Processual Archaeology
Processual archaeology, the New Archaeology of the 1960s, sought to turn archaeology into an explicitly scientific discipline that explains cultural processes through hypothesis testing and general laws.
Definition
A theoretical paradigm that aims to explain culture change through scientific method, treating culture as a system adapting to its environment and seeking law-like generalizations from the archaeological record.
Scope
This topic covers the rise of the New Archaeology under Lewis Binford and others, its commitment to scientific explanation, systems theory, and cultural materialism, and its key methodological innovations such as middle-range theory, ethnoarchaeology, and explicit hypothesis testing. It also addresses the program's view of culture as humanity's extrasomatic means of adaptation.
Core questions
- How can archaeology explain, rather than merely describe, the past?
- What role do hypothesis testing and general laws play?
- How does middle-range theory link statics to past dynamics?
- How is culture understood as an adaptive system?
Key theories
- Culture as adaptive system
- Binford's view, drawing on Leslie White, that culture is humanity's extrasomatic means of adaptation, so cultural change should be explained through ecological and systemic processes.
- Middle-range theory
- The development of theory, often through ethnoarchaeology and actualistic studies, that links observable archaeological statics to the past dynamics that produced them.
History
The New Archaeology emerged in the United States in the 1960s, led by Lewis Binford, and in Britain through David Clarke's systems-oriented work. Reacting against descriptive culture history, it advocated explicit scientific method, as set out in Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman's Explanation in Archeology, and reshaped fieldwork, sampling, and the use of ethnographic analogy.
Debates
- Can archaeology produce general laws?
- Processualism's search for law-like generalizations was criticized, including by later post-processualists, for underestimating meaning, agency, and historical particularity in human behavior.
Key figures
- Lewis Binford
- David Clarke
- Patty Jo Watson
- Colin Renfrew
Related topics
Seminal works
- binford1972
- watsonetal1971
Frequently asked questions
- Why is it called the 'New Archaeology'?
- It was called new in the 1960s because it broke with descriptive culture history, calling for explicit scientific explanation of cultural processes rather than narrative classification.
- What is middle-range theory?
- It is theory, often built through ethnoarchaeology, that connects the static archaeological record we observe to the dynamic past behaviors that created it.