Response to Apel and Darmark: Evolution and Material Culture

Abstract

Jan Apel and Kim Darmark boldly deliver an argument to address what they regard as shortcomings in contemporary Scandinavian archaeology —which they describe as narrative, fragmented and anti-scientific to the point of being effectively marginalized from other disciplines. To come to terms with this, they call for theoretical debate and propose the introduction of evolutionary issues in Swedish archaeology. The proposition is given an ambitious scope. An evolutionary perspective will, according to the authors, "have a fundamental effect on the questions asked, the taxonomies employed, and the role of archaeology as a discipline. "We are, it would seem, facing a potential paradigm shift in Scandinavian archaeology. While I warmly welcome the call for theoretical debate, I am not convinced by the authors' argument that evolutionary archaeology is the answer to the wide set of questions that archaeology encompasses today. To borrow from the authors' own vocabulary, I am not convinced that Darwinian evolutionary perspectives will have the replicative success the authors hope for in archaeological theory and debate. This, I argue, is not because the ideas are altogether irrelevant or uninteresting, but because they simply are not fit to inhabit the many niches of contemporary archaeological thought and may even contribute to marginalizing the discipline even further. I want to make it clear that my skepticism does not reside in a kneejerk reaction to natural scientific perspectives in the quest to understand humanity and human history. For example, I sympathize with