An institutional approach for archaeology

Abstract Theoretical development in archaeology is hindered when basic reference terms such as ‘the settlement,’ ‘the site,’ or ‘society,’ have little relation to the behavior to be explained. Such units were not the organizations that people deployed for the activities important to them. We present an institutional framework that, we argue, helps to overcome this difficulty. Institutions are organizations of people that carry out objectives using regularized practices and norms, labor, and resources. Our approach attempts to identify important institutions and to describe their properties, potentially including resources and funding, durability, scale, activities, labor, formality, participants and membership, overlap with other institutions, naming, knowledge, and objectives and outcomes. Case studies from northeastern and southeastern North America illustrate the utility of this method for analyzing synchronic social structure and processes of structural transformation.