Patty Jo Watson is currently Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, chair of the Anthropology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
Research Interests : Archaeological theory and method, archaeological ethnography, origins of food production, cave archaeology; Western Asia, Eastern Woodlands of North America.
She is credited with both defining and pioneering the study of ethnoarchaeology - the relation of studies of pre-industrial peoples to archaeological data. According to her membership listing in the National Academy of Sciences, "her excavations in the Near East and North America have exemplified the very best in multidisciplinary research in archaeology."
Watson's method for explaining archaelogical data is through the methods of processural archaeology. The processural approach attempts to explain the processes of cultural change through the relationship between the social and economic basis of a culture and through the relationship of a culture to its environment. The idea is bascially the many sytems and factors affect a culture and that each of these factors should be analyzed as an independent variable with the ultimate goal of a reconstruction of social structure.
Watson advocated the processural approach and other New Archaeology ideas in the 1984 book - Archaeological Explanation: The Scientific Method in Archaeology which she co-wrote with Steven LaBlanc and Charles Redman. They argued that a explicitly scientific framework should be used for archaeological methods and theories, and that rigorously tested hypotheses should be the basis for explanation.
Even though her primary interest remains processural archaeology, she has become interested recently in the challenges presented by proponents of a concept called post-processural archaeology. The post-processural approach is a reaction to what are preceived as limitations of the processural approach, namely its reliance generalizations. Post-processural explanations rely on an individualizing approach to each site and culture. This method of thought is gaining respect, and Watson writes in her web page that she "pays considerable attention (to the concept and challenges it presents)" in her classes.
Selected Publications : 1974 Archaeology of the Mammoth Cave Area. New York: Academic Press.
1979 Archaeological Ethnology in Western Iran. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
1990 The razor's edge: Symbolic-structuralist archaeology and the expansion of archaeological inference, with comments by Michael Fotiadis. American Anthropologist 92:613-629.
1992 The origins of food production in Western Asia and Eastern North America. In L. Shane, O. Shane, and E. Cushing, eds. Quarternary Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
1995 Explaining the transition to agriculture. In D. Price and A. Gebauer, eds. Last Hunters-First Farmers. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
1995 Archaeology, anthropology, and the culture concept. American Anthropologist 97:683-694.
1996 Of caves and shell mounds in West-Central Kentucky. In Of Caves and Shell Mounds. Co-edited with Kenneth Carstens. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
1999 From the Hilly Flanks of the Fertile Crescent to the Eastern Woodlands of North America. In Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States, edited by N.M. White, L.P. Sullivan and R.A. Marrinan. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, pp. 286-297.
1999 Ethnographic Analogy and Ethnoarchaeology. In Archaeology, History and Culture in Palestine and the Near East: Essays in Memory of Albert E. Glock, edited by T. Kapitan. American Schools of Oriental Research, ASOR Books, Volume 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholar's Press, pp. 47-65.
2001 Origins of Food Production. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, N. Smelser and P. Baltes, Editors-in-Chief. Amsterdam: Pergamon (Elsevier Science).
WATSON, PATTY JO 