Preucel, Robert W.
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MCMANAMON, F.P. 1991. The many publics for archaeol-
ogy. American Antiquity 56: 121-30.
MURTAGH, W.J. 2006. Keeping time: the history and theory
of preservation in America. Hoboken: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
NASH, G.B. 2006. First city: Philadelphia and the forging
of historical memory. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
NICHOLAS, G.P. 2005. Editor’s notes: on “reality archaeol-
ogy”. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal
Canadien d’Archaeologie 29: iii-vi.
NICHOLS, S. 2006. Out of the box: popular notions of
archaeology in documentary programmes in
Australian television. Australian Archaeology 63:
35-46.
NOEL HUME, I. 2010. A passion for the past: the odyssey of
a Transatlantic archaeologist. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
POKOTYLO, D. & N. GUPPY. 1999. Public opinion and
archaeological heritage: views from outside the
profession. American Antiquity 64: 400-16.
WOOD, J.T. 1877. Wood’s discoveries at Ephesus. Littell’s
Living Age (5th Ser.) XVII: 626-38.
Further Reading
ALANEN, A.R. & R.Z. MELNICK. (ed.) 2000. Preserving
cultural landscapes in America. Foreword by
D. Hayden. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
ASCHER, R. 1960. Archaeology and the public image.
American Antiquity 25: 402-3.
BEALE, T.W. & P.F. HEALY. 1975. Archaeological films:
the past as present. American Anthropologist
(New Series) 77: 889-97.
BOHRER, F.N. 2011. Photography and archaeology
(Exposures series). London: Reaktion Books.
CLACK, T. & M. BRITTAIN. (ed.) 2007. Archaeology and the
media. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
DECICCO, G. 1988. A public relations primer. American
Antiquity 53: 840-56.
DE GROOT, J. 2009. Consuming history: historians and
heritage in contemporary popular culture. Oxford:
Routledge.
HOLTORF, C. & E.H. CLINE. 2008. TV archaeology is valu-
able storytelling (with response). Near Eastern
Archaeology 71: 176-9.
MCGEOUGH, K. 2006. Heroes, mummies, and treasure:
Near Eastern archaeology in the movies. Near Eastern
Archaeology 69: 174-85.
SCHABLITSKY, J.M. (ed.) 2007. Box office archaeology:
refining Hollywood’s portrayals of the past. Walnut
Creek: Left Coast Press.
STRONGHEART, N.T. 1954. History in Hollywood. The
Wisconsin Magazine of History 38: 10-16, 41-6.
TRIGGER, B. 1990. A history of archaeological thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
VAN DYKE, R.M. 2006. Seeing the past: visual media in
archaeology. American Anthropologist (New Series)
108: 370-5.
VERMEULE, C. 1976. Classical archaeology and French
painting in the seventeenth century. Boston Museum
Bulletin 74: 94-109.
Preucel, Robert W.
Alexander A. Bauer
Department of Anthropology, Queens College,
CUNY, Flushing, NY, USA
Basic Biographical Information
Robert W. Preucel (Fig. 1) is an anthropological
archaeologist who is a leading voice in many
areas of archaeological theory and practice,
from Native North American archaeology to
problems of philosophy and epistemology, to
the engagement with Native communities in
archaeological practice and academia more gen-
erally. He received his B.A. in anthropology in
1978 from the University of Pennsylvania. Hav-
ing interests in both North American and Near
Eastern archaeology, Preucel subsequently took
a Master’s degree (1979) at the University of
Chicago where he studied at the Oriental Insti-
tute. While at Chicago, he became interested in
P
archaeological method and theory, in particular
processual archaeology, and so from there
embarked on a Ph.D. (1988) in archaeology at
UCLA, where he studied processualist methods
and Puebloan archaeology under the guidance of
James N. Hill.
After graduating from UCLA, Preucel was
awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center
for Archaeological Investigations at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale (1988–89),
where he organized a conference on the
Processual-Postprocessual debate (Preucel
1991a). In 1989, he joined the faculty of Harvard
University as an Assistant Professor of Anthro-
pology and Assistant Curator of North America at
the Peabody Museum. He was later promoted as
Associate Professor and Associate Curator
(1993–1995). In 1995, he returned to the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, this time as Associate
P 6142
Preucel, Robert W., Fig. 1 Robert Preucel
Professor of Anthropology and Associate Curator
of the American Section of the University
Museum. He was promoted to Professorship in
2007 and two years later made the Sally and
Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology
and the Gregory Annenberg Weingarten Curator-
in-Charge of the American Section of the Univer-
sity Museum. He served as the Chair of the
Department (2009–2012) and the Director of the
Center for Native American Studies
(2007–2013). In 2013, he was appointed as the
Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthro-
pology and Professor of Anthropology at Brown
University.
