The document summarizes the evolution of archaeology from its origins in antiquarianism and the culture-historical method to the development of processual and post-processual archaeology. It describes how early archaeology focused on collecting and describing artifacts but later adopted scientific and explanatory approaches seeking to understand culture as an adaptive system. It then discusses how post-processual archaeology rejected notions of objectivity and emphasized subjective interpretation over hypothesis testing.

1. Evolution of the study of Archaeology
 Early Archaeology/antiquarianism:
Archaeology originated in 15th and 16th century Europe with the popularity of
collecting and Humanism, a type of rational philosophy that held art in high
esteem.
The inquisitive elite of the Renaissance collected antiquities from ancient Greece
and Rome, considering them pieces of art more than historical artifacts.

2. Cont’d
 Antiquarianism focused on the empirical evidence that existed for the
understanding of the past, encapsulated in the motto of the 18th-century
antiquary, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, "We speak from facts not theory".
 Antiquarians of the 16th century, including John Leland and William Camden,
conducted surveys of the English countryside, drawing, describing and
interpreting the monuments that they encountered.

3. Cont’d
 The methods at that time left some gaps in understanding. For example,
compared to today, there was less focus then on finding small remains and on
recording patterns in the soil.
 That limited the data about food, houses, and gave a rare glimpse of the site
as a whole.

4. The method
 The culture-historical method (sometimes called the cultural-historical
method or culture-historical approach or theory) was a way of conducting
anthropological and archaeological research that was prevalent among
western scholars between about 1910 and 1960.
 The underlying premise of the culture-historical approach was that the main
reason to do archaeology or anthropology at all was to build timelines of
major occurrences and cultural changes in the past for groups that did not
have written records.

5. Cont’d
 The culture-historical method was developed out of the theories of historians
and anthropologists, to some degree to help archaeologists organize and
comprehend the vast amount of archaeological data that had been and was
still being collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries by antiquarians.

6. Cont’d
 this phase of archaeology is also known as the speculative phase marked by
the creation of cabinets of curiousities which displayed curious and ancient
artifacts though not in any proper order.
 18th century saw more adventurous researchers excavations of some of the
most prominent sites; ie. The roman city of Pompeii in Italy
 19th century saw new ideas of stratification, uniformitarianism, evolutionary
theories, the three age system etc. these were to mark transformations in
archaeology towards a scientific discipline

7. The New/Processual archaeology
 The turning point in the development of archaeology was in the 1960s with a
number of archaeologists expressing dissatisfaction with excavation
techniques, the lack of use of scientific aids, and with the way archaeologists
explain things
 The birth of the new archaeology was led by lewis binford and his students,
setting out to provide new approaches to archaeological explanations (The
NEW archaeology):

8. Cont’d
 They argued against over reliance on archaeological data to write
“counterfeit history”, which fails to address social and economic aspects of
past societies adequately
 They argued for archaeological reasoning conclusions to be explicit, and
logical and not based on personal authority and interpretation of the
researcher.

9. Cont’d
 Processual archaeology was an intellectual movement of the 1960s, known
then as the "new archaeology", which advocated logical positivism as a
guiding research philosophy, modeled on the scientific method—something
that had never been applied to archaeology before.
 before. The processualists rejected the cultural-historical notion that culture
was a set of norms held by a group and communicated to other groups by
diffusion and instead argued that the archaeological remains of culture were
the behavioral outcome of a population's adaptation to specific environmental
conditions.

10. Cont’d
 The New Archaeology stressed theory formation, model building, and
hypothesis testing in the search for general laws of human behavior
 The processualists explicitly wanted to go beyond the cultural-historical
methods of the past (simply building a record of changes) to focus on the
processes of culture (what kinds of things happened to make that culture).

11. Cont’d

 There's also an implied redefinition of what culture is. Culture in processual
archaeology is conceived primarily as the adaptive mechanism that enables
people to cope with their environments.
 Processual culture was seen as a system composed of subsystems, and the
explanatory framework of all of those systems was cultural ecology, which in
turn provided the basis for hypothetical and deductive models that the
processualists could test.

12. Cont’d
 The new/processual archaeology sought to explain rather than describe and
thus, making valid generalizations
 They sought to analyze culture as a system with subsystems (technology,
trade, or ideology) which could be studied individually rather than
emphasizing artifact typology and classification
 In achieving the goals, the used lots of quantitative and new ideas from
disciplines such as geography

13. Postprocessual archaeology
 The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of postprocessual archaeology, led
by ian hodder and his students
 They stress the fact that there is no single, correct way to undertake
archaeological inference, and that the goal of objectivity is unattainable
 Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as
the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in
archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological
interpretations.

14. Cont’d
 Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical
viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as
have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology.
 The post-processual movement originated in the United Kingdom during the
late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered by archaeologists such as Ian Hodder,
Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley and Peter Ucko, who were influenced by
French Marxist anthropology, postmodernism and similar trends in
sociocultural anthropology.

15. Cont’d
 Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism,
namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific
method was applied, come to completely objective conclusions.

16. Quick Summary of the key difference
1. The old vs the new Archaeology
(i) The Nature of archaeology: descriptive vs explanatory
The new archaeology denounced descriptive archaeology and argued for
explanation using explicit theory
(ii) Nature of explanation: Culture-historical approach vs Culture process
The new argued for moving away from historical explanations to using the
philosophy of science in terms of culture to establish how economic and social
systems change, implyinggeneralizations

17. Cont’d
(iii) Reasoning: descriptive vs inductive approach
During the old archaeology, the task was to piece together past seen generally as
a jigsaw puzzle so as to establish chronologies, whereas the new archaeology
indicates that archaeological procedure should be formulating hypothesis,
constructing models, and deducing their consequences
(Iv) Validation: testing vs personal authority
The new archeology called for hypothesis testing to arrive at conclusions as
against the old archaeologists basing their conclusions on the standing or
authority of the researcher

18. Cont’d
(v) Research focus: project design vs data accumulation
The new archaeology says research should be designed to answer specific
questions rather than generating more data/information that might not be
relevant
(vi) Choice of approach: quantitative vs qualitative
New archaeology called for quantitative techniques to apply computerized
statistical treatment with possibility of sampling significance and testing rather
than purely verbal approach

19. Cont’d
(Vii) Scope: optimism vs pessimism
Whereas the old archaeology stressed that archaeological data were not suited
for the reconstruction of social organizations and cognitive systems, the new
were positive of the possibility and argued that archaeologists can infer social
and cognitive systems

20. New vs postprocessual
 Neo-Marxist approach: it is the duty of archaeologist to search insights with
the objective of changing the present world rather than only describing the
past.
 Post-positivist approach: this rejects the systematic approach/ or the
scientific method as not being capable of providing objective conclusions
 Phenomenology: this stresses personal experiences and encounters with the
material world and the objects in it to shape our understanding of the world;
thus a subjective appreciation of culture and culture change

21. Cont’d
 Praxis: this emphasizes the role of human agents and the primary significance
of human actions (praxis) in shaping social structures as many social norms
and structures are established and shaped through habitual experiences
 Hermeneutic/interpretive view: this rejects generalizations of the new
archaeology and emphasizes the uniqueness of each society and culture, and
on the need to study the full context of each society in all its rich diversity –
thus, there is no single correct interpretation as there is diversity of opinions.
This is interpretive archaeology