North American Archaeologist

Between 1997 and 1998, the Public Archaeology Facility, at Binghamton University, was contracted by the New York State Education Department on behalf of the Department of Transportation to conduct investigations of the Plus site (SUBi-1736; NYSM #10494), located in the Town of Dryden, Tompkins County, New York. The site occupies an inland setting in the Virgil/Fall Creek watershed, lying on a glacial gravel hill adjacent to Willow Glen Cemetery along NY Route 13. Site examination and data recovery excavations in threatened areas of the site revealed a cluster of Late Woodland cultural features including hearths, a storage/refuse pit, and postmolds. The artifactual materials from these cultural features suggest the Plus site functioned as an Iroquois remote camp occupied during the late 14th century. The Plus site represents the first Iroquois remote campsite in central New York to receive intensive subsurface investigation.

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.

The role of analogical reasoning has been extensively discussed by American archaeologists. Geologists and evolutionary biologists suggest two kinds of analogy are necessary in historical science. The distinction between immanent and configurational properties and processes in these affinal disciplines clarifies the role of analogical reasoning in archaeology. Examples of archaeological analogies reveals conflation of the two kinds of processes and properties. Distinction between immanence and configuration provides a basis to identify the potentials and pitfalls of analogical reasoning in archaeology.