Binford's Hunting Stand Hypothesis and the Joint Site

Michael B. Schiffer

American Antiquity, Vol. 48, No. 1. (Jan., 1983), pp. 139-141.

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COMMENTS

BINFORD'S HUNTING STAND HYPOTHESIS AND THE JOINT SITE

Michael B. Schiffer

Lewis R. Binford has recently disputed the inference, advanced in Behavioral Archeology, that the in- habitants of the Joint Site hunted more often during the last years of the site's occupation. As an alternative he suggests that the site was used after abandonment as a hunting camp. These conclusions, which stem from a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the analytic units employed in the Joint Site study, are shown to be without substantial foundation.

Lewis R. Binford suggests in a recent article that I misinterpreted archaeological evidence from the Joint Site, a thirteenth-century pueblo ruin in the Hay Hollow Valley of east-central Arizona (Hanson and Schiffer 1975; Schiffer 1976). In Behavioral Archeology, I concluded that a change in chipped stone usage patterns resulted from more hunting during the last years of the site's oc- cupation. The purpose of this brief comment is to examine Binford's alternative hypothesis that the Joint Site was used after abandonment "by huntingparties operating out of another residential base" (Binford 1981:204, emphasis in original).

The basis of both hypotheses is an inferred trend in the use of chipped stone at the Joint Site, specifically that "the flow rate of chalcedony through households increases by a factor of nearly 2 during the Abandonment period" (Schiffer 1976:170). In trying to account for this change, I tested four hypotheses. Hypothesis 1, that the efficiency of chalcedony use decreased, was decisively rejected. The second hypothesis-which could not be excluded-posits a more wide- spread use of chalcedony by households. (I suggested that this cause could not by itself account for the dramatic increase in flow rate.) Hypothesis 3, stating that chalcedony tools were being used in more and different tasks, was eliminated. The last hypothesis, which received tentative support and was retained, asserts that the rate of task performance for chalcedony tools in- creased. In summing up the hypothesis tests, I proposed that, possibly under conditions of a deteriorating agricultural base,

inhabitants of the Joint Site diversified their procurement strategies to include more species of wild foods, and a greater dependence on the wild foods ordinarily consumed. . . . Because the increased rate of hunting by groups of males resulted in more trips to the vicinity of Point of the Mountain, chalcedony, a material favored for the manufacture of arrow points, was retrieved more frequently [Schiffer 1976:177].

This scenario, offered simply as "a synthesis of the available inferences, consistent with the evidence presented" (Schiffer 1976:178) is regarded by Binford (1981:203) as "truly bizarre."

Binford contends that the hunting activities that led to the deposition of the chalcedony ar- tifacts took place after the Joint Site was abandoned as a residential pueblo. In arriving at his "successional alternative" (Binford 1981:203), Binford assumes that "Abandonment" period materials from the Joint Site are those left behind on occupation surfaces such as room floors. He equates the analytical category "Abandonment period" with de facto refuse or (to use his term) site furniture (Binford 1981:204). However, both "Main Occupation" and "Abandonment" periods are analytical categories referring to materials deposited in middens as secondary refuse. On this point the text of Behavioral Archeology is unambiguous:

In order to carry out this study [of change in raw material use], it is first necessary to associate secondary refuse deposits with the gross occupation periods of the site. This can be achieved, in a coarse way, by mak- ing several assumptions about depositional patterns:

1. During the Main Occupation period, when all rooms were still occupied (except 37), secondary refuse was deposited only in extramural areas.

Michael B. Schiffer, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

140 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY [Vol. 48, No. 1,19831

2. During the Abandonment period, which began after the first rooms were abandoned and lasted until the site was vacated totally, secondary refuse was deposited mainly in empty rooms.

From these assumptions, the following conclusions can be drawn: Extramural deposits contain secondary refuse primarily from the Main Occupation period, but secondary refuse in room fill consists exclusively of Abandonment period refuse. . . .The trash fill from Rooms 1, 2, 5, 7, 11,and 17 comprise[s] the sample of Abandonment period refuse [Schiffer 1976:169,emphasis added].

Binford structures his discussion as if he were dealing with hunting materials (presumably as de facto and primary refuse) on room floors: in reality, he is directing his efforts at secondary refuse thrown into vacant rooms by the remaining inhabitants of the pueblo. To save his scenario, Bin- ford would have to argue that post-Puebloan hunters fastidiously deposited their own trash in abandoned rooms, trash that includes such typical Pueblo artifacts as worked bone, marine shell, and copious sherds.

