Crossroads of Disciplines: Precipitating Causes and Latent Causal Conditions

Summary

Historians and archaeologists are habitually drawn to one or the other of two very different types of causal explanation. Those habits arise in great measure from the two distinctly different kinds of data that the two disciplines deal with. Archaeological causal explanations are frequently limited to "latent causal conditions," that is, environmental and cultural (thus anonymous and collective) vulnerabilities or proclivities, broad-scale physical and societal pushes and pulls that set the stage for changes in human behavior. Historical causal explanations, on the other hand, typically emphasize "precipitating causes," the acts or reactions of individual people that constitute in aggregate any societal change. Satisfactory explanations of changes effected by humans require both modes of explanation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20001