Relations between anthropology and archaeology

The links between cultural anthropology and archaeology came in late thirties and early forties with the excavations in Peru carried out by W.D. strong and his student, Gordon Willey. In the view Valley, a complex of domesticated beans, squash and cotton were identified at the based of a large mound, with an estimated date of 2500 B.C.

A continuous evolutionary sequence was obtained in the mound ad in the adjacent sites leading from incipient agriculture through several stages of village life upto the lowland irrigation states which were ultimately absorbed by the Inca empire, Of special interest in this sequence was the phase identified by Steward as the formative, when maize was introduced and irrigation techniques took over the main subsistence load.

The entire sequence is wholly intelligible as a product of endogamous forces, increasing productivity, increasing population density, multiplication of village sites, warfare inter village and later inter-valley co-ordination of production processes, increasing social stratification and bureaucratic control of production and distribution, centralization of power, feedback to greater productivity, and population density.

If contacts with the old world had occurred during the 2500 to 3000 years which were required for the shift autonomous village to state organisation, nothing vital to the dynamics of the process seems to have resulted there from. The only possible exception was maize, which obviously had not been domesticated on the Peruvian coast. No wild ancestors of the plant had been identified, wild ancestors of corn have been identified in Mexico, but radio carbon 14 daks have confused a period gradual experimentation with domerticated varieties extending back to 7000 B.C. in the Tehuachan valley of central Mexico. The proof that the American domesticated corn is taint amount to a proof that they were capable of achieving every either technologies innovation associated with the New world sequence independently of diffusion from the old. Given the combination Homo sapiens, a nutritive and hardy grain, semi arid valley, ample sources of water terrain. Adaptable to irrigation, it was highly probable that irrigation civilizations would evolve, not once but again and again.