Spring/Summer 1998
One of the greatest rewards is to have students begin the quantitative courses only because of university requirements and with a dread of anything mathematical and then to have them end up enthusiastic about quantitative methods and how they might integrate quantitative methods into their own work.	Faculty Profile Q & A with Dwight Read, Professor of Anthropology ALL OF YOUR DEGREES ARE IN MATHEMATICS. WERE ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY ALWAYS INTEREST? I first became interested in anthropology and archaeology while I was a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics here at UCLA. I came to UCLA after receiving my BA in mathematics from Reed College and my MA in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin. My then wife (we were later divorced) was a graduate student in the Anthropology Department. Prior to this time I had little idea of the subject matter of anthropology and as I began to find out what anthropology was about, I realized that anthropology had to do with something that had long interested me namely, Why are societies the way they are and why the differences among societies? I began to audit courses in anthropology and got to know the faculty. This was also the time that Lewis and Sally Binford were faculty in the Anthropology Department, along with others such as Theodore Graves in sociocultural anthropology who were advocates of using quantitative methods in anthropology. Lewis Binford had a tremendous impact on me and his ideas helped me to realize that archaeology was becoming a discipline with an explicitly scientific framework and was beginning to develop a more explicit theoretical basis for its arguments that might be amenable to mathematical modeling. Ted Graves made apparent the ways in which quantitative methods could be used to address issues in sociocultural anthropology. B.J. Williams introduced me to population genetics with its long tradition of mathematical modeling. Other archaeology faculty, such as Fred Plog and James Hill, reinforced the ideas and potential that I learned from Lewis Binford. James Sackett provided the opportunity for me to do archaeological fieldwork in the Dordogne region in France during the summer of 1967. Like many others who have done archaeological fieldwork, I became enthralled at the idea of digging up the material remains of past societies. The following spring (I was in France for a year while working on my mathematics dissertation) I worked with the Binfords on the Combe Grenal material that had been excavated by François Bordes. By the time I returned to UCLA to complete my Ph.D. in mathematics, I had decided that I definitely wanted to switch to anthropology and to combine my mathematics background with theorizing in anthropology. I had the good fortune that several of the faculty in the anthropology department were supporters of my making a switch from mathematics to anthropology. I completed my Ph.D. in June of 1970 and began as an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department that Fall. WHAT ARE THE REWARDS OF TEACHING FOR YOU? ARE YOU PLANNING ANY NEW CLASSES? One of the greatest rewards is to have students begin the quantitative courses only because of university requirements and with a dread of anything mathematical and then to have them end up enthusiastic about quantitative methods and how they might integrate quantitative methods into their own work. I am planning a new seminar in archaeology on classification from a theoretical and methodological viewpoint. This will be offered for the first time in Spring Quarter, 1999. The goal will be to provide the students with a strong foundation in the theoretical issues that have been discussed in the anthropological literature, to review methods for doing a classification based on those theoretical issues, and to identify areas for future research. YOUR WORK COVERS A WIDE RANGE OF TOPICS AND AREA OF RESEARCH IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY. WHAT PARTICULARLY INTERESTS YOU RIGHT NOW? In archaeology my recent publication in American Antiquity ("A Method for Taxonomic Typology Construction and an Example: Utilized Flakes"), with Glenn Russell as junior author, brings together a number of ideas I have been developing about classification in archaeology. Of particular importance in this article is the way it demonstrates that when the quantitative analysis is guided by archaeological arguments about how artifactual materials are likely to be structured, then the quantitative analysis has a sensitivity to subtle differences that cannot be matched by so-called intuitive and qualitative approaches to classification. Most prior work on quantitative methods has attempted to recreate typologies constructed by other means. In this paper, using non-quantitative methods to examine the topic area-utilized flakes-had not yielded helpful results, yet distinctive groupings of the utilized flakes are found using quantitative methods based upon a taxonomic approach to typologies as discussed by Robert Whallon in the early 1970s. But this is not just quantitative methodology as it is based upon arguments about the conceptual framework that leads from the more abstract to the more empirical. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR WORK WITH CHRIS CHIPPINDALE AND ABOUT SHAPE GRAMMARS? "Shape grammars" owes its genesis to work done by the architect, George Stiny, formerly a professor at UCLA. Stiny has been concerned with the underlying "grammar" that accounts for how complex architectural patterns can be produced by the application of a relatively few rules for the generation of shape from a few simple shape elements. Chris Chippindale realized that Stiny's work on shape grammars applied not only to architectural designs but also could be applied to things of concern to archaeologists, such as megalithic tomb designs. These varied in terms of numbers of rooms and how the rooms were connected; yet, the variation did not appear to be random but patterned in some manner. Chris organized a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in the late 1980s that brought together a number of archaeologists who, in one way or another, were attempting to see how design-which might be the design of a pot or the pattern painted on pottery-could be understood either in terms of a process by which a design is constructed or in terms of something like an underlying grammar. My contribution was an article that discussed how the shape of projectile points could be seen as a "grammar" that directed its production as a shape. For the most part, archaeologists who have worked with projectile points simply take the shape as a given and then measure it by some choice of variables, such as length, width, thickness, and angle of point. In many cases these measurement schemes are inadequate in the sense that the original shape cannot be reconstructed uniquely from the set of measurements. If the original shape cannot be reconstructed, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the set of measurements. I argued that the solution was not merely to add more measurements but to take a different approach and to view how the overall shape is constructed by a kind of grammar that informs us how to construct the shape as one goes around the periphery of the projectile point. What the "shape grammar" approach brings to the analysis is a shift to thinking about how shape is produced rather than simply measuring an object by measures that probably have little to do with the artisan's conceptualization. In turn, this raises questions about the linkage between the material object and the conceptualization that it represents. That is, a projectile point is not just a lithic object that happens to have a certain shape but it also represents the realization of a concept such as killing at a distance. In turn that requires a propulsion system for transmission of force that then places constraints on the possible shapes and sizes of projectile points and means of hafting the point to the shaft that is the basis for providing momentum to the projectile point, and so on. These constraints do not dictate all aspects of the final shape-else we would not have the variety of projectile points that were in fact made-and some aspects of the final shape we refer to under the rubric of style. The idea of a shape grammar then becomes a way to see how the final shape brings together all of these aspects in the artisan's production of the projectile point-in effect, it becomes the basis for a theory of artifacts, a theory that exists only in bits and pieces in archaeological theorizing despite the central role that artifacts play in the work of archaeologists. This past Spring both Chris and I were invited participants in an international conference on shape grammars, which was held in Santa Barbara and sponsored by UCLA. Our contribution to the conference focused on the way in which the ideas of design and shape grammars are being used in archaeology and is published as part of proceedings of the conference, which can be accessed at the website.
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