Re´sume´: Le « consensus de la communaute´ scientifique » pour rejeter la diffusion transoceánique en tant qu’une explication du changement culturel en Ame´riques est-il justifie´ par la logique, les donneés, ou la politique disciplinaire? ________________________________________________________________ Resumen: Es «consenso de la comunidad cientı´fica» rechazar la difusioń transoceańica como explicacioń del cambio cultural en Ame´rica justificado por la lo´gica, los datos o la polı´tica disciplinaria? KEYWORDS

Diffusion, Science, Fringe archaeology, Polynesia, Transoceanic contacts _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Preface When, in 1971, Joseph Needham published his discussion of ‘‘Navigation’’ in volume 4, part 3 of Science and Civilisation in China, David Kelley and I were gratified that one of the leading scientific minds of the century had judged the evidence for pre-Columbian transpacific contacts to warrant serious consideration. No one else seemed to notice. In 1975, looking up the library catalog number for Science and Civilisation, Needham’s birth date, 1900, caught my attention. I phoned Kelley, pointed out Needham was 75 years old, and suggested that since archaeologists seemed unaware of his research, Dave and I should try to organize a conference with him to bring that work into our field. We wanted Needham to come to Mexico 2010 World Archaeological Congress

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to see the data firsthand and discuss finds and contexts with archaeologists engaged with those data. Needham was delighted, and said that Lu GweiDjen would accompany him. With support from Wenner-Gren, Ford Foundation, and Coca-Cola (then negotiating to win the People’s Republic cola-drink franchise), our group spent 2 weeks in Mexico in 1977, visiting Teotihuacań, Monte Albań, El Tajıń, and Palenque as well as Mexico City’s Museo Nacional (Kehoe 1978). The funded participants were from the United States and England, with Mexican colleagues joining us as convenient; such a peripatetic conference meeting at a series of sites and museum collections was a novel innovation for Wenner-Gren. A good time was had by all, but none of participants who had dismissed pre-Columbian contacts changed his mind, and none of those fulfilled the understood obligation to submit a paper for the proposed conference volume. I believe none of them had a reasoned argument. I continue to see archaeologists rejecting well-derived, well-supported scientific interpretations, espousing instead hoary dogma or simplistic scientism. As David Quinn, discussing disputes over Columbus’ rivals, said of the magisterial Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, The rejection of any pre-Columbian movement across the Atlantic apart from the Norse voyages leaves the ocean peculiarly empty for many centuries, but it is a justifiable reaction in an outstanding historian whose great merit is that he sees sharply in black-and-white terms and is therefore uniquely qualified to expound what is already known. He is perhaps too impatient to study the nuances of pre-Columbian enterprise (Quinn 1974:22–23).

A Case Without Nuances In 2007, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed paper by eleven scientists, ‘‘Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile.’’ Fifty chicken (Gallus gallus) bones were recovered from El Arenal-1, a late preColumbian archaeological site on the southern side of Chile’s Araucanian Peninsula. Chickens are a south-Asian domesticate carried by Polynesians to their Pacific colonies. The El Arenal-1 chickens’ DNA matches that of preColumbian chickens in Polynesian island sites; not surprisingly, these Polynesian chickens represent a common type spread into Europe as well as Asia and then the Pacific over several millennia (Gongora et al. 2008: Fig. 1). The Araucanian peninsula lies within the ‘‘Roaring Forties’’ where winds and currents facilitate landfalls from South Pacific voyagers. Indigenous Mapuche still raise chickens that share a single point mutation, T to C

