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= William A. Longacre =

I. Lead Section and Introduction
William A. Longacre II (16 December 1937 - 18 November 2015) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist chiefly known for his work in the American Southwest region. Longacre is considered the co-founder of “Ceramic Sociology” and “Processual Archaeology.” One of his most famous works is “Archaeology as Anthropology: a Case Study” that highlighted his work on prehistoric social organization at the Carter Ranch Site. Longacre was also in the beginning stages of the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project that took place in Southeast Asia. He was an eminent archaeologist and was a former head of University of Arizona Anthropology Department from 1990-1998. William A. Longacre was the academic advisor to Miriam T. Stark who is also a current well-known archaeologist with work in Southeast Asia. Throughout his half-century long career, Longacre published 9 volumes and over 60 published article works.

Early Life:
William was born on December 16, 1937 in the town of Hancock, Michigan. Longacre was raised in Houghton County in Michigan and was the son of William A. Longacre and his wife Doris. His father was a physics professor at Michigan Technological University for more than 40 years.

Education:
William Longacre attended community college at Michigan Technological University (MTU). This was called the Michigan College of Mining and Technology at that time, and was the workplace of his father. He transferred into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in anthropology. He received this degree in 1959. After this, he was accepted to the University of Chicago. It was here that he would meet Lewis Binford. William Longacre was heavily influenced by Lewis Binford in his development of “New”, or processual, archaeology. By 1963 he was a PhD student specializing in archaeology in the southwestern region of North America, and did his dissertation on 12th-13th century Pueblo site in eastern Arizona known as Carter Ranch.

Adult Life/Career:
Longacre started working at the University of Arizona in 1964, after accepting an offer from Emil W. Haury. He worked in the Anthropology department as an assistant professor, later becoming a professor. He was appointed director of the archaeological field school at the University of Arizona in 1966 and served in this position until 1979, overseeing leading fieldwork in eastern Arizona at the Grasshopper Pueblo.

In 1975 he started the Kalinga Project on the Philippine island of Luzon. He was a visiting professor at the University of the Philippines for 30 years.

In 1989 he was appointed head of anthropology department at University of Arizona. He held this position until 1998, and retired in 2004.

Death:
William A. Longacre died on November 18, 2015 after a brief illness and heart attack. He was buried in his family plot in Houghton, MI.

Legacy in Anthropology:
William A. Longacre was one of the great archaeologists who played an integral role in what is known as The New Archaeology of the early 1960s. Led by Lewis R. Binford, this movement focused on making changes in the methods and manner in which archaeologists as well as anthropologists asked questions within a conceptual framework that treated “culture as systemic, participatory, behavioral, and multifaceted.” Furthermore, the archaeological record went from being seen as “surviving, material portions of former cultural systems” to being studied from an archaeological lens that added into knowledge by drawing inferences to advance studies with scientific material.

He directed the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper Pueblo from 1964 until 1979, where he supervised 22 doctorates at University of Arizona and implemented an ethnoarchaeological research program with the Kalinga group in the Philippines. John Olson, who succeeded department head at University of Arizona, mentioned that Longacre’s “positive impacts on the University of Arizona range from his administrative expertise as anthropology department” and described him as an “energetic and thoughtful archaeologist.” Throughout his career he highlighted how research and education could be fused together efficiently and an influential leader at the University of Arizona.

Awards:
In 1994, Longacre received the Award for Excellence in Ceramic Studies by the Society for American Archeology. He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS).

Longacre was awarded the Fred A. Riecker Distinguished Professor in 1998 and emeritus Riecker Professor in 2004.

In 2016-17, he was also the 6th Raymond H. Thompson Award recipient which is given to anthropologists in order to not only highlight their contributions to the field of archaeology but also commemorate their past work at the University of Arizona.

In 2004, he received the Presidential Recognition Award which is given to those who have “provided extraordinary services” to the Society for American Archaeology. The award recipients were hand picked by the president of the SAA and members within the Executive Board.

“Anthropology as Archaeology: A Case Study”:
This is one of Longacre’s most famous work, and was a groundbreaking piece of research in which he reconstructed social organization at a 12th to mid 13th century AD Ancestral Pueblo community in Eastern Arizona. Longacre’s research mainly focused on the prehistoric community in an area which was occupied for a relatively short period, (1100 AD - 1250), within a small but ecologically heterogeneous area. Longacre disputed the fact that “major articles should not be primarily descriptive in character.” He argued that, “we can use these ‘descriptive’ articles and monographs and sorely need them still, in all archeological fields. They provide the basic data our more imaginative characters draw on.”

