Direct historical approach

The direct historical approach to archaeology was a methodology developed in the United States of America during the 1920s-1930s by William Duncan Strong and others, which argued that knowledge relating to historical periods is extended back into earlier times. This methodology involves taking an archaeological site that has historical accounts relating to recent periods of occupation and then excavating it to establish continuity back into prehistoric times. The historical data then becomes the basis of analogy and homology for the study of the prehistoric communities at both the particular site and other sites in the region. The main issue with the approach is that in many parts of the world there is no direct continuity between historically documented communities and the prehistoric occupants of the region.

In the nineteenth century, the archaeological record of the Americas was viewed as an extension into the past of the ethnographically documented record. Human behaviors of the archaeological past were seen as nearly identical to those described ethnographically and thus, they could be studied with minimal training in archaeology. The result of this particular view was the development and regular use of what came to be known as the direct historical approach.

Roland B. Dixon was seen as an early proponent of this approach. In his presidential address to the American Anthropological Association he stated: “one would logically proceed to investigate a [number of sites of known ethnic affiliation], and work back from these,” because it “is only through the known that we can comprehend the unknown, only from a study of the present that we can understand the past.” Strong, who later became attributed to this particular methodology, argued that Dixon set forth the procedure of the direct historical approach. Strong would later go on to say that “once the archeological criteria of [a historically documented] culture had been determined, it [is] then possible to advance from the known and historic into the unknown and prehistoric.”

Oddly, the direct historical approach rarely appears in histories of American anthropology. Similarly, very few texts point out that the direct historical approach was used for three distinct purposes. In American archaeology these were: (1) to identify the cultural association of an archaeological manifestation; (2) to construct relative chronologies of archaeological materials; and (3) to understand the human behaviors that were thought to have produced particular portions of the archaeological record.

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