Major Accomplishments
Robert Preucel has made and continues to make
significant contributions to several different
arenas of scholarship and practice, most notably
archaeological theory, Puebloan archaeology,
and engagement with Native American commu-
nities. His interest in archaeological theory and
epistemology drew him first to study Processual
approaches and then consider its critiques over
Preucel, Robert W.
the course of his doctoral studies. While
a graduate student, he coauthored an important
essay on those debates with Tim Earle entitled
“Processual Archaeology and the Radical Cri-
tique” (Earle & Preucel 1987). Subsequently,
the conference he organized as a postdoctoral
scholar at Carbondale resulted in one of the
most important volumes on this debate (Preucel
1991a), with his essay “The Philosophy of
Archaeology” (Preucel 1991b) remaining a key
distillation of the core components of archaeo-
logical reasoning. In 1996, he collaborated with
Ian Hodder to write the first incarnation of Con-
temporary Archaeology in Theory (Preucel &
Hodder 1996), a reader on archaeological method
and theory that was as valuable for the short
introductory essays that Preucel and Hodder
wrote as for the readings it contained.
During his time at Harvard, Preucel had the
opportunity to expand his interest in philosophy
through interaction with colleagues such as Terry
Deacon, David Rudner, and Rosemary Joyce, and
at the Peirce Sesquicentennial International Con-
gress at Harvard University in 1989, he first
encountered the semiotic writings of American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work
focused on the production of meaning and the
logic of inferences about the world. Preucel felt
that Peirce’s model, notably being non-
foundational and an alternative to both positivist
and non-positivist approaches, might be espe-
cially productive for archaeological inquiry and
its problem of verifiability. He laid out and tested
this framework in a series of essays (Preucel &
Bauer 2001; Capone & Preucel 2002; Ferguson &
Preucel 2005), culminating in his 2006 book
Archaeological Semiotics (Preucel 2006).
Preucel continues to explore Peirce’s ideas and
in particular the utility of pragmatism generally
as a way to produce a more inclusive and
ethically engaged archaeology (Preucel &
Mrozowski 2010), particularly with respect to
bridging Native and indigenous ways of knowing
the world with Western scientific approaches.
Preucel has had a long-standing research
engagement with the Puebloan communities of
the southwest United States. Since 1995, he
has collaborated with Cochiti Pueblo in New
Preucel, Robert W.
Mexico on the Kotyiti Research Project,
a multidimensional study of an ancestral Cochiti
village from the time of the Pueblo Revolt, incor-
porating archaeological survey, mapping, oral
history study and interviews with elders from
Cochiti, and museum and historical analysis.
This project seeks to address questions about the
links between past and present identities as well
as what constitutes responsible and ethical col-
laboration. Engagement with the Cochiti commu-
nity is a central pillar of this project and it
includes the active participation of Cochiti elders
as well as youth through an internship program.
Both in the Kotyiti Research Project and in his
collaborations with T.J. Ferguson and his former
students, Preucel has sought to understand the
ways in which Puebloan identity and ideology
was expressed materially during the period of
the Pueblo Revolt and since (Preucel 2002,
2006; Liebmann & Preucel 2007).
Preucel’s involvement with Native Americans
and concerns about ethical academic practice
have not been limited to his own research agendas,
but have guided much of his work at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Museum and in the Univer-
sity as a whole. At the University Museum, he has
facilitated collaborative relationships with many
Native American communities, and has provided
important examples of how NAGPRA works at its
best. He has also been active in increasing Native
American participation and enrollment at Penn
through serving on university-wide committees
on diversity outreach, minority recruitment, and
pushing to establish the Center for Native Amer-
ican Studies. Through this work, and in comple-
ment to his academic research goals, Preucel has
sought to increase the visibility of Native Ameri-
cans in academia and raise the profile of topical
concerns of Native peoples more generally.
Cross-References
▶ Earle, Timothy
▶ Hodder, Ian (Theory)
▶ Indigenous Peoples, Working with and for
▶ Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), USA
6143 P
▶ Post-Processual Archaeology
▶ Pragmatism in Archaeological Theory
▶ Processualism in Archaeological Theory
▶ Semiotics in Archaeological Theory
▶ Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG)
References
EARLE, T. & R.W. PREUCEL. 1987. Processual archaeology
and the radical critique. Current Anthropology 28:
501-38.
CAPONE, P. & R. W. PREUCEL. 2002. Ceramic semiotics:
women, pottery, and social meanings at Kotyiti
Pueblo, in R. W. Preucel (ed.) Archaeologies of the
Pueblo Revolt: identity, meaning and renewal in the
Pueblo world: 99–113. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Ferguson, T.J. & R. W. Preucel. 2005. Signs of the ances-
tors: an archaeology of the Mesa villages of the Pueblo
Revolt, in J. Rykwert & T. Atkin (ed.) Structure and
meaning in human settlement: 185–207. Philadelphia:
University Museum.
LIEBMANN, M. & R. W. PREUCEL. 2007. The archaeology of
the Pueblo Revolt and the formation of the modern
Pueblo world. Kiva 73: 197-219.
