Saturday, January 2, 2016

Some consequences of viewing archaeology as a social science


“Making warranted inferences is the whole point and the only point of doing social research.”
(6 and Bellamy 2012:14)

If one views archaeology as a social science, then the poor record of many archaeologists in making arguments is a serious professional problem. I point out problems with a number of common archaeological approaches to argumentation in a recent paper (Smith 2015); see also Smith (2011). I have just started reading a book (6 and Bellamy 2012) that covers similar material as my article, but on steroids. That is, the book is an extended treatment of the process of argumentation in the social sciences. Although I am only on chapter 2 now, the book has stimulated me to think about the implications of faulty argument techniques for a social-scientific view of the discipline of archaeology. If you have other views of archaeology--perhaps considering it a branch of the humanities, or as consisting of practical fieldwork and not a scholarly discipline--then the following argument does not apply.

What are the social sciences?

Here are a few quotes that describe what social science is. These are mainstream social science perspectives that--in my opinion--are congenial to much of archaeology.



  • “Social science is about human beings and what goes on in their institutions and interactions .... Social science studies all levels from the family to the global society, and how the various levels affect each other” (Steuer 2002:5).
Ragin and Amoroso (2011:33-56) list the following as the main research goals of research in the social sciences:
  1. Identifying general patterns and relationships
  2. Testing and refining theories
  3. Making predictions.  [But see Lieberson and Lynn (2002) for a good discussion of sociology as an observational, not a predictive, discipline. Ditto for archaeology.]
  4. Interpreting culturally or historically significant phenomena
  5. Exploring diversity
  6. Giving voice
  7. Advancing new theories

What is the purpose of the social sciences?


  •  “The main structural features of what society can be like in the next generation are already given by trends at work now. Humanity’s freedom of maneuver lies within the framework created by its history. Social scientists and allied scholars could help to widen the area of choice by analyzing the historical trends that now limit it. They could show, impartially, honestly, and free from the special pleadings of government and vested interests, the range of possible alternative and the potentialities for effective action. Such has been, after all, the aim of inquiry into human affairs in free societies since the Greeks” (Moore 1958:159).
  •  “The purpose of social science, let us say, is to help citizens and policymakers better understand the world, with an eye to changing that world. Social science ought to provide useful answers to useful questions" (Gerring 2012:396)

What do social scientists have to do to reach the goals identified by Ragin and Amoroso, and to accomplish the social purposes described by Barrington Moore and John Gerring? The mainstream social science answer to this question is that social scientists need to do two things:  First, conduct research using scientific methods; and, second, reach conclusions based on rigorous forms of scientific argumentation (any of the methods textbooks in the social sciences will elaborate on this claim; e.g., Abbott 2004; Ragin and Amoroso 2011; Gerring 2012). In the words of John Gerring, 

  • “The willful avoidance of scientific methodology has doleful long-term consequences for social science, and for those who would see social science playing a role in the transformation of society" (Gerring 2012:399).
My focus here is on the second requirement of social research: good argumentation (Smith 2015). The epigram, a quote from 6 and Bellamy, strikes me as crucial:


  • “Making warranted inferences is the whole point and the only point of doing social research.”
Then were does this leave those many archaeologists who are satisfied to quote a bunch of abstract, philosophical social theory, then describe their data, and end up with a bunch of speculative conclusions? These authors are not making what 6 and Bellamy call "warranted inferences." To my mind, this non-rigorous form of argumentation is harmful to an archaeology that strives to be part of the social sciences. It may be okay for a postmodern archaeology, or for an archaeology that eschews science to focus on literary theory or some other kind of humanities epistemology. But to my way of thinking, if we can't make rigorous, warranted arguments, then why bother doing archaeology? 

References

6, Perri and Christine Bellamy
2012    Principles of Methodology: Research Design in Social Science. Sage, New York.

Abbott, Andrew
2004    Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. Norton, New York.

Gerring, John
2012    Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Lieberson, Stanley and Freda B. Lynn
2002    Barking up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to the Current Model of Sociological Science. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 1-19.

Moore, Barrington, Jr.
1958    Political Power and Social Theory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Ragin, Charles C. and Lisa M. Amoroso
2011    Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method. 2nd ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Smith, Michael E.
2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18: 167-192.


Smith, Michael E.
2015    How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

Steuer, Max
2002    The Scientific Study of Society. Kluwer, New York.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Journal asks me to remove a posted article pdf



I recently received  a request from a journal editor (a friend) to remove a pdf of an article of mine published in that journal from my site on Academia.edu. I complied with the request. The following text is taken from my email to the editor:


I have complied with your request to remove the pdf of my recently published paper from my Academia.edu site. I approach this issue from two—often contradictory—perspectives: moral and legal. Morally, I am complying with your request under protest. In my mind, I own my scholarly publications. I did the research, I wrote the paper, and the products are my own. I resent the policies of journals that do not permit an author to post his or her publications on the internet. These policies restrict the distribution of scientific knowledge, thereby harming the advancement of scholarship and depriving the public of knowledge obtained often with public funding. As a result, such policies also harm my career, my reputation, and the advancement of my own scholarly trajectory.


