This blog post delves deeply into why archaeologists use two perspectives—typology and population theory—when classifying artifacts, examining the differences in their characteristics and interpretive approaches.
Since the inception of archaeology in its modern sense, archaeologists have sought to classify artifacts through collection and excavation, inferring their spatio-temporal relationships and evolutionary processes to interpret them in relation to past human actions. The perspectives on artifact classification can be broadly divided into ‘typology’ and ‘population theory’.
Typologists, who led early archaeological research and established fundamental classification systems, were the pioneers. They first examined the discernible morphological characteristics of artifacts to form groups. Once they identified essential, form-based characteristics—conceptualized as ‘form’—or central tendencies, a ‘type’ was formed based on these. This process involves identifying an archetype among multiple artifacts sharing a specific form, then using this artifact as an ideal standard for comparison with others. While variations between individual artifacts within a type are inevitable, typologists regarded these as mere deviations unworthy of explanation unless deemed substantial enough to warrant establishing a new type. Therefore, they understand all changes in artifacts as ‘transitions’ from one type to another. This perspective has been crucial in establishing the basis for distinguishing groups with temporal sequences or distinct cultural and spatial boundaries through the classification of types, the setting of boundaries between types, and the ordering of these types. However, the morphological changes observed in individual artifacts are often continuous. Furthermore, typologists tended to perceive changes in types as discontinuous, explaining them solely through factors like external influx or new inventions, rather than considering their own internal evolutionary processes. Moreover, adopting a typological approach inherently limited analysis to simple comparisons of similarities and differences between excavated artifacts.
These issues prompted archaeologists to attempt artifact classification from another perspective. This is the approach based on population theory. Population theorists argue that the essential characteristics of artifacts are not real entities, and that central tendencies are merely the result of empirical observation. They particularly view central tendencies as something that can change at any time depending on the number of artifacts and the criteria used. Therefore, according to them, types do not exist based on an inherent essence intrinsic to the artifacts themselves. Instead, they are inferred through observation and are merely tools devised by researchers according to their research objectives. What exists are only phenomena and variations, signifying the state of things. Population theorists assert that within a specific type, there is no such thing as an archetype—an artifact form that can represent that type. Consequently, they focus their attention on the variations themselves. Variation manifests diversely, gradually increasing after its initial appearance before slowly fading away. They perceive these changes as occurring continuously. That is, the frequency of variation differs across space and time, and change is determined by how variations are distributed in space and time. Population theorists explain these changes in mutation frequency and the differential persistence of specific mutations through the concepts of ‘fluctuation’ and ‘selection’. Fluctuation refers to the phenomenon where unpredictable mutations continuously emerge within a fossil group, causing random changes in mutation frequency. ‘Selection’ refers to the phenomenon where, among such variations, those adapted to a specific environment increase in quantity relative to those that are not.
Examining how this difference in perspective is applied in actual fieldwork reveals an interesting fact. Generally, when new artifacts are discovered, archaeologists directly observe some of them to identify morphological characteristics and review existing cases to select the key attributes necessary for assigning or establishing a type. Based on this, they re-examine whether all artifacts possess these key attributes, classify them according to the presence or absence of these attributes, and then assign or newly establish a type. If two or more types are identified, they first arrange these multiple types spatially and temporally to interpret their meaning. Here, if the researcher seeks to confirm the temporal sequence or differences in user groups among the artifacts, they focus on the establishment and arrangement of types. Conversely, to concretely grasp the evolutionary process between types, one focuses on the variations within the types arranged in space and time. The frequency of these variations and their relative proportions are measured, and it is examined which variations among the many are selected and used continuously. Archaeologists, despite differing positions on artifact classification, actually choose one of these two approaches or appropriately combine them depending on the specific problem they aim to solve.
