International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2000 Darwinian Evolutionism Is Applicable to Historical Archaeology Michael J. O’Brien 1 and R. Lee Lyman 1 Over the past decade or so, an increasing number of archaeologists have begun to show interest in employing Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain variations in the material record. Epistemological and methodological issues surrounding the implementation of Darwinian evolutionism in archaeology are numerous, the most basic of which is that Darwinism embodies a materialist perspective, whereas archaeology traditionally has maintained an essentialist outlook. Stemming from this dichotomy are fundamental differences in such things as how units are created and how they are used to measure change. As archaeologists grapple with these issues, specific examples of how Darwinian evolutionism can be used to build historical narratives and create historical explanations are appearing with more frequency, but with few exceptions, proponents have focused specifically on the prehistoric record. This gives the impression that Darwinian evolutionism is not applicable to the more-recent material record, which is decidedly not the case. The kind of evolutionism proposed here transcends the age of the record under investigation. KEY WORDS: evolution; archaeology; natural selection; classification; style; function. INTRODUCTION Although Darwinian evolutionary archaeology has not yet enjoyed the same popularity as other disciplinary approaches have over the years, a now-sizable lit- erature (see references in Lyman and O’Brien, 1998; O’Brien, 1996a; and O’Brien and Lyman, 2000) attests to the fact that a growing number of archaeologists are serious about incorporating the tenets of Darwinism into their work. This is a daunting task, made all the more so because Darwinian evolutionism is a dif- ferent kind of theory than what most of us have traditionally been exposed to 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211. 71 1092-7697/00/0300-0071$18.00/0 C  2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation