The Role of Parsimony in Archaeological Inference Building

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In archaeology, distinct processes in the past can generate similar patterning in the material record under varying temporal and spatial scales. Facing this challenge of equifinality, archaeologists frequently use parsimony to help assess competing explanatory models by preferring simpler explanations over more complex ones. However, there is little consensus on what model simplicity is determined. More often than not, the parsimony principle is invoked as an ad hoc appeal, with the assumption that more parsimonious explanations are more plausible. In this paper, we argue that there is no theoretical justification to associate parsimony with credibility in archaeology. Moreover, without recognizing the formational dynamics and the aggregate nature of the archaeological phenomenon, an uncritical treatment of the parsimony principle risks reducing emergent patterns in the material record to singular “simpler” sources of variation. In many cases, these singular explanatory factors are actually complex in their implicit assumptions about the nature of the archaeological record. We propose that parsimony should not be treated as a rule for judging competing explanations, but used to help disentangle assumptions among alternate hypotheses, particularly with respect to the connection between human behavior and archaeological formation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Inference in Paleoarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32533