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transition at site 214 on the genome, with prehistoric chickens from West Polynesia, Hawai’i, and Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Radiocarbon analyses directly on the El Arenal-1 chicken bones date them to Cal. AD 1304–1424 (Storey et al. 2007). (Note that Pizarro landed in Peru AD 1532.) Archaeologist Terry Jones and linguist Kathryn Klar point out that in addition to chickens, the area had Polynesian-style basalt adzes, two-piece bone fishhooks, and sewn-plank canoes. The latter two artifacts occur also in Chumash territory in southern California beginning in the late first millennium AD. Klar notes that the Chumash word for the sewn-plank canoe and the neighboring Gabrielino words for sewn-plank and for hewn dugout canoes derive from Central Eastern Polynesian, and are foreign to the Chumash and Gabrielino languages (Jones and Klar 2005:460). Mapuche called their sewn-plank canoes dalca, but the neighboring Alacaluf used ki_-lu which Klar relates to Hawai’ian kialoa, a type of Polynesian canoe (Klar and Jones 2007:94). Chumash territory and the Araucanian peninsula are the only places in the Americas where sewn-plank canoes were constructed before European contact. Jones and Klar therefore concur with Storey et al., that El Arenal-1 offers strong empirical evidence for Polynesian landing before historic European contact, and suggest that El Arenal-1 strengthens their interpretation of data for Polynesian landing in southern California (Jones and Klar 2009). The Storey et al. 2007 and Jones and Klar 2005 papers immediately provoked rebuttals. For the former, a group argued that if any chickens were brought to Chile by Polynesians, they should have been a unique type raised in Rapa Nui, and also questioned whether the radiocarbon dating took sufficient account of possible marine effect (did the chickens eat seaweed?) (Gongora et al. 2008). For the latter, the leader of Chumash-territory archaeology insisted on her interpretation of Chumash history in terms of autochthonous evolution (Arnold 2007). Rebutting her critique, Klar and Jones (2007) add to the artifacts and linguistics, references in both Chumash and Hawai’ian oral history traditions to events that are reasonably inferred to refer to Polynesian voyaging to America. By 2008, one could say that most Oceanic archaeologists considered Polynesian landfalls on the American Pacific coast a probability, if not particularly significant for American societies. The data convinced a California archaeologist, Terry Jones, to change his orthodox opinion toward accepting authochthonous evolution (Jones and Klar 2009:180). I consider it significant that Jones joined a university faculty only after working for many years in CRM archaeology. Empiricism rather than theory is privileged in CRM projects, scrutinized as they are by engineers, business operators, government officials, and developers. There is ‘‘forbidden knowledge’’ that endangers people’s lives or livelihoods, and ‘‘forbidden knowledge’’ that endangers scientists’ careers (Kempner et al. 2008:3–4). The former can be

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of concern in CRM projects, the latter lies in the gardens of university Edens. This paper looks at the fruits of trees of knowledge forbidden by the popes who manage ‘‘normal science,’’ ripe fruits plucked by a few of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most brilliant scientists (von Humboldt 1814, Needham 1971) but declared rotten by professors who set the boundaries for valid research. Perhaps the best perspective for understanding social structure among archaeologists is in terms of normal science and anomalies (Kuhn 1962; see also Nickles 2003). Normal science is ‘‘the consensus of the scientific community,’’ in effect ‘‘the local cultural tradition’’ (Barnes et al. 1996:31). Jane Holden Kelley diagramed these as concentric circles around a Core System (Kelley and Hanen 1988:120).1 The farther from a Core tenet an explanation lies, the more stringently it is critiqued (Kelley and Hanen 1988:337). Graduate students and assistant professors are warned not to pursue outlier topics. Quoting circles, frequently stemming from an author’s graduate-school cohort and professors, buttress Core Systems because ‘‘every citation acknowledges a source of authority’’ (Barnes et al. 1996:155). Core Systems’ vitality is maintained by the activities of its practitioners, and simultaneously by the low visibility of outliers not cited, not invited to lecture, and published in less-generally-read journals or presses. Mainstream American archaeology’s normal science focuses on constructing sequences of artifacts from stratigraphic sections, on the model of paleontology. The work, following a natural-science model, appears objective and scientific. Changes through time can be ascribed to evolutionary processes, affected, as in paleontology, by environmental changes. This orientation toward natural-science data and models has been termed ‘‘ecological functionalism’’ (Philips et al. 1994:3; see also Phillips and Sebastian 2001), and it underlay the ‘‘explicitly scientific’’ method advocated by the postwar cohort that labeled their program ‘‘the New Archaeology’’ (Kehoe 1998:116). Their hope to proclaim universal laws of human behavior derived from material data and statistical manipulations fit the National Science Foundation’s Cold War program (Trigger 1989:314–315; Fuller 2000:151; Steinmetz 2005a:22–23, 2005b:278, 298). Its substantial funding valorized their ‘‘explicitly scientific’’ schema as competing paradigms languished. Under Lewis Binford’s New Archaeology regime, ‘‘science’’ was narrowly defined according to Wesley Salmon, an American logical empiricist. Their text was Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach (1971) by Binford’s disciples Watson et al. (revised 1984 as Archeological Explanation). ‘‘Explicitly scientific’’ meant proposing a hypothesis and specifying a test to validate it, thus the method is ‘‘H–D,’’ hypotheticodeductive. Carl Hempel, the Vienna-school philosopher who popularized the method in the United States, taught that any truly scientific explana-


