Response to Apel and Darmark: Evolution and Material Culture

As Jan Apel and Kim Darmark rightly observe, the conceptual approaches that we employ in archaeology have fundamental implications, affecting not only the questions that we ask about the past, but the way that we understand both our evidence and the place of our investigation within contemporary society. Theory matters, and debates like the present one are critical to the continued vitality of our discipline. However, I disagree strongly with their arguments for an evolutionary archaeology of material culture, which seem to me to rest upon a series of misapprehensions. It is fair to say that the natural and human sciences have developed distinct ways of understanding the world, since they are interested in answering different questions, and that these can be seen as complementary, if ultimately mutually incommensurate. They reveal different aspects of reality. The attraction of a single framework that could integrate the study of cultural and biological phenomena is undeniable, since there is only one world, while the division between culture and nature is an acknowledged fabrication. However, when such a thing is attempted it all too often results in a form of reductionism, and this appears to be what Apel and Darmark are offering here. They give themselves away when they repeatedly claim that the perspectives on culture offered by the social sciences have had the effect of'marginalising' the topic. Now, thousands upon thousands of scholars in anthropology, sociology, cultural history, social geography, politics, art history and numerous other disciplines cur-