Post-processual Archaeology - Criticism

Criticism

As the archaeologists Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn noted, "For its most severe critics, while making a number of valid criticisms, simply developed some of the ideas and theoretical problems introduced by . To these critics it brought in a variety of approaches from other disciplines, so that the term "postprocessual," while rather neatly echoing the epithet "postmodern" in literary studies, was a shade arrogant in presuming to supersede what it might quite properly claim to complement."

In their article "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique" (1987), Timothy K. Earle and Robert W. Preucel examined the post-processual movement's "radical critique" of processualism, and whilst accepting that it had some merit and highlighted some important points, they came to the conclusion that on the whole, the post-processual approach was flawed because it failed to produce an explicit methodology.

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