Processual Archaeology - Further Theoretical Development

Further Theoretical Development

"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."

In 1973, the processualist David Clarke of Cambridge University would publish an academic paper in Antiquity 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" as archaeologists became sceptical of the work of their forebears. 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 Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart.

Processualism's development transformed archaeology, and is sometimes called the "New Archaeology." With few notable exceptions such as Boston University and Brown University, 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. But archeology is a branch of history and history is a branch of cultural anthroplogy. It is important to analyze which sciences are close kin 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 post-processualism in Europe.