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 New Archaeology • 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 Scientific Post Processualism Archaeology Evolutionary Theory