In his case study, he hypothesized that social demography, which is a field that focuses on the relationships between economic, social, cultural, and biological processes influencing a population, as well as social organization are reflected in the material system. Furthermore he argued that a society practicing post-marital rules stressing matrilocality, social demography may be mirrored in the ceramic art of female potters, and that the smaller and more closely tied the social aggregate, the more details of design would be shared. He tested such hypothesis in his distributional study of the ceramic types, stylistic attributes of the pottery, and the non-ceramic artifacts recovered from the Carter Ranch Site. His description of the Carter Ranch Site, and his research on the orientations more striking aspects differs from the customary south or southeastern bearing of Pueblo III sites of the Anasazi. This led him to believe that the architecture at the site is more similar to the Mogollon tradition. Overall Longacre concluded his study and argued that by adopting certain refinements in method and theory, we can make precise statements regarding the structure and behavior of extinct social groups, we should be able to point to cultural processes of stability and change that operated in the past.

“The Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project”:
The Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project (KEP) is oriented to try to study “new archaeology” which is focused on explanation over-description and in looking at why pottery involves social structure. It is currently one of the longest running ethnoarchaeological projects in the world that began in 1973. The main focus of this project was to look at similarities and differences between Longacre’s Carter Ranch Pueblo study to the results of the Kalinga project about the social context of pottery making. This ethnoarchaeological project is an ongoing project in Southeast Asia that continues to change its research goals; in 1975 the new goal was to investigate how long artifacts and how the people who used them discard them. Throughout the initial project the methods included mapping pottery making villages and then coming up with relationships between the households in the villages.

Within the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project is when William A. Longacre began his research tradition known as the “ceramic sociology” movement. Throughout his own dissertation work, Longacre focused on the Carter Ranch Pueblo site in Arizona and looked at ceramic variability in the styles in order to learn frameworks of cultural transmission. This work served as a type of ceramic ethnoarchaeological research similar to the Kalinga Project that ventured into intergenerational transmission of style patterns with decoration.

In 1975, Longacre returned to the Philippines to focus on the Dangtalan and neighboring villages with two important new goals in mind. One dealt with the issue of understanding and recording the social context of pottery making, while the other highlighted the ability to develop fine scale measures for recording stylistic variability with the Kalinga pottery. Throughout his work with the Dangtalan and Dalupa villages Longacre incorporated participant observation in his mapping project of pottery making. It was crucial to identify different groups of related and unrelated potters in the same working groups in order to understand the stylistic variability in the pottery while keeping the social and biological relationships in mind. His end product for this study was to create a household census for these villages in order to figure out the “exact genealogical relationships between and among households and between potters.”

“Southwestern Pottery Standardization: An Ethnographical View from the Philippines”:
The work opens up with the idea that archaeologists today often assume that because pottery is standardized among specialists, then that means there is evidence of full-time potters. This study highlights two Philippine populations, the Kalinga group and the Paradijon neighborhood. The objective is to study the cooking pots of each society based on their households and their relationships to one another. The main argument of this study was that the Paradijon pottery should be more standardized than that of the Kalinga group. It is crucial to highlight that in complex societies, pottery-making neighborhoods are often there and can be seen from the surface materials at the sites. The aspects such as standardized form, dimensions, and sizes leads to the conclusion that the pottery is made by specialists.

This work explains that one method to understand the linkage between standardized pottery and a specialist mode can be done through ethnoarchaeological study. Philippine Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology is emphasized greatly throughout this piece in order to conduct its methodology. The two populations of pots are studied, then they are both produced by the Philippine groups (specialists vs. non-specialists), and then finally the data is collected over a period of over ten years in order to see the variability. Both of the populations use different patterns of hand modeling, paddle and anvil, and coil and scrap techniques to create these cooking pots. In the Paradijon, most of the flowerpots are by beginners who are not yet experts and the selection of red and other white clays plays a crucial role in the variability of pots.

It is important to note that the degree of which this study measures standardization for the cooking pots is from the Grasshopper Ruins in Arizona. They compared the overall size range from the Grasshopper vessels to be more than three times the size of those in the Kalinga or Paradijon cooking pots. They also compared different type of ratios of the vessels in the Grasshopper pots, such as height to width. The end results indicate that the Grasshopper vessels were closest to that of the Kalinga potters.

Based on the data collected, it indicated that the pots from Paradijon are much more standardized than the Kalinga pots. The data proved a low standardization in Kalinga’s ceramic production and higher in the Paradijon’s full-time specialists. The conclusions of the study determined that the standardization of these vessels should suggest the products of full-time specialists to be tested by ethnoarchaeological data from the Philippine. The variation of statistics data concludes that the pots made by full-time potters are much more standardized than those of the Kalinga pots.

“Aggregation and Abandonment at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona”:
In 1982, “Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo Arizona” was published after all of the essays were compiled and edited by Longacre and his associates. At the time of publication, nearly two decades of research had been done on the Grasshopper site. In 1965, William A Longacre served as the Associate Director of the University of Arizona field school at Grasshopper. And from 1966-1978, he served as the Director of the field school at Grasshopper.

