Historical archaeology was first defined as a separate entity in the late 1960s. Its practitioners initially devoted considerable effort toward defining their field, casting around for a core set of goals and a sense of direction that would justify their worth to established prehistorians and cultural anthropologists. Like all archaeology, the changing direction of historical archaeology has paralleled wider theoretical changes across the humanities and social sciences generally, themselves components of essential changes in modern, western modes of thought since World War II (see Historical Archaeology: Methods).
In seeking a path, much early historical archaeology was heavily influenced by the ‘new’, or processual, archaeology of the 1960s. Processual archaeology was concerned with explaining long-term patterns in human behavior across both time and space in order to reveal the commonalities in the ways that human beings interacted with their environments. In historical archaeology this was translated into identifying, for example, the processes involved in producing the material patterns that could be observed at (and in some degree were also held to constitute) historical archaeological sites. Stanley South, one pioneer of this approach, defined a range of quantifiable artifact patterns that he believed could be used to identify sites independently of historical documents. The major problem with such approaches, however, is that identification was not explanation - South’s pattern recognition process could successfully label a particular ‘behavioral unit’ as a school, for example, but how a school functioned, or how wider attitudes to childhood or appropriate age-related behaviors constructed children (and by extension adults), let along how this might change over time, were not issues that the processual path could reveal (see Processual Archaeology).
The alternative theories of structuralism, also in their heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, imported several key ideas from linguistics that shifted attention away from material artifacts as passive products of particular activity patterns, toward artifacts as symbolic representations of deeper, underlying worldviews. James Deetz’s seminal investigations into the transition between medieval and Georgian mindsets in seventeenth - and eighteenth-century colonial Virginia, for example, married an analysis of deep mental structures with detailed, small-scale analysis of the nuances of material form and style. Deetz’s insights enabled him to produce a broad-ranging and perceptive historical archaeology that encompassed changes in architecture, dining, refuse disposal patterns, ceramic forms, gravestones, and color, within its scope. Since the 1980s, historical archaeology has taken many of structuralism’s symbolic strands and woven them together in the light of contemporary social politics to analyze a range of interests synonymous with postprocessual archaeology. Taking its cue from various elements of postmodernism, and inspired by philosophical and sociological literature, postprocessual archaeology rejected the belief that artifacts were merely passive residues of past human behavior, and argued instead that objects are, and always have been, an active medium through which people create themselves and their society. Objects are fashioned and used by people in the process of constructing who they are. In the last 20 years, historical archaeology has become increasingly oriented toward postprocessual questions of power, ideology, class and ethnicity, and the many ways in which material artifacts are used to construct and negotiate both personal and group identity in a variety of contexts.
World History
