Glossary

New archaeology Mid-twentieth century approach to archaeology explicitly focused on social dimensions of past societies.

Processual archaeology Combination of learning strategies focused on how to use the archaeological record to make inferences, develop, and test theories about past sociocultural dynamics.

‘Processual archaeology’ and ‘new archaeology’, while often treated as if they refer to the same intellectual tradition, in fact have distinct referents. As advances in radiocarbon and tree-ring dating in the middle of the twentieth century freed archaeologists from relying on the combination of stratigraphic excavation and seria-tion of items of material culture to develop chronologies, many researchers began to explore what else could be learned from the archaeological record. These explorations led to a number of approaches both for reconstructing social organization beyond subsistence and settlement systems and for beginning to offer explanations for the recorded archaeological variability over space and time.

While they share several central figures, ‘new archaeology’ refers to a wide range of innovative approaches for studying archaeological material which were undertaken in many distinct intellectual traditions by archaeologists who were completing graduate study in the 1950s and early 1960s. Further, these approaches depended upon a wide variety of both assumptions about what the world was like and goals for pursuing knowledge of the past. The precursors to most modern approaches to archaeology can be found among the initial contributions which collectively became known as the ‘new archaeology’.

The diversification of research interests and an optimistic view of what could be learned from a systematically excavated archaeological record led to the development of new standards for fieldwork. When chronological control was the primary focus of archaeological research, only the artifact types which were thought to be diagnostic of time had been systematically recorded and studied. This was a tiny portion of the total artifact assemblage. In the early twentieth century, cultures were defined by the presence and absence of culture traits - relative frequencies were not considered relevant. Researchers attempting to learn a new range of things from the archaeological record began to record the full range of materials recovered from surface survey and excavation. Passing all excavated sediments through a screen and recording detailed provenience of artifacts, ecofacts, and features are two such innovations in field methods which are standard archaeological practices today.

‘Processual archaeology’ is just one of many intellectual traditions which were established during this period of experimentation with new strategies for learning from archaeological materials. The primary goal of ‘processual archaeology’ is to explain variability in the archaeological record by reference to general cultural processes. Thus, in terms of its learning goals, ‘processual archaeology’ is firmly aligned with the natural sciences, which seek general explanations that allow prediction across a range of phenomena, rather than with the humanities which seek nuanced explication of particular phenomena. What distinguishes ‘pro-cessual archaeology’ from many other contemporary approaches to archaeological explanation is a twofold focus on: (1) epistemology, the study of how new knowledge is produced, which results in (2) studying the archaeological record in terms of itself, rather than as a substitute for a past cultural system. From the beginning, there has been a focus on challenging unwarranted assumptions, propositions, speculations, opinions, and other existing ideas about what the world is like by testing their implications for archaeological patterning. Formal arguments regarding the necessary relationships among variables are preferred to less formal interpretations of archaeological patterns.

The initial focus on testing pre-existing ideas about what the world is like led early proponents of ‘pro-cessual archaeology’ to emphasize the utility of deductive reasoning - starting with an idea or theory and reasoning to the implications for what archaeologists should see if this idea were true. Many authors have misinterpreted the statement that deduction was a necessary part of any mature science as an argument that deduction was the only acceptable learning strategy in science. Thus, ‘processual archaeology’ is often associated specifically with the hypothetico-de-ductive approach to research. However, testing hypotheses using deductive reasoning presupposes there are pre-existing ideas about what the world is like - those ideas can come from many places, but those which are founded on more than speculation often result from inductive research, or pattern recognition and theory development. As traditional ideas were tested, ‘processual archaeology’ shifted its focus from testing existing ideas using deductive reasoning to developing new ideas relevant to archaeological observation by developing pattern recognition strategies and using inductive reasoning. Today, there are enough new ideas about how the world works, and why it works that way, to begin a new phase of deductive testing to find the limits of their utility. The growth of learning strategies is a major contribution of ‘processual archaeology’ and well worth exploring further.

The earliest work in ‘processual archaeology’ challenged existing conventions for interpretation of archaeological patterning (especially how to recognize migration, diffusion, and invention) while simultaneously promoting the analytical potential of the archaeological record for learning about variability in settlement, subsistence, and social organization. Testing the existing conventions and providing alternatives to traditional interpretation proved to be much easier than developing a systematic body of integrated knowledge on which to build general processual explanations for archaeological variability. Several early proponents of ‘processual archaeology’ drifted away after their initial optimism was replaced by the frustration of realizing the field didn’t have enough basic knowledge to accomplish the goal. However, those who recognized the enormous learning potential of the archaeological record saw this as an irresistible intellectual challenge and went to work learning what was necessary to pursue the explanatory goal.

Subsequently, ‘processual archaeology’ focused on developing methods for observing the archaeological record and for recognizing patterns in the data produced from these observations which served the goal of explaining variability. This work is commonly referred to as middle range research, or middle range theory. Middle range research comprises studies of archaeological patterning resulting from both natural and cultural formation processes (Schiffer’s N-transforms and C-transforms). Archaeological study of formation processes, taphonomy, and ethnoarchaeology largely resulted from middle range research questions raised by work in ‘processual archaeology’.

More recently, researchers working in this intellectual tradition have returned their attention to the development of learning strategies for building the larger-scale general theory regarding culture process which was the original goal of ‘processual archaeology’. The primary learning strategy in contemporary ‘processual archaeology’ is to organize large data sets (Binford’s ‘frames of reference’ or Wandsnider’s ‘bodies of reference knowledge’) to use as a foundation for pattern recognition and analytical comparison. This strategy can be used to study variability in any observable phenomena at any temporal or spatial scale of comparison. Recent examples range from global comparisons of hunter-gatherer subsistence, mobility patterns, group size - even beliefs about death - to comparison of large-scale patterns in archaeological sequences, regionally focused studies of site locations given detailed knowledge of resource availability, and site-specific studies of formation processes given detailed knowledge of palaeo-environmental conditions and/or ethnographically documented activities in similar ecological contexts.

As pattern recognition and inductive reasoning leads to the construction of new theories about why the world is the way it appears to be, a new round of testing should focus on identifying the conditions under which these theories do and do not work. Since initial efforts at theory-building must begin with broad generalizations, there is an enormous potential for learning what other things must be equal for the theory to hold. This research has already produced predictions about the character and timing of long-term patterns of culture change which can fuel the development of archaeological knowledge, method, and theory for many years to come.

Accumulation of intellectual tools and organization of large data sets provide a solid foundation for future developments in ‘processual archaeology’. Using a combination of ethnographic, environmental, and archaeological data sets, archaeologists who seek to explain archaeological patterning by referencing general cultural processes are poised to make substantial theoretical contributions relevant to the entire field of anthropology. This is an exciting arena for future knowledge growth.

See also: Agency; Ethnoarchaeology; Interpretive Models, Development of; Middle Range Approaches; Taphonomy.