Situating Origins Research Paraphrasing the American physical anthropologist Henry Harpending (in Clark 1988: 368), I described human origins research recently as a “highly visible, curiously intangible” field (Clark 1999). I was trying to express my conviction that there were problems with the way paleoan- thropology was done that went beyond the empirical insuffi- ciencies acknowledged by all of its practitioners. The disci- pline has been marked by controversy ever since the antiqui- ty of humans came to be generally established and accepted in the scientific community during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Since that time, episodes of accelerated discussion and debate have flared up with a periodicity of about a generation, and often take on a highly-visible public aspect, because the issue of our origins is of interest to all of us. The most recent of these scholarly debates is still going on and is concerned with modern human origins and what relationship, if any, humans of modern form and behavior might have had with their archaic predecessors. Scientists have been trying to arrive at a consensus about human ori- gins for more than a century. Why haven’t they been success- ful or, more accurately, why haven’t they been more success- ful? In my opinion, it is because human origins researchers pertain to different intellectual traditions that – despite the powerful, overarching conceptual framework of post-synthe- sis Darwinism – proceed from different assumptions about what the remote human past was like (Clark 2001). There is also little concern with epistemology (how we know what we think we know about the remote human past), and so the logic of inference underlying knowledge claims is seldom made explicit or subjected to critical scrutiny. Most scientists would respond to these observations by saying that we do not have enough data to answer human ori- gins questions, and that with the eventual accumulation of more data, the controversies will be resolved (e.g., Klein 1999). However, because data have no meaning or existence independent of investigator-derived conceptual frameworks, empirical insufficiency is only part of the problem. Different intellectual traditions are also involved in the research and they operate according to different paradigms. These para- digms are characterized by different biases and assumptions that determine what constitutes data, which questions are relevant to ask of data, and how data should be organized and measured (Clark 1993). Since paradigmatic bias is typically implicit within research traditions, and when multiple research traditions are involved in the solution of a single problem (as is the case with human origins research), people tend to talk past one another. Proceeding from different assumptions and biases about the nature of the human past, and feeling no obligation to make those biases explicit, they literally do not understand what their colleagues in other research traditions are talking about. In default of a universal ‘metalanguage’ like mathemat- ics (the basis for communication in the physical sciences), each country or region has its own traditions of research in respect of the various biological and social sciences that make up its intellectual life. I would argue that these tradi- 1 Research Traditions in Paleoanthropology: An Archaeological Perspective Geoffrey A. Clark Arizona State University Abstract In 1999 I reviewed a book manuscript for Cambridge University Press. Titled Studying Human Origins, it was eventually published two years later by Amsterdam University Press (Corbey & Roebroeks 2001). Studying Human Origins juxtapos- es the views of paleoanthropologists interested in the question of our origins with those of professional philosophers and his- torians of science interested in epistemological questions. Although common in the life and physical sciences, such books are relatively rare in human origins research (e.g., Trinkaus & Shipman 1993,Wolpoff & Caspari 1997). This essay asks why. It consists of a reaction to the papers by a paleoarchaeologist interested in epistemology,and in the logic of inference underlying knowledge claims in archaeology and human paleontology. “At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.” Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World Reprinted from Managing Archaeological Data: Essays in Honor of Sylvia W. Gaines (J. Hantman & R. Most, eds.), pp. 3-15. Arizona State University Anthropological Research Papers No. 57 [2006].