As with most things theoretical in archaeology, interests in agency first took hold in anthropology and subsequently trickled down. Like many elements of the post-processual program that emerged in archaeology in the 1980s, concern with the role of human agency can be traced directly to dissatisfaction with various tenets of the new archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. Given the systems-theory framework within which processual archaeology was constructed, its empirical orientation, and its principal concern with long-term processes, there was little room for the individual or intentionality in archaeological investigations of this period (see Processual Archaeology).
In the wake of the various critiques of behavioral-ism, ecosystems, and cultural evolutionary theory that were subsequently developed, a variety of alternative, post-processual approaches began to coalesce around an explicit concern with individual agents and agency. As a reaction to the functional and deterministic emphases of the new archaeology, agency was initially conceived in opposition to the view of prehistoric peoples as simple pawns in some highly orchestrated game. It took as its starting point the idea that humans are able to monitor the effects of their actions and act in novel and creative ways as opposed to being simple stimulus-response reactors caught up in larger, pre-existing sets of processes and systems. Among the different post-processualists contributing to an interest in agency-oriented questions in archaeology were the structural-symbolic, feminist, and Marxist contingents. Others who followed a more continuous trajectory from processual archaeology to the present and maintain a strong neoevolutionary bent have also embraced the concept of agency. Given the range of interest in the idea of agency as a useful explanatory device, it is little surprise that the concept has developed in so many different directions within the field.
World History