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tion must have reference to general (universal) laws (Salmon 1989:12; Salmon and Salmon 1979). Therefore, New Archaeologists premised general laws of human evolution and behavior. To find such, they had recourse to nineteenth-century anthropology, specifically, although unacknowledged, the ideas of Herbert Spencer embedded in Leslie White’s evolutionism (Carneiro 1981:200; Adams 1998:173–175). New Archaeologists’ preoccupation with ‘‘the evolution of complex societies’’ came from this training, originating at the University of Michigan with White and Elman Service. Many of the problems in New Archaeology are cogently analyzed by Wylie (2002). Sociologist George Steinmetz highlights the manner in which his discipline reflected American ideology, especially in the mid-twentieth-century, ‘‘oriented toward general laws, replication, prediction, and value-freedom’’ (i.e., freedom from concern with value judgments) (Steinmetz 2005b:309). Bernard Barber articulated the mid-century position: ‘‘The social sciences, like all science, are primarily concerned for analysis, prediction, and control of behavior and values’’ (Barber 1952:259)—a Fascist notion of science carried by such Cold War warriors as James Conant, Thomas Kuhn’s mentor (Mirowski 2005:150, 164). Odd though it seems today, the National Science Foundation was the single largest source of funding for mid-century sociology (Steinmetz 2005b:296). Steinmetz broadens the Cold War focus that spawned the National Science foundation by embedding it in what he and others term the Fordist capitalist, Keynesian, welfare-state regime (Steinmetz 2005b:295–295). American academic archaeology paralleled sociology and other social sciences in the orientation Steinmetz describes, like them reaping NSF bounty. NSF dominance in funding underlay the simultaneous emergence of self-designated New Archaeology, New Geography, and New Ecology (Kehoe 1998:127). Less obvious is why, at this time, all these plus social sciences and even philosophy and theology adopted the label ‘‘process’’ (Kehoe 1998:107). ‘‘Process’’ derives from Latin pro cedere, ‘‘go forward,’’ and implies, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition, ‘‘progress,’’ and ‘‘natural or involuntary operation, series of changes,’’ just the sort of thing Fordist managers hoped to see. As the Fordist regime dissipated in the last third of the twentieth century, methodological positivism was questioned and challenged in all the disciplines–in archaeology, ‘‘postprocessualism.’’ During the mid-twentieth-century heyday of Positivist science devoted to winning the Wars—World II and Cold War—commitment to mathematical languages obscured the horrors attending military goals (Mirowski 2005:164). Lack of concern with natural language—semantics, rhetoric, structure—placed American archaeologists completely out of sync with contemporary developments in semiotics and linguistics (e.g., Eco, Sebeok, or Lakoff and Johnson [Eco 1976, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Sebeok and

