A Scientific Anthropological Archaeologist at Work

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reviews the fifty-year contribution of Deborah L. Nichols to Mesoamerican archaeology, highlighting her insistence that archaeology is indeed anthropology and how a fundamental anthropological perspective informed all her work. From her 1977 excavations of the earliest known Basin of Mexico irrigation canals at Santa Clara Coatitlán, to her subsequent research on household craft production at Otumba, regional exchange networks across the Basin of Mexico, and formative settlement at Altica, she treated her findings as the outcomes of social decision-making within shifting ecological and political economic parameters and sought to validate her conclusions through systematic comparison defined, not by fixed typologies, but by key variables whose effects on each other could change according to circumstances, thereby demonstrating the nature of the interconnections between them. This appreciation for both the interactional “insider’s point of view” and macrolevel comparative generalization represents anthropological science at its best. Conversely, the way she could hypothesize sociocultural behaviors that produced the material artifacts she found also substantiates an essential contribution of archaeology to anthropology. Finally, her collaborations with other archaeologists and her readiness to apply new technologies to longstanding questions epitomize what Thomas Kuhn argued led “normal science” inevitably, if only inadvertently, to scientific revolutions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50005