Front Matter, Table of Contents, Editorial

Abstract

A sentence in the lead article of a recent American Antiquity took me by surprise. Elizabeth Brumfiel wrote that "personal experience has taught many archaeologists that data do make a difference." My decade-long absence from the halls of academe left me poorly prepared for the headwayan extreme relativism has made in our field. At first I thought Brumfiel was spoofing-does any prehistorian really think that data don't make a difference? But it's true, relativists have advanced the propositions that archaeological research is purely a social product and nothing more than politics. Brumfiel's article is a dead serious first-person testimony to an instance when data did make a difference-in this case a change in her understanding of Indian women's resistance to tribute collection in Aztec and colonial Mexico brought about by study of archaeological assemblages. Her point is that prehistorians are not free to write whatever they want about the past, guided solely by social and political forces of the moment. Rather, they are constrained in what they can write by archaeological (and I would add, other) evidence. They learn about the past from archaeological data. Data do make a difference.