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Eco 1983, Lakoff 1987]).2 Natural languages are, in Lotman’s term, ‘‘primary modeling systems’’ (Lotman et al. 1975). Archaeologists’ languages are overwhelmingly natural language, thus archaeological knowledge is set within primitive modeling systems seldom brought into consciousness (see Nersessian 2003 for a recent review of cognitive research on ‘‘model-based reasoning’’). Data and interpretations may seem unambiguous because they lie within a shared primary modeling system. As it inculcates a scientific community’s primary modeling system, whether in a natural or mathematical language, professional training may subvert science’s avowed ideal of addressing real data. French archaeologists led by J.-C. Gardin and his associates were, in contrast to most Americans at the time, engaged with contemporary linguistics (Gardin and Peebles 1992). The cognitive mind of the archaeologist, not people in the past, is a problem that must be addressed. Where a philosophically naive American archaeologist would take data literally as ‘‘givens,’’ the Gardin group weighed the circumstances within which certain phenomena are re-cognized as significant data. Expanding on semiotics, Stoczkowski (2002) drew out narrative structures persistent in Western culture, showing that these mold both archaeologists’ recognition of data and interpretation. Such a focus on epistemology seemed esoteric to the majority of American archaeologists, ensconced within a nation that, as Leslie White taught (1959), believed it had triumphed through harnessing the most energy. American naı¨vete´ stems, basically, from the Scottish bourgeois culture carried by nineteenth-century immigrants who dominated American business (Herman 2001:253–254) and its social mores (Bozeman 1977). Thomas Reid’s (1710–1796) Common-Sense Realism was taken for granted by most American scientists, along with Comte’s Positivism (including its idea of Progress). Reid believed that the real world compels consensus among rational men. This has an interesting converse: that what is held in consensus by rational men must be real. Politically, this philosophy powerfully legitimizes beliefs and policies of the educated ‘‘rational men’’ comprising the dominant class. Common-sense Realism orients researchers to the consensual community amply described in sociological studies of scientists from Merton’s ‘‘invisible college’’ (Merton 1973), through Latour and Woolgar’s landmark Laboratory Life (1979), to a plethora of contemporary ethnographies such as Knorr Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures (1999) and critical philosophy such as that by Zammito (2004). None of these, so far as I have seen, take particular note of Reid’s articulation of the premise that common experience constitutes a realist picture of the world. The imprint of Scottish bourgeois culture upon American society, beginning in the late eighteenth century, tended to subtly differentiate it from English culture


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and its exemplification (for our purpose here) in Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Until the 1970s, American archaeologists were nearly exclusively WASP men, born into American middle and upper classes (Patterson 1995:99). Their education followed the Scottish model (high school/4-year college) and, incorporating Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, fostered a pragmatic realism more engaged with practice than with metaphysics. After World War II, the G.I. Bill social revolution and 1964 Civil Rights Act enabled large numbers of men and women from lower classes and diverse ethnic origins to complete university and enter professions (Patterson 1995:72). Although this greatly broadened social origins of American archaeologists, it did not heighten general concern with epistemology. Instead, among archaeologists, scientific method was emphasized, in accord with twentiethcentury America’s mantra, ‘‘Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms’’ (from the 1933 Chicago Exposition, in Goldman, ed. 1989:294). Concomitant with the broadening of the profession’s social base, American archaeology bifurcated into academic and heritage-management (CRM) structures (or as Barnes puts it, ‘‘hierarchy’’ and ‘‘market’’ [Barnes 2003:139]). Over a generation, National Science Foundation support lessened and CRM employment came to dominate the profession (Patterson 1995:108–110; McGimsey 2003; Polk 2002). Academics differentiate themselves, and their niche market, from hoi polloi contract practitioners by requiring publication of books ostensibly exemplifying theory; CRM people are expected just to write gray-literature reports. Academics produce data from their field schools or grant-supported projects and slot them into theoretical models, CRM practitioners mass-produce data to be warehoused. Each sector images itself as a scientific community controlling specialized knowledge and methods by protracted initiation, peer-reviewed production, arenas of competition for status, and lobbying for domain protection. Each segment of the profession developed its role models: for academics, the major professor heading a hierarchy of affiliated scientific specialists and graduate students, employed in multi-year projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars; for CRM, the senior staff of an established company with its own well-equipped facility, running multiple contracts efficiently carried out by seasoned field directors and dependable shovel-dancers. The crux of academic life is the dissertation that must demonstrate relevance to a theoretical model considered feasible by the candidate’s major professor. Monitoring this gate to the profession, professors in large research universities subsidizing dozens of doctoral candidates can push their preferred method and theory, their paradigm in Kuhn’s term, promulgating it beyond their own department through recommending—or not recommending—graduates seeking employment. The consensus community thus created and maintained is unlikely to last more than a

