Incompatibilities Between Evolutionary and Behavioral Archaeology

Michael J. O’Brien, R Lee Lyman, and Roberts D. Leonard’s article “Basic incompatibilities between Evolutionary and Behavioral Archaeology” is in response to Michael Brian Schiffer’s article “Some Relationships between Behavioral and Evolutionary Archaeologies”. The main reason for this comment article is because O’Brien, Lyman, and Leonard are all evolutionary archaeologists. O’Brien, Lyman, and Leonard attempt to argue that there are several important reasons that evolutionary and behavioral archaeology cannot work together. This claim was in response to what Schiffer had proposed in his article “there is no fundamental reason why these two programs cannot work in concert to achieve the goal of explaining behavioral (or evolutionary change in human societies.” (Schiffer 1996:643) O’Brien, Lyman, and Leonard primarily focused on the “metaphysical

O’Brien, Lyman and Leonard have vastly different approaches to the same question that Schiffer is trying to answer. Schiffer’s main approach is that the actives of past people are what behavioral narratives/theories are centralized on. Whereas O’Brien, Lyman and Leonard approach is more centered on Darwinian evolution, and that “evolutionary archaeology has many parallels to modern paleobiology” (O’Brien, Lyman and Leonard 1998:487), which evolutionary archaeology borrows concepts and approaches from. O’Brien, Lyman and Leonard do make light of that, “before a truly integrative approach to the historical study of humans and their artifacts merges-that is, one that investigates the evolutionary pathways of humans and the groups in which they live we must make clear what the points of contention are among the various approaches” (O’Brien, Lyman and Leonard 1998:495), which is true, that the only real reason that behavioral and evolutionary archaeology is because of the approaches they both