Summary of the New Archaeology

1
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

2
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?

3
Changing Directions from the NA

• Binfords call for Science resulted in a push in
  that direction with a focus on ultimate causation
• Binfords focus on culture reconstruction was
  transformed into humanistic archaeology, e.g.,
  post-processualism

New Archaeology
Scientific Post Processualism Archaeology Evolutio
nary Theory