Albert Spaulding

Albert Clanton Spaulding (August 13, 1914 – May 29, 1990) was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science.

His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate.

He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.

Albert Spaulding was born on August 14, 1914, in Choteau, Montana.

He grew up in Missoula, Montana and attended the University of Montana, where his father was the dean of the School of Forestry.

During his sophomore year, he married Charlotte Smith and later had two children, Ronald and Catherine.

He received his B.A. in economics in 1935 and promptly enrolled in the University of Michigan's anthropology M.A. program, receiving his degree in 1937.

Spaulding's archaeological career spanned every corner of North America, beginning with a brief teaching position at the University of Montana after receiving his B.A. in 1935.

He pursued his Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University in 1938 under the guidance of William Duncan Strong, a firm advocate of the direct historical approach.

In 1939, he became the first anthropology graduate student to be named university fellow.

During his time as a doctoral student, he developed his stalwart perspectives on archaeology, namely its justification as a true science and the need for its practitioners to think quantitatively when necessary.

Relating his initial intellectual experience in archaeology, Spaulding recalled, "my fundamental interest at the time [...] was clarification of the basic concepts of archaeology, which led me into explicit applications of quantitative technique and explicit definitions of archaeological problems in terms of relationship between or among well-defined variables."

As a result, Spaulding—along with his colleague Gordon Willey—regularly contemplated the interrelations of form, space, and time in archaeological study, an extensive and critical concept he termed the "dimensions of archaeology".

During his time as a master's student at the University of Michigan, he joined the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal as an archaeological supervisor, participating in projects throughout South Dakota, Nebraska, Mississippi, and Kentucky until 1941.

While his dissertation stalled, Spaulding took advantage of his time and joined the War Mapping Program of the U.S. Forest Service as an assistant topographic and photogrammetric engineer.

He mapped the coastal ranges of southern California before traveling to Pennsylvania.

In the wake of World War II, having received his Ph.D., Spaulding accepted an offer to teach at the University of Kansas, where he stayed for only three semesters.

He also accepted the position of Assistant Curator of the university's Museum of Anthropology, where he spent most of his time administering the archaeological and ethnographic collections and exhibits.

Although he completed his studies in 1942, the potency of World War II forced him to delay publication of his dissertation until 1946, upon which he was awarded his degree.

He left KU in 1947 to accept a much-desired assistant teaching position and assistant curatorship at the University of Michigan and its Museum of Anthropology.

The position he vacated at KU was filled by Carlyle S. Smith.

While the concept of culture history dominated the archaeological discipline throughout the early 20th century, unrest as to the empirical suppositions of the theory fermented during the 1950s and 1960s, just as the theoretical underpinnings of the "New Archaeology" came to fruition.

At the same time, the nature and legitimacy of archaeological types became a prime target of academic dispute, for some archaeologists held the belief that the cultural popularity of defined types created a normal frequency distribution that, in turn, validated such types and reflected cultural norms.

This "common sense" theory of cultural units pitted the real against the arbitrary, rooted in empirical and theoretical rationalizations.

Debates flourished as proponents of the idea defended the irrationality of an empirical type, coming to a head with a series of publications that swiftly ran its course through the pages of American Antiquity known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate.

In 1953, Spaulding published a counter-argument of sorts titled "Statistical techniques for the discovery of artifact types" that detailed a statistical classification method for recognizing real inherent types in prehistoric material.

He believed using cluster algorithms to group artifacts of similar attributes favored by the maker— corroborated by chi-squared tests— produced such meaningful and evident types, giving credence to the methods of evolutionary archaeology.

In response, James Ford took the side of a nascent post-processualism and contested Spaulding's self-perceived emic modus operandi, declaring that archaeological types are more or less subjective constructs of the archaeologist and that the concept of culture itself is quite etic.

Spaulding's method would only serve to highlight the extent to which temporally popular styles prevailed and categorize cultural continuity without seriously considering the basics of culture theory.

Even so, Ford believed that archaeological types could, in some measure, reflect cultural norms, but the idea that they were mostly subjective units created through trial and error and convenient testing dominated his understanding.

Spaulding responded with haste, challenging Ford's methodologies.

Eventually, he attained the recognition of full-time professor and curator, but left the university in 1959 to become the program director of the Office of Social Science at the National Science Foundation, a new addition at the time.

Originally, he was assigned director to both the "Anthropology" and "History and Philosophy of Science" programs within the foundation, but became the full-time director of Anthropology in 1961.

It was here that he expressed the inherent need for anthropology to be considered a true science, intimately developing the attitudes directed towards the social sciences.

After a brief appointment at Yale University, Spaulding left NSF in 1963 to serve as the chairman of the Department of Anthropology and professor at the University of Oregon for three years.

He ultimately accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served as the dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1967 to 1971.

He retired in 1983, returning to the university to teach as an honored emeritus professor until he developed an illness in 1988.

He died in 1990 of cancer.

Spaulding participated in a number of field projects during the course of his lifetime but documented comparatively little field material as his interests resided mostly in the refinement of theory and method.

The only reports considered somewhat complete are those on the Arzberger site in South Dakota and Agattu Island in the Aleutian Islands.