university alabama press w c mckern and the midwestern taxonomic method nov 2002

[...]... classi¤cation o is the method whereby apparent ®ux and chaos of the external world are reduced to quiescence and unity and become the object of intellectual contemplation ( W R Thompson 1952:2) The conceptual structure of what became known as the midwestern taxonomic method originated with Swedish physician and botanist Carl Von Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus Understanding the Linnaean biological taxonomy—how... direct service to all students who may have occasion to examine these materials in the course of research” (McKern 1936:179) These topics were still being discussed by members of the Society for American Archaeology in the 1990s TH E MIDWESTERN TAXONOMIC METHOD Of all his accomplishments, McKern is best remembered as the chief architect of the MTM, designed to classify archaeological remains from the. .. be the ¤nal arbiter of which units are applicable for which kinds of analytical jobs Theory and an analytical problem dictate which characters out of the almost in¤nite number that could be selected are actually chosen by the analyst for measurement, and theory in particular speci¤es the values (character states) of those characters The characters and values chosen are the units used to construct types,... measure and how we should measure them? There must be some theory—explanatory statements—that guides analysis, because it is theory (taxonomic principles) and its derivative propositions that suggest which characters are relevant and at what scale they should be measured The theory one chooses 18 / W C McKern and the Midwestern T axonomic Method to follow depends in part on the particular analytical problem... that we want to show that many of the thought processes that McKern and his colleagues went through were parallel to, and in some ways anticipated, the thought processes that biologists and paleontologists went through in the decades following the evolutionary synthesis of the early 1940s The ontological and epistemological issues with which McKern, Guthe, and Deuel wrestled are not unique to archaeology... producing what eventually became known as the midwestern taxonomic method (MTM) As we document in later chapters, the method attracted considerable attention throughout the 1930s as archaeologists, primarily those working in the Midwest, worked to re¤ne the method to suit their needs No one was ever completely satis¤ed with it, and few other than McKern really understood how it operated Unlike the southwestern... lunch together and discussed various archaeological matters Fisher (1997:119) reported that late in 1929 these lunchtime discussions “began to concentrate on how a cultural classi¤cation system could be designed to serve the archaeological needs of the Wisconsin area.” Because no means was available for ascertaining the age Introduction / 9 of much of the archaeological material they had collected, they... squabbles over the method itself rather than what its results might signify Those discussions re®ected the “typical methodologizing of the period” (Dunnell 2000:371) McKern was explicit and vocal about the purpose of the method and what its intended results would accomplish First, the MTM was intended to produce a terminology for a set of classi¤catory units that would enhance communication between archaeologists... “UC” to denote the Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago W C MCKERN There is no obituary for McKern in American Antiquity, the leading archaeological journal in the United States Instead, a short notice appeared in the March 1989 issue of the Bulletin of the Society for American Archaeology It read simply: Society Founder Dies At the age of 96, Will Carleton McKern, one of the. .. a handful of archaeologists several decades earlier had wrestled with such issues as identifying characters and character states and attempting to understand how various characters were linked The method used by that small group of archaeologists was nowhere near as sophisticated as that developed by the pheneticists, but the basic approach was the same: Use any and all available Preface and Acknowledgments .