The Grasshopper Pueblo is located in eastern Arizona and consists of a fourteenth century community made up of approximately 500 rooms. It was founded between AD 1295 and 1305 and then consisted of small groups of agriculturists in interdependent communities and depended on one another for survival. The differences in architecture, burial practices, and distribution of ceramic types showed how each group was distinctively different from one another. Although, there did not seem to be any hierarchical order between the different communities. Environmental stressors (e.g., drought) caused aggregation between the small groups. As time progressed and aggression occurred settlements dispersed and were abandoned. The region was ultimately abandoned in AD 1400 because the groups failed to intensify agricultural production through technological advancements in a sociopolitical organization in order to counter short-term resources. The remaining population joined different communities in the surrounding areas known to them from previous trading encounters. The findings support Longacre’s hypothesis that if the population of interdependent communities increase without adaptive socio-cultural changes, the likelihood of a regional system collapse is enhanced by environmental fluctuation.

“Pottery and People: Standardization and Specialization: What’s the Link?”:
In the spring and summer of 1995 to the summer of 1996 Longacre began an ethnoarchaeological project among a small group of specialized potter producers in the town of San Nicolas in llocos Norte Provinance to examine specialization and standardization regarding water jars. He was interested in specialization and standardization as it is a mode used for understanding the rise of complex forms of social and political organization. Specialization is understood as the process of concentrating on and becoming expert in a particular subject or skill. Standardization is the process of making something conform to a standard. Typically product standardization is viewed as a “by-product of specialization” through “routine and repeated actions in the formation of ceramic products.” In regards to the pots, Longacre questioned whether increased standardization was a result of routinization from repetitive behavior and actions.

His study explored the linkage between degree of producer specialization and degree of product standardization based upon ethnoarchaeological data. He conducted this study with only a small sample size of 4 potters. Two of which were considered to be experts, two of which were considered less experienced. If Longacre’s hypothesis stands correct, the two experts will show less variability in their pots than the less experienced potters. The expert potters are Avelina and Estrella, the less experienced potters are Salcedo and Dennis. In conclusion, he found that the more experienced potters had less variability than the less inexperienced potters.

“Changing Patterns of Social Integration: A Prehistoric Example from the American Southwest”:
The Southwest Archaeological Expedition of Chicago Natural History Museum led excavations throughout the summers of 1959-1963 in eastern-central Arizona by the modern day town of Snowflake. This transition area between the White Mountains and Colorado Plateau was home to groups of prehistoric people from around 1500 BC until 1350 AD. Although modern day Snowflake does not have a regular growing season for high agricultural yields, prehistoric groups dated from 700 AD to 1000 AD were dependent on corn agriculture as their main source of subsistence.

Villages of small farming communities were established beginning around 700 AD. Following the appearance of small villages, patterns of regular population growth emerged. The steady increase in population led to the creation of a network of small agricultural communities. These communities were tied to the presence of arable lands, which, today, are arroyos. The basic structure of these communities existed as 3-4 room communities to 15-20 room communities of small pit houses. These small pit houses were replaced by pueblo architecture following the same structural format. Newly founded communities remained kinship ties and ritual connections with their respective mother community. This cohesion was maintained through systems of non-ceremonial sodalities and ceremonial sponsorship.

In 1000-1100 AD, minor environmental shifts spurred major adaptive changes in these small farming village communities. Investigating the spectra of fossil pollens indicated a minor shift in rainfall, which led to a decrease in the annual mean temperatures around 1350 AD. This climate resulted in a shorter growing season, altering the main subsistence of the prehistoric peoples dependent on corn. Following this environmental stress, the critical cultural shift turned to the enlargement of the basic social unit for cooperation. This is the beginning of population convergence, where small villages consisting of single descent groups combined into larger communities of multiple kinship units. Larger communities participated in village integration methods such as religious integration and through necessary mutual interdependence.

An example of population convergence is shown at Carter Ranch. This site was occupied 1050 – 1200 AD. Longacre’s detailed analyses of the distribution of the decorative motifs found at the ceramics on site explain the social structure. 2-3 unilineal descent groups who maintained matrilocal residence following marriage occupied the village. Each unit maintained separate kivas.

Furthermore, the Broken K Pueblo site contains nearly 100 rooms built around a plaza. This site was inhabited from 1200-1300 AD. Non-ceramic tools, weapons, and other cultural items were found there. Longacre’s analysis of their distribution suggests a pattern of reciprocal exchange between groups in the town. These tools were distributed in a way to support a functional explanation. The distribution suggests that the center of production of certain items, such as engraved pendants, was localized and then, upon completion, was distributed throughout the town as part of a reciprocal goods exchange.