Summary of the New Archaeology

• Make archaeology a science with science define as

– Deductive explanations through hypothesis testing and/or laws

• Two kinds of explanations sought:– Culture reconstruction (functional and behavior

– Explanations of culture process

• Developed new methods for connecting artifacts to cultural behavior:– Record formation processes

– Ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology

– mid range theory

Was/is the New Archaeology a Paradigm

• There is some debate on this issue:– The changes called for were certainly “revolutionary” and a far cry

from what culture historians had been doing.– They discussed and developed new methods:

• How to achieve certainty in conclusion• Reliance on quantitative methods• Emphasis on spatial variation and how to sample to obtain

representative samples of that variation• Identification and description of record formation processes to build

better analogues

• BUT, they never constructed the explanation they so wanted. Do change in methods constitute a paradigm shift?

Changing Directions from the NA

• Binford’s call for Science resulted in a push in that direction with a focus on ultimate causation

• Binford’s focus on culture reconstruction was transformed into humanistic archaeology, e.g., post-processualism

New Archaeology

Scientific Post Processualism

Archaeology

Evolutionary Theory