Strategy and Tactic in the Analysis of Archaeological Hunter-Gatherer Systems

Abstract

Archaeologists studying past cultural systems commonly employ the concept of strategy to characterize both general and specific aspects of those systems. It is herein argued that a “strategy” is a plan; a general concept or blueprint conceived to achieve a goal. The fulfillment of a strategy requires that specific, lower-order, actions be taken. These actions are tactics—small-scale activities that generate a material record. It is the patterned remains of tactical behavior that form, and are recovered from, the archaeological record, with higher-order strategies being inferred from some understanding of tactics. In practice, however, many researchers interchange the concepts of strategy and tactic, equating plans with actions and vice versa. This tends to homogenize the reconstruction of strategies and masks the diversity, variability, and adaptive nature of the tactical inventory within the larger cultural system. Thus, the degree and scale of initial archaeological analysis should be at the level of tactic, rather than of strategy, an approach that would broaden the archaeological perspective in modeling and understanding past systems.