177:. In exosomatic adaptation, the culture is determined by its environmental constraints. As a result, processual archaeologists propose that cultural change happens within a set predictable framework, and they seek to understand the adaptation analyzing its components. Moreover, because the framework is predictable, science is the key to unlocking how those components interacted with the culture as a whole. Consequently, processual archaeologists hold that cultural changes are driven by evolutionary "processes" in cultural development. The resulting cultural changes would be adaptive relative to the environment. In this framework, the changes within the culture are not only understandable, but also scientifically predictable once the interaction of the variables is understood. In effect, archeologists should then be able to completely reconstruct these "cultural processes." Hence the name "processual archaeology," and its practitioners becoming known as "new archaeologists".
303:, universities in America classify archaeology as a sub-discipline of anthropology, while in Europe it is thought to be a subject more like historical studies. It is important to analyze which sciences are related because such analysis highlights the questions of what archaeology ought to study and in what ways. Like the other social scientists, the New Archaeologists or processualists wanted to utilize scientific methodology in their work. Archaeology, and in particular archaeology of the historical period, has sometimes been allied more with humanities disciplines, such as Classics. The question of where to put archaeology as a discipline, and its concomitant issues of what archaeology ought to study and which methods it ought to use, likely played no small part in the emergence of
259:"Do these developments represent a 'New Archaeology'? Well of course it depends on the point of view of the observer and what the observer wishes to see. However, it does seem difficult to sustain the view that the character, scale and rapidity of recent change is of no greater significance than that experienced in other twenty-year spans of archaeological development. We seem rather to have witnessed an interconnected series of dramatic, intersecting and international developments which together may be taken to define new archaeologies within a New Archaeology; whether we choose to use these terms or avoid them is then mainly a personal, political and semantic decision."
151:"New Archaeology represents a precipitate, unplanned and unfinished exploration of new disciplinary field space, conducted with very varied success in an atmosphere of complete uncertainty. What at first appeared to be merely a period of technical re-equipment has produced profound practical, theoretical and philosophical problems to which the new archaeologies have responded with diverse new methods, new observations, new paradigms and new theory. However, unlike its parent, the New Archaeology is as yet a set of questions rather than a set of answers; when the questions are answered it too will be Old Archaeology."
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244:—outlined three basic primary processes through which a language comes to be spoken in a specific area. These processes are initial colonization, replacement, and continuous development. Supported by linguistic analyses, accepted migration progressions, and archeological records, Renfrew proposed a radical new conclusion that contradicted long-held linguistic-origin theories. With Renfrew's proposal being far from conclusive,
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when describing how elements of a culture interact, but performs poorly when describing why they interact the way they do. Despite its lacking, Systems Theory has become a very important part of processualism, as it sets archaeologists with parameters to examine other cultures unique to its peoples, while limiting interference from the researcher's own cultural biases.
169:'s theory that culture can be defined as the exosomatic (outside the body) means of environmental adaptation for humans. That is, archaeologists study cultural adaptation to environmental change rather than the humans' adaptation over generations, which is dealt with by evolutionary biologists. This focus on environmental adaptation is based on the
202:, a people living in conditions very similar to those of France during the period in question. Binford was successful with this approach, and though his specific problem ultimately eluded complete understanding, the ethno-historical work he did is often referred to by researchers today and has since been emulated by many.
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published the findings, claiming that
Renfrew's work has since been both supported and challenged in multiple studies by linguists, archaeologists, biologists, geneticists, statisticians, and computational mathematicians. Though Renfrew's conclusions still garner debate, the scientific understanding
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claiming that as a discipline, archaeology had moved from its original "noble innocence" through to "self-consciousness" and then onto "critical self-consciousness", a symptom of which was the development of the New
Archaeology. As a result, he argued, archaeology had suffered a "loss of innocence"
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could be used in archaeology to approach questions of culture from an unbiased perspective, as the study focuses on the symbiotic whole of a culture rather than its parts, or artifacts. Systems theory however, proved to have problematic limitations for archaeology as a whole, in that it works well
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Scientifically however, the challenge facing proponents of New archaeology was developing a methodology of analyzing the archaeological remains in a more scientific fashion, as no such framework existed. The lack of this type of analysis in works of archeological science led Willey and
Phillips to
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felt that ethno-historical (history of peoples) information was necessary to facilitate an understanding of archaeological context. Ethno-historical research involves living and studying the life of those who would have used the artifacts—or at least studying a similar culture. Binford wanted to
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phase in which archaeologists thought that information artifacts contained about past culture would be lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. Willey and
Phillips believed all that could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts.
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as archaeologists became skeptical of the work of their predecessors. Clarke's paper would later be described as "one of the seminal statements of the New
Archaeology, by one of its leading proponents" in Britain, if not elsewhere, by the archaeologists
137:, a proponent of processual archaeology, observed in 1987 that it focuses attention on "the underlying historical processes which are at the root of change". Archaeology, he noted, "has learnt to speak with greater authority and accuracy about the
141:, their technology, their economic basis and their social organization. Now it is beginning to interest itself in the ideology of early communities: their religions, the way they expressed rank, status and group identity."