From a legal standpoint, however, I often sign the author’s agreements that prevent just this type of posting of published papers. When I am challenged about posting a paper, I typically have little basis for complaint. I signed the form, and in our society bound by the rule of law, I have to comply with the law. While my moral sentiments are quite strong on the issue, they won’t hold up in a court of law. As a citizen and public employee I feel obliged to comply with the law on this and other issues.



Saturday, December 26, 2015

Tweeting my book: At Home with the Aztecs

My popular book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Daily Life, will be released (Routledge) March 3, 2016. This is my first explicitly popular book. That is, it is non-technical, written in a narrative fashion, full of personal stories, and such. I tried to find a commercial trade publisher, but ended up with Routledge when none of the big New York publishers thought it had enough commercial potential. I talk about some of my experiences HERE.

I am floundering a bit on the marketing of the book. I've gotten advice that I need to use social media. So the book has a Facebook page (which I haven't started tinkering with yet...). I need to set up a separate website for the book, though. And now I have jumped into the waters of Twitter. The book has a hashtag (#AtHomeWithAztecs), and I have decided to post at least one tweet a day with something interesting from the book until it is released in March. Check it out. My

Twitter has been somewhat of a disappointment so far. I've dumped on Twitter in this blog before, but I have decided to give it a second chance. I found that my scholarly interests are rather poorly represented in Twitter. Talking to my new colleague, Katie Hinde (a social media star: check out: @Mammals_Suck), it turns out that natural scientists are far more active on Twitter than social scientists. Go figure. In looking for like-minded people on Twitter, I found out that Ancient Cities is a rock band, but not a relevant topic on Twitter. Aztecs on Twitter is mainly about the sports teams from San Diego State. Households and communities are mainly about contemporary community development. Kris Hirst posts a ton of Tweets on current archaeological finds in the news. These are great, but they aren't the kind of targeted scientific topics I was hoping for. The cultural evolution people are pretty active, including Peter Turchin's SESHAT project. This is fine, but it it not really central to my interests (although I am reading Turchin's new book, UltraSociety, right now).


Thursday, December 3, 2015

Do you like indexes?

An excellent book
I just finished indexing my new book last night. I actually enjoy indexing my books. It does take some time, but I find it fun and interesting to compile the index. This is a creative, intellectual task. You have to organize knowledge, cross-reference concepts and terms, and figure out how readers or users of the book might want to find information. I might say "market exchange," you might say "commercial exchange" and someone else might simply say "trade," all for the same concept. So the index has to accommodate all these terms, using "see" and "see also" entries. Users might want to find out about exchange systems, so should I put in an entry "exchange:  see market exchange"? Or do I let it go, assuming that this reader will think to look for markets or trade or commercial?

My wife Cindy, who is an editor, hates indexing. She loves editing, page production using desktop publishing programs, and graphic design, but not indexing. She always bring up the example of a book she indexed once on globalization. The anthropologists used one set of terms, the political scientists another, and the historians a third set of terms. She had to negotiate this diversity and come up with usable index terms that would serve all readers. Maybe the reason I like indexing is that I have only indexed my own books. I like my books. They are brilliant, extremely well written, and full of nuggets of deep insight. Who wouldn't want to index such excellent volumes? Well, maybe an ego-maniac who believed such hype might not have patience for the work of indexing. I always ask Cindy if she wants to index my books, and she usually falls for it, getting worked up about how she hates indexing, before she realizes I am kidding.


A lame index (to a lame-looking book)


But me, I do like compiling the index. And now it is DONE, as is proofing, and I just have to wait for the book to appear.  At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Deilyi Life.

Don't you hate lame indexes that don't have enough entries? Remember the old archaeology books from Academic Press? They had terrible indexes. Three pages for a 500-page book. Mostly useless. Why did they bother?
An index with "After poop deck"

 But what about indexes that are too detailed, too full of entries? Are they a problem? Probably not. If you are a sailor and really want to see where the author talks about the after poop deck, then you need a detailed index.

I just received Peter Turchin's new book, "Ultra Society" in the mail. I like Peter's work, and I was interested to see his book. I've been thinking about social insect colonies lately, since they seem to share some scaling relationships with human settlements. Our settlement scaling group is planning to meet with some of the mathematical social insect folks in a few months to explore the issue. So I wondered if Peter Turchin (a biologist) might discuss insect cooperation in his book. I open it to the back, and find, to my horror, that there is NO INDEX! This isn't a detailed technical monograph (most of which don't have indexes), but a book intended for a popular audience. Then why no index?