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generation, waning as its leader retires and aggressive younger scholars build their own cohorts of students. Meanwhile, CRM companies are constrained to legal regulations and guidelines that dictate a consensus on acceptable heritage management. They are required to assess ‘‘significance’’ according to whether the subject area exemplifies ‘‘historic’’ properties or appears relevant to recognized research problems. Since CRM must be formulated within bureaucratic codes, projects tend to be seen as series of more-or-less standard cases. Practitioners desiring to be innovative, in method or in questions entertained, feel they are performing ‘‘intellectual gymnastics’’ to comply with ‘‘the regs’’ (Altschul 2005:207). Because CRM overtly follows written codes, the limiting and stultifying effect of mainstream consensus is obvious. CRM practice is the palpable face of establishment hegemony, veiled in academia by rhetoric of free inquiry (Tainter and Bagley 2005). Consensus communities built by major professors compete for funds and jobs, as of course do CRM companies. The latter necessarily exclude persons incapable of fulfilling legal requirements for a contracted project; the fringe of CRM archaeology consists of inadequately capitalized companies, incompetent practitioners, and a few shady characters. Academic consensus communities are another matter. Kelley’s Core Systems of tenured professors directing well-funded projects, recruiting and maintaining research cohorts, depend upon the larger society, subject to its structures and ideological forces. An analysis of the constitution of Core and fringe positions in American archaeology needs to look beyond the profession’s rhetoric.

Fringe Archaeology The profession of archaeology has a wide foundation of avocational researchers, lay local historians and naturalists, and people who work the land. Some of these find standard archaeological interpretations less than satisfactory, or are interested in phenomena and questions not usually discussed by archaeologists. Such people, and a few reputable professional archaeologists, get lumped as ‘‘fringe archaeology’’ (Feder 1990; Stout 2008; Williams 1991). Thorough histories of archaeology should investigate why certain phenomena and issues are non grata. American archaeology has been strongly influenced by Manifest Destiny ideology with its racist picture of First Nations as bestial savages in a wilderness (Kennedy 1994; Kehoe 1998:65–70). For several reasons—legitimating European colonization and the Monroe Doctrine (proscribing European intervention in American affairs), and testing hypotheses of societal evolution on allegedly independent data—orthodox American archaeology insists there were no


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contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world before Columbus’ 1492 voyage, with the very minor exception of brief Norse visits to northern Newfoundland, Labrador, and Baffin Island. Recent hard petrographic data validating the 1362 date carved in a Norse rune inscription on a stone found in northwest Minnesota (Kehoe 2005a) is summarily rejected by some archaeologists insisting ‘‘We know it’s a hoax.’’ Even those consummate long-distance voyagers the Polynesians are dismissed as only ‘‘once’’ touching America (Williams 1991:233; for an opposing view by an Oceanic archaeologist, see Green 1998). Substantial evidence exists, and has been presented by respected scientists beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, for preColumbian transoceanic contacts (Jett 1983, forthcoming; Fingerhut 1994; Kehoe 2003). This dark side of archaeology, as real as the dark side of the moon, is as much part of histories of archaeology as the mainstream story. Raising and working with data seen as anomalous, is taken as throwing a gauntlet to established professionals. In cases where a proponent of transoceanic contacts has achieved status as a reputable archaeologist, for example the Mesoamericanists Gordon Ekholm, David H. Kelley, Paul Tolstoy, his reputation is saved by ignoring his work on pre-Columbian contacts. In my conversations with these men, each was bemused by his peers’ assumption that transoceanic contacts research is an aberration to be politely overlooked.

