And archaeology.
Cladistics is a systematics, specifying relationships between biological species. It works on empirical similarities and differences.
It is explicitly evolutionary, but fundamentally denies the usual kind of stories we find in palyontology.
Henry Gee puts it like this
Why did dinosaurs become extinct? Why did fishes evolve legs and learn to walk on land? How did birds become airborne? Is humanity the culmination of evolution? Apart from their perennial fascination, questions like these - evolutionary questions, about 'how' and 'why' - are united by an implication of a narrative in which causes and effects are linked: dinosaurs became extinct because of the after-effects of an asteroid impact, or because they were rendered obsolete by mammals. Chains of cause and effect may also be animated by purpose: fishes evolved legs for wlaking on land; birds evolved feathers for flight; human beings evolved from apelike ancestors because they had bigger brains, could make tools and use language. ...
But many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from the fossil record, are baseless ...
The scale of geological time is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils of creatures we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure. Any story we tell against the compass of geological time that links these fossils in sequences of cause and effect - or ancestry and descent - is, therefore, only ours to make. We invent these stories,[mise-en-scène],mis-en-scène, to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices
Instead of an orientation upon cause and effect, cladistics begins with contemporary observations of similarity and difference, emphasizing past-present relationships rather than seeking to discover what happened in deep time.
Archaeology? Put to one side those over-familiar (and thereby comforting) modernist tropes - stories of technological progress, of lost wisdoms, of anthropological exoticism, of the origins of civilization, of the origins of the west.
Focus upon past-present relationships.
And simply follow rigorously the connections through what remains of the past.
This will make quite a different historiography *.
photo - Richard Ross - Museology