I was really impressed with a Calculus textbook I had, both in high school then as a freshman at Brandeis University. Written by Michael Spivak, it was idiosyncratic and more fun than most calculus textbooks. I was intrigued by an entry in the index for "pig-headed." The page in question discussed some pig-headed ideas by a group of mathematicians. I remembered this a few years ago when indexing one of my books, so I looked up Spivak in Wikipedia, where it says:  

"In each of Spivak's books there are hidden references to yellow pigs, an idea Spivak apparently came up with at a bar while drinking with David C. Kelly." I really wanted to verify this, but of course I don't still have my old calculus textbook. I do like the idea, however. I can say that I have never put "yellow pigs" in a book of mine, and "pig-headed" has not occurred in an index. But I cannot deny including one or two strange entries in my indexes. (Note to the staff of my publishers: please ignore that last sentence). But perhaps pig-headed would be a good keyword for a blog entry!

Thursday, November 12, 2015

What is my research all about?

For a variety of reasons, I have been doing some soul-searching recently, trying to identify the patterns and big issues that bind my research interests and projects together. Part of the rationale comes from having to start doing private fund-raising for the ASU Teotihuacan Research Laboratory. To communicate research to the public and to donors, one has to be able to describe it clearly and in terms that people find interesting and important. Part of the impetus comes from some collective soul-searching with my unit, the School of Human Evolution & Social Change. We are ten years old now, and we are launching a publicity and scientific outreach program. I just got an email asking me to encapsulate my research in one sentence. If you think that your work is far to complicated and nuanced for such a brief treatment, my response is, "F*** Nuance!"

Another reason for working on these big issues is that I have always admired the way sociologist Robert Sampson does this. Sampson has a paper where he articulates three "theses" that guide his research and make sense of it scientifically (Sampson 2009). When he came to ASU as a consultant for our urban project, he gave a public lecture, and he used the same three points to organize his research for a public audience. It was a very effective device and a great lecture. For the past five or six years I have periodically wondered about my own three theses or questions.

So, here is my initial stab at my three big research questions. After several years, this is the first time I have tried actually defining these questions. This is a provisional attempt, subject to amendment and change. OK, enough caveats:


1.                  How did people in the distant past form communities and cities that were able to thrive and prosper for many centuries?
2.                  How did the interaction of local, bottom-up forces and governmental, top-down forces, generate and shape human society and action in cities and communities?
3.                  What are the regularities of human settlement size and organization—in the present and the past—and how can these patterns help us understand social life and institutions?


The first question is somewhat post-hoc. I didn't start out excavating Aztec households to show how prosperous or successful they were. In fact, I thought their residents were probably poor and downtrodden. But after several excavation project and lots of analysis, my conclusion is that these people were remarkably well off. I explore this situation and grapple with ways to explain it in my new book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Daily Life (due in Feb, 2016, I am correcting proofs right now. NOTE: I did NOT set the price! Sorry.). But now, as my research interests turn to Teotihuacan, I am finding a parallel bit distinct pattern of successful urban life for many centuries: see my post on this in Wide Urban World.

The second question owes a lot to the change in my thinking after first reading Blanton and Fargher (2008). My work on neighborhoods, open spaces, and urban services fits with this broad question. It is hard to steer a reasonable course between these two poles. Traditional models in anthropological archaeology are very top-down in the way they depict states and complex societies. The basic idea for decades was that kings and states controlled everyone and everything, and we now know differently. But the complexity scientists often write as if everything is generative and bottom-up with no central control, which errs in the opposite direction (as in modeler Joshua Epstein's creed, "If you can't grow it [with an agent-based model], you haven't explained it.")

My third question reflects more recent activity on the scaling of human settlements. I've been astounded several times: first in seeing the regularities of scaling relationships in modern cities; and second, in finding that some of these same regularities work for premodern cities, and even for village societies. Working with physicists, economists, and archaeologists, this project has not only been great fun, but it is somewhat awe-inspiring to think that we are uncovering some basic fundamental regularities in human behavior, things that have not been though about in anthropology or archaeology for many decades.

I apologize for indulging in such navel-gazing here. But stepping back to think about the big picture and how one's own research fits with big ideas is useful in two ways. First it helps you understand your own work, its importance, and its links with broader ideas and domains. This can help you improve your research and writing. Second, this kind of thinking allows you to more effectively communicate with the public, and with scholars in other disciplines. We need more thinking on a grand scale. The "Grand challenges for archaeology" was a step in the right direction (Kintigh et al), but on a personal level, for individual scholars, I encourage everyone to go one step further and really nail down one's own research interests and domains at a broad and easily understandable level.

References:

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher
2008    Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.



Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright, and Melinda Zeder
2014    Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79 (1): 5-24. 

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, and Melinda A. Zeder
2014    Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122: 879-880.

Sampson, Robert J.
2009    Racial Stratification and the Durable Tangle of Neighborhood Inequality. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621: 260-280.

Smith, Michael E.
2016    At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Domestic Life. Taylor and Francis, New York.