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suggested that the New
Archaeology would face particular opposition from amateurs, historical archaeologists, and practical excavators but argued that such individuals would still benefit from the theory's adoption.
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gained from the wide interdisciplinary studies demonstrates processual analyses of a complex topic provides valuable data that can be analyzed, refuted, and built upon to further understand cultural history.
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state in 1958, "So little work has been done in
American archaeology on the explanatory level that it is difficult to find a name for it". Different researchers had alternative approaches to this problem.
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The sharper students of the current generation reasonably regard the "New
Archaeology" in its pristine form as a period piece, as strange an artefact of that remote era as the Paris
323:, argued that despite the 40 years since its development, the "intellectual questions" first posed by processualism remained "absolutely central" to archaeology.
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113:'s comment: "My own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history, and being nothing." The idea implied that the goals of
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made it possible to get past the limits of the archaeological record and to learn something about the lifestyles of those who created or used artifacts.
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Processual archaeologists believe they can understand past cultural systems through the remains they left behind. One theory that influences this is
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121:, which were to answer questions about humans and human culture. This was meant to be a critique of the former period in archaeology, the
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Malone, Caroline; Stoddart, Simon (1998). "Special section: David Clarke's "Archaeology: the loss of innocence" (1973) 25 years after".
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Processualism's development transformed archaeology, and is sometimes called the "New
Archaeology." With few notable exceptions such as
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in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing" (Willey and
Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of
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could be recovered from the archaeological record if only you searched hard enough was the archaeological version of the hope that
389:. They have some cause: the then-radical insistence that nothing valuable had been written in archaeology before 1960 matched the
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Processualism began to be critiqued soon after it emerged, initiating a theoretical movement that would come to be called
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209:(the idea that all aspects of culture are accessible through the material record), the use of quantitative data, and the
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language made a case for the spread of Indo-European languages through neolithic Europe in connection with the
858:(2005) for a detailed account of the debate between the processual and post-processual schools of archaeology.
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spoke on the view of processualism at that time, putting it in the context of the 1960s, when he stated that:
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1991. "A Parochial Primer: the New Dissonance as Seen from the Midcontinental United States". In
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failure to take into account factors such as gender, ethnicity, identity, social relations etc.
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Chippindale, Christopher. 1987. Review of "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique".
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The Goddess and the Bull: Catalhoyuk, An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization
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1987:6, and "6. Language, population and social organization: a processual approach" 120ff.
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343:. Post-processualist critics consider the main weaknesses of processual archaeology to be:
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belief that anyone over 30 was too ancient to be intelligent, and the optimism that
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Proponents of processual archaeology claimed that the rigorous use of the
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1984. Alternative Archaeologies: nationalist, colonialist, imperialist.
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1965. "Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process". In
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In his 2010 book on archaeological theory Matthew Johnson, then of the
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model (scientific method of observation and hypothesis testing).
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could be levitated if only enough people had sufficient faith.
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assemblage, a group of stone artifacts from France during the
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Archaeology and Language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins
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Clarke, David (1973). "Archaeology: the loss of innocence".
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and multilinear evolution ideas of anthropologists such as
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During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, archaeologist
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97:. It had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of
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228:An example of processualism, in the field of
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840:Method and Theory in American Archaeology
692:Method and Theory in American Archaeology
689:Willey, Gordon; Phillips, Philip (1958).
62:Learn how and when to remove this message
46:, without removing the technical details.
751:1962. "Archaeology as anthropology". In
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702:Archaeological Theory: An Introduction
695:. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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792:. Cambridge University Press: New York
365:supposed objectivity of interpretation
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44:make it understandable to non-experts
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842:. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
790:A History of Archaeological Thought
369:Writing in 1987, the archaeologist
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111:Frederic William Maitland
827:. McGraw-Hill, New York.
825:The Evolution of Culture
777:. Chicago, Aldine Press.
753:Contemporary Archaeology
637:Malone and Stoddart 1998
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371:Christopher Chippindale
321:Northwestern University
762:31(2) Part 1: 203-210.
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676:Volume 28, Number 4.
674:Current Anthropology
375:Cambridge University
355:view of cultures as
352:lack of human agency
296:and Simon Stoddart.
279:Cambridge University
80:American archaeology
238:Proto-Indo-European
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909:Culture-historical
760:American Antiquity
593:The New York Times
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473:Clarke 1973
357:homeostatic
307:in Europe.
115:archaeology
52:August 2021
741:References
599:2023-07-04
567:2024-02-15
434:2009-02-08
383:évènements
188:Mousterian
733:Antiquity
724:Antiquity
639:. p. 676.
562:0362-4331
411:Footnotes
387:Woodstock
327:Criticism
319:, now at
288:Antiquity
956:Category
663:. p. 18.
651:. p. 11.
615:. p. 12.
475:. p. 17.
395:anything
196:Nunamiut
914:Marxist
838:1958.
268:, 1973.
192:ice age
160:, 1973.
38:Please
919:Social
823:1959.
788:1989.
773:1968.
711:
560:
391:hippie
311:Legacy
200:Alaska
145:Theory
406:Notes
709:ISBN
558:ISSN
101:and
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