The Rejection of Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts For mainstream archaeologists, pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts have been a dead issue. Primitive people couldn’t cross oceans, that settles it; or, anyone who asserts the American Indians didn’t evolve wholly independent of Old World societies must be a racist. To the first point, in 1971 I published a list of documented deliberate modern ocean crossings in an astounding variety of things that float (Kehoe 1971, updated in Kehoe 2003:32): the record for smallest boat is held by Hugo Vihlen, who crossed the Atlantic from Casablanca to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 85 days in 1968, on a 5’117/8¢¢ sailboard, then in 1993 crossed from St. John’s NFLD to southern England in 106 days on a 5’4¢¢ board. For the Pacific, in 2000–2001, Jim Shekhdar, a 54-year-old Briton, rowed a boat 8060 miles from Peru to Brisbane, Australia, in 274 days. These feats are ignored. Archaeologists cannot ignore the Paleolithic settlement of Australia, requiring boats or rafts crossing open ocean to the island continent, a fact supporting the increasing popularity of postulating initial colonization of the Americas by coastal voyaging around the North Pacific rim. That hypothesis is kept within the subfield of Paleoindian studies rather than stimulating discussion of ocean voyaging in later Holocene times. As for the charge

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that only racists would look for pre-Columbian contacts, the real racists are those who exclude First Nations from involvement in the wider world. Much of the evidence for transoceanic contacts is historic or ethnographic, therefore outside archaeology as it is practiced as a modern science. American geographers trained by Carl Sauer and, more recently, his students, work with these data and include several extensively researching transoceanic contacts, pre- and post-1492. A second-generation ‘‘Sauerian,’’ Daniel Gade, declares that the Sauer tradition represents a particularly strong commitment to empiricism, which he contrasts with the postwar American archaeological paradigm (Gade 2004:24). Where data pointing to transoceanic contacts are archaeological, as in the wheeled figurines Gordon Ekholm excavated in sealed stratigraphic deposits in Mexico, the comparison (to Chinese tomb figurines) is anomalous to American purview. The structure of American archaeological practice has no place for ‘‘the nuances of pre-Columbian enterprise,’’ where Ekholm, for example, added to his Chinese tomb figurines, depictions of dragons with flame eyebrows and Teotihuacań cylindrical tripod vases with conical lids and fresco painting (Ekholm 1953, 1955, especially 1964 for his discussion of scientism and of regional foci impeding broader comparisons). Notwithstanding the respect earned by his many years as Curator of Mesoamerican Archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, and his impeccable, for its time, fieldwork in Mexico, Gordon Ekholm’s detailed and carefully argued hypotheses of Han Chinese-Classic Mesoamerican contacts have been relegated to fringe archaeology. Joseph Needham is another example of a scholar whose reputation as a scientist carried no weight among American archaeologists when he argued for pre-Columbian transpacific contacts. Needham was controversial, especially in Cambridge. In the 1930s, along with J. B. S. Haldane in biology, J. D. Bernal in physics, and Lancelot Hogben in mathematics, Needham, then working in biochemistry, formed a Social Relations of Science group looking to Marxist principles to explain the history of science (Aronowitz 1996:208–209; Harding 1996:22). Later, upon his retirement from his laboratory in 1965, Needham began a monumental history of science in China, incorporating Chinese philosophies and political history as well as what the West terms science and technology. A basic theme in the Science and Civilisation in China volumes is the spread of scientific knowledge, what is usually termed ‘‘diffusion.’’ Many instances proved difficult to document, particularly in Needham’s favorite challenge, the spread of gunpowder and firearms. There, military advantage, and in other cases, commercial advantage, dictated secrecy. Other difficulties stem from an opposite circumstance, the unremarked mundane ordinariness of everyday technologies. Needham forged ahead, laying out the story as he perceived it, bolstered by immense footnoting. Critics found many cracks in the grand edifice, as might be expected in work of such pioneering scope (similar in this respect