I also note that Binford's hunting stand hypothesis receives scant support from de facto refuse on the floors of lateabandoned rooms. Data in Table 11.2 (Schiffer 1976:150) indicate a total of only 280 bone elements on the floors of the 13 rooms containing de facto refuse. The comparable figure for chipped-stone artifacts is 145. Moreover, chalcedony-the material type thought to be involved in the manufacture of hunting gear-was represented on room floors by just seven ar- tifacts (Schiffer 1973). For a host of reasons discussed at length in Behavioral Archeology (Schif- fer 1976:133-139)-principally the lack of homogeneity in mode of deposition of artifacts in the provenience type "floor"-these numbers of de facto refuse items are not completely accurate. The firecracked rock Binford (1981:204) takes as evidence of cooking by hunters consists generally of tiny chert chips, usually about 1-3 cm long, that probably are unrelated to cooking activities. (Regrettably, information on the specific attributes of the Joint Site fire-cracked rock is not published.) It is possible that brief reoccupations by hunters could result in the deposition of these small quantities of bone and chipped stone. However, in the absence of positive evidence, it is more parsimonious to assume that these items, which in all respects are identical to the kinds of artifacts contained in secondary refuse, were laid down by the Puebloans at the same time they deposited items of demonstrable de facto refuse, such as restorable pots, on room floors. In short, on the basis of patterns in the existing evidence, one's confidence is not raised in Binford's hunt- ing stand hypothesis.

In attempting to refute my hypothesis of increased hunting during the Abandonment period, Binford briefly treats the faunal evidence. He attaches a great deal of significance to purported changes in bone to chipped-stone ratios between the two occupation periods as presented in Table 12.6 of Behavioral Archeology (Schiffer 1976:176). (The chipped-stone counts were used to stan- dardize comparisons of the faunal elements; it was assumed that flow rates for total chipped- stone artifacts remained approximately constant for the two periods.) His argument is as follows:

In general, the speed of game depletion is inversely rslated to body size; larger body sized animals are over- exploited first, so that there is an increasing trend toward animals of smaller body size during the tenure of a sedentary occupation. We note that there is a relative increase in mule deer relative to antelope between the "main occupation" and the "abandonment phase" (sic) assemblages. This proportional shift is also true with respect to the smaller animals; there is an absolute increase in mule deer relative to other animals. I find this pattern almost impossible to imagine as characteristic of the closing phases of a permanent settle- ment [Binford 1981:204].

The data, however, contradict Binford: the alleged trend toward greater exploitation of larger animals does not exist. (The following percentages are derived from figures reported in Table 12.6.) The ratio of mule deer to antelope does rise during the Abandonment period. However, the percentage of mule deer to other species only changes from 2.5% to 2.7%-hardly a noteworthy trend. More interesting still is the decrease in antelope from 4.9% to 1.6% of all species. Indeed, contrary to Binford's assertions, between the Main Occupation and Abandonment periods large animals decline as a percentage of total elements from 7.4% to 4.3%. I could have used these numbers to support the hypothesis of increased hunting during the Abandonment period: after all,

COMMENTS 141

the shift toward smaller game should be strong evidence for greater hunting pressure. I did not stress such comparisons of the faunal data because of the likelihood that bone preservation in rooms was far better than in extramural areas, possibly by a factor of 10 (Schiffer 1976:175-176). As an accomplished vertebrate taphonomist, Binford surely appreciates the differences in destructive processes that operate in closed rooms versus open middens; however, in the present case he overlooks the obvious implications of these preservation differences. If Binford wishes to assume that the faunal ratios can be directly compared and meaningfully interpreted, then, using his own criteria, he will have to acknowledge that they buttress the original hypothesis of more hunting during the Joint Site Abandonment period.

In Behavioral Archeology, inferences about the systemic context of the Joint Site were ad- vanced in the context of a general study of archaeological methodology. Regrettably, the linkage I established between the methodological points and the Joint Site analysis was apparently less o b vious than I intended. The Joint Site could, of course, have been used as a hunting stand. Indeed, there is no end of hypotheses that one can capture-from theory, commonsense, or even dreams-to account for a particular pattern. Once a hypothesis is formulated, however, the in- vestigator must endeavor to establish appropriate units of analysis, defined in terms of formation processes (Reid 1973; Reid et al. 1975; Schiffer 1975, 1976). As Reid and I have argued on many occasions, hypothesis testing cannot proceed in a rigorous manner until such analytic units- which establish comparability-are formed. This is one of the basic tenets of behavioral ar- chaeology, and one that many archaeologists continue to ignore. I suggest that the methodological errors evident in Binford's reexamination of the Joint Site data dramatically underscore a con- tinuing need for a "revisionist" New Archaeology along the lines of behavioral archaeology.

Acknowledgments. I thank J. Jefferson Reid, Christian Downum, Randall H. McGuire, Arthur J. Jelinek, and anonymous referees for American Antiquity for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this comment.

REFERENCES CITED

Binford, Lewis R. 1981 Behavioral archaeology and the "Pompeii premise." Journal of Anthropological Research 37:195-

208. Hanson, John A., and Michael B. Schiffer

1975 The Joint Site-a preliminary report. Fieldiana: Anthropology 65:47-91. Reid, J. Jefferson

1973 Growth and response to stress at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.

Reid, J. Jefferson, Michael B. Schiffer, and Jeffrey M. Neff 1975 Archaeological considerations of intrasite sampling. In Sampling in archaeology, edited by James

W. Mueller, pp. 209-224. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Schiffer, Michael B.

1973 The chipped-stone assemblage from the Joint Site. Ms. on deposit, Arizona State Museum Library, Tucson.- ~

1975 Behavioral chain analysis: activities, organization, and the use of space. Fieldiana: Anthropology 65:103-119.

1976 Behavioral archeology. Academic Press, New York.