PART VI

THE BENEFITS OF COOPERATION

As one who has personally benefited greatly from contact with situations and investigators in Spain, as have my students, I feel that it is only seemly to conclude the collection with the chapter “The Participation of North Americans and Spaniards in Joint Prehistoric Research in Cantabria.” Although some chauvinists assume that in our collaboration, the Europeans alone have been the recipients of vast knowledge gained in the course of cooperating with their wiser U.S. counterparts, in fact the story is actually one of both give and take. Equally important information has passed in both directions. New World archeology historically resisted the idea of stratigraphic excavation, until one U.S. prehistorian learned better at the cave of Castillo.

Still, today some U.S. excavators carefully separate the finds from different soil horizons, apparently without realizing that those discolorations formed after the deposits were laid down and that they often crosscut more archeologically meaningful “natural” layers of sedimentation. That is not to say that the conclusions of those excavators are always wrong, but it does suggest that European excavators may sometimes use preferable procedures. On the other hand, European-trained archeologists, educated as geologists and paleontologists, may be overly concerned with “refining stratigraphy” and establishing the supposed relative age of their finds and too little concerned (or quite unconcerned) with their anthropological significance. They may engage in attempts to overrefine chronological relationships without realizing the extant of deliberate human (or “natural”) interference with the “normal” orderly succession of deposits. Just as dangerous is the assumption that all differences between archeological assemblages must be the result of the evolution of functionally similar industrial complexes over time, before demonstrating that the assemblages in question are actually functionally equivalent. International and interdisciplinary cooperation can go far to palliate these shortcomings.