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to the provocative projects of Richard S. MacNeish, in American archaeology). Regardless, Cambridge honored Needham by making him Master of Gonville and Caius College. My own evaluation, from 2 weeks together during our Wenner-Gren conference in Mexico, 1977, and visits to him and Lu subsequently in Cambridge, is that he possessed a strong scientific mind, focusing on material data and building a clear logic. Whether that logic could be refuted would be a matter of working with more data or alternate hypotheses. Our question of transpacific contacts was greatly advanced by his raising the possibility of undocumented commoners transmitting traits during the century of the Manila galleons, whose crews deserted by the hundreds and were forced to flee into the hinterlands because desertion was severely punished. Ethnographic similarities might be attributed to these early postColumbian contacts. Sifting out these, Needham highlighted archaeological and early contact ethnographic data (Needham and Lu 1985). What I have termed the ‘‘Manila galleon problem’’ of undocumented commoner contacts extends broadly across the Americas, certainly to the United States Southeast where sixteenth-century pirates and privateers preying on the Atlantic treasure galleons running the Gulf Stream must have lain over along the coast. Anglophone archaeologists and ethnohistorians have ignored not only these undocumented boats, but also the first Jamestown chroniclers’ identification of the Chickahominy lord Opechancanough as a refugee from ‘‘near Mexico,’’ and the extraordinary sojourn of another Chickahominy, ‘‘Don Luis’’ (Paquinquineo), between 1560 and 1570 in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Spain before returning to his homeland and resuming his aristocratic leadership (Kehoe 2005b:268–270). Here, boundaries between eventually Anglo and Spanish territories, and between prehistoric and historic, support orthodox American archaeology’s commitment to a premised evolutionary trajectory instead of historical particularism. From the standpoint of Chesapeake Bay First Nations, an academic origins myth is substituted for their forebears’ participation in a wider world. When archaeologists dismiss scientists of the caliber of Alexander von Humboldt and Joseph Needham, when data are rejected a priori on grounds that oceanic voyaging was impossible or that proponents are racists, we are not dealing with rational science. Mainstream archaeology constructed a normal science conformable to Western ideology, excluding pasts that veer from the story of Man’s Rise to Civilization through Western Technology (Stone and Mackenzie 1989). American mainstream archaeologists, apparently unable to grasp that evolutionary developments are above all historically contingent (Gould 2002), have not yet rejected nineteenth-century stages of cultural evolutionism. Those who travel the high road replicating their preceptors, both in social class and intellectually, usually gain a job.

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End Notes 1 Kelley herself was somewhat marginalized, as a woman in an era when Gordon Willey could openly proclaim he would not accept women students, as a West Texan in a country that thinks intellectuals can only be bred on the seacoasts, as a Southwestern archaeologist aware that her region stretches across the political border into Chihuahua, and exacerbating her marginality to the Southwest archaeology Core, employed in a Canadian university. 2 I owe this paragraph to Clyde Kluckhohn, who discussed Gardin at length in his Harvard graduate course on history and theory of anthropology, Spring semester 1958, in which I was enrolled. Kluckhohn foresaw, and recommended, a ‘‘linguistic turn’’ in archaeology; two other students in the course, Chang (1967:77–78) and Deetz (1967:83–96) reflect Kluckhohn’s influences although without citation, since he had not published his argument before his untimely death, 1960. Chang dedicated his book to Kluckhohn.

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