PREUCEL, R. W. (ed.) 1991a. Processual and
postprocessual archaeologies: multiple ways of know-
ing the past (Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale Occasional Paper 10). Carbondale (IL):
Center for Archaeological Investigations.
- 1991b. The philosophy of archaeology, in R. W. Preucel
(ed.) Processual and postprocessual archaeologies:
multiple ways of knowing the past (Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale Occasional Paper 10): 17-29. P
Carbondale (IL): Center for Archaeological
Investigations.
- (ed.) 2002. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: identity,
meaning and renewal in the Pueblo world. Albuquer-
que (NM): University of New Mexico Press.
- 2006. Archaeological semiotics. Oxford: Blackwell.
PREUCEL, R.W. & A.A. BAUER. 2001. Archaeological
pragmatics. Norwegian Archaeological Review 34:
85-96.
PREUCEL, R. W. & I. HODDER. (ed.) 1996. Contemporary
archaeology in theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
PREUCEL, R. W. & S.A. MROZOWSKI. (ed.) 2010. Contem-
porary archaeology in theory: the new pragmatism,
2nd edn. New York (NY): Wiley-Blackwell.
Further Reading
LEONE, M.P. & R.W. PREUCEL. 1992. Archaeology in
a democratic society: a critical theory approach, in L.
Wandsnider (ed.) Quests and quandaries: visions of
archaeology’s future (Southern Illinois University,
Occasional Paper 20):115-35. Carbondale (IL):
Center for Archaeological Investigations.
P 6144
LIEBMANN, M., T.J. FERGUSON & R.W. PREUCEL. 2005.
Pueblo settlement, architecture, and social change in
the Pueblo Revolt era, A.D. 1680-1696. Journal of
Field Archaeology 30: 1-16.
MESKELL, L. & R. PREUCEL. 2006. A companion to social
archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
PREUCEL, R.W. 2012. Indigenous archaeology and the sci-
ence question. Archaeological Review from Cam-
bridge 27: 121-41.
PREUCEL, R.W. & L.F. WILLIAMS. 2005. The centennial
Potlach. Expedition 47(2): 9-19.
PREUCEL, R.W., L.F. WILLIAMS, S.O. ESPENLAUB & J.
MONGE. 2003. Out of heaviness, enlightenment:
NAGPRA and the University of Pennsylvania
Museum. Expedition 45(3): 21-7.
Processualism in Archaeological
Theory
Steven A. LeBlanc1 and Patty Jo Watson2
1
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge,
MA, USA
2
Department of Anthropology, Washington
University, St. Louis, MO, USA
Introduction
For approximately 20 years during the 1960s to
the 1980s, lively discussion about theoretical
and methodological issues characterized
Euroamerican archaeology. Much of the debate
centered upon an approach called New Archae-
ology or processual archaeology that originated
in the United States. In this entry we provide our
perspectives upon the mid-twentieth-century
controversies about the nature and goals of
archaeology and make reference to some of the
more prominent subsequent developments.
Definition
We use the phrases “New Archaeology” or
“processual archaeology” to mean a problem-
oriented, generalizing rather than a particulariz-
ing approach toward archaeological data, with
the goal of advancing knowledge about social,
Processualism in Archaeological Theory
cultural, and political processes characterizing
past human societies. This view derives from
the development of anthropology within the
United States during the first few decades of
the twentieth century as a holistic study of
humankind from origins to the present day.
Anthropology was conceived as a social science
wherein archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists,
and physical anthropologists carried out world-
wide comparative cross-cultural research on
humankind, past and present, wherever relevant
evidence could be found.
Historical Background
Prior to the rise of processual archaeology,
however, Americanist archaeologists of the
early to mid-twentieth century focused quite
narrowly upon chronology and comparative
typology. There was such a heavy emphasis
upon chronologically diagnostic artifacts and
their travels through time and space that the
phrase “time-space systematics” was and still is
often used to describe 1930s–1950s Americanist
archaeology. Although efforts were made during
this period by a few archaeologists to broaden the
scope of archaeology in the USA, these had no
discernible effect. Neither did a closely reasoned,
strongly argued, book-length critique that
appeared shortly after World War II (Taylor
1948; see Maca et al. 2010). During the early
1960s, however, Lewis Binford began to attract
considerable attention to his views concerning
anthropological archaeology. Binford’s program
for change (Binford 1962, 1964, 1965) was
labeled “processual archaeology” by many of its
advocates (e.g., Flannery 1973) and instigated
considerable methodological and theoretical fer-
ment. In his initial manifesto, Binford (1962)
begins by quoting the well-known statement of
Gordon Willey and Phillip Phillips that “Ameri-
can archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.”
He then proceeds to assess the performance of
Americanist archaeology with respect to
supporting the aims of anthropology as the inte-
grated discipline it was supposed to be. He
defines those aims as explicating and explaining