PROCESSUAL ARCHEAOLOGY

(1)Scientific explanations would demand that archaeologists focus on dynamic systems—an approach called “systems theory”—
with the goal of understanding the complex factors driving cultural change, and explaining how people adapted to the
environmental factors that drove cultural changes.

(2) Focus on culture process: Arguing that culture–historical archaeology results in static snapshots of phases of occupation (an
artifact of archaeological collection and not a representation of reality), the processualists focused on generating a more lifelike,
fluid understanding of the past, one based on understanding the complex interrelated cultural and environmental factors that
contribute to cultural (and archaeological) change over time.

(3) An expressly theoretical approach: The theoretical goals of processual archaeology resulted in a number of methodological
changes in the ways in which archaeology was (and is) practiced, resulting in a strong focus on survey, on the integration of a
wide range of new types of data, and on the replacement of the solo archaeologist with an archaeological team of experts,
representing a number of fields that contribute to the explanation of the past.

Binford (1978b: 5) described ethnoarchaeology as a method “to seek experiences in the world … that can elucidate the usefulness
and accuracy of [archaeologists’] tools for apprehending and describing reality.” Ethnoarchaeology offers archaeologists the
opportunity to evaluate our understanding of present-day cultural processes and identify appropriate means to recognize and
interpret meaningful variation in the archaeological record. Ethnoarchaeological observations about the organization and use of
space are one method used to explore the range of behaviors represented by patterns in material remnants of cultural activity at
archaeological sites. Understanding the conditions under which the material record is created helps us to develop methods for
capturing important patterning in the archaeological record and interpret it in meaningful terms.

By the time his landmark book In Pursuit of the Past (1983) was published, Binford’s theoretical and applied analytical approach
to site structure had been explicitly set in place. Development of theory about the use of space at sites, artifact disposal, modeling,
and ethnoarchaeology were all used to explain variations in site function, artifact assemblages, artifact distributions, and spatial
patterning. In particular, the study of site structure sought “ways to understand how early man

Ethnoarchaeology is an anthropological approach by which archaeologists seek to answer questions in the context of studying
living peoples. The purpose of such studies is to understand the relationship between cultural processes, human behaviors carrying
out those processes, and the material consequences of those human behaviors. While the relationship between material culture and
the archaeological record is by no means a direct or one-to-one correlation, ethnoarchaeological research into the

Conclusions

Among Lewis Binford’s many contributions was the development of ethnoarchaeology as a robust subfield of archaeology. His
goals are still relevant for developing middle-range theory and for helping to understand and explain the archaeological record.
Even so, explicit examples linking ethnoarchaeology with a fully researched archaeological data base are not common. Some
notable exceptions include Kent’s (1990) study of segmentation in architectural space as observed in societies of varying

Middle-range theory is an interpretive methodology influential in New Archaeology. The concept originates in the 1950s in the
sociological theory of Robert K. Merton, where it is conceived as a scale of abstraction in the process of linking low-level
empirical data to high-order theories about culture (Merton 1968). In archaeology, however, middle-range theory has developed a
different, materialist objective, focusing on processes of site formation and the relationship between the material record and the
conditions of its production (Raab & Goodyear 1984: 255–8; Tschauner 1996: 4).
By the mid-twentieth century, the traditional culture-historical archaeological approach had successfully developed sequences of
artifacts and cultures and placed these within established chronological frameworks (Greene & Moore 2010). In the 1960s, rather
than simply continuing to situate archaeological material within space and time, New Archaeology, also known as processual
archaeology,...

Lewis R. Binford, American archaeologist. Binford taught principally at the University of New Mexico (1968–91) and later
at Southern Methodist University (1991–2003). In the mid-1960s he initiated what came to be known as the “New Archaeology,”
which champions the use of quantitative methods and the practice of archaeology as a rigorous science. He applied the
new methodology in an influential study of Mousterian artifacts and later extended it to a study of the hunting activities of a living
people, the Nunamiut, trying to draw analogies to prehistoric contexts.
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological
theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the
later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology (or the
"New Archaeology") in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in
the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm.[3] Recent
appraisals have judged that his approach owed more to prior work in the 1940s and 50s than suggested by Binford's strong
criticism of his predecessors.[4]

New Archaeology[edit]
Binford first became dissatisfied with the present state of archaeology while an undergraduate at UNC. He felt that culture
history reflected the same 'stamp collecting' mentality that had turned him away from biology. At Michigan, he saw a sharp
contrast between the "excitement" of the anthropology department's cultural anthropologists (which included Leslie White) and
the "people in white coats counting their potsherds" in the Museum of Anthropology.[9] His first academic position was as
an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he taught New World archaeology and statistical methods in
archaeology. Shortly after his appointment he wrote his first major article, Archaeology as Anthropology (1962), which was
stimulated by problems in archaeological methodology that had become apparent with the use of radiocarbon dating to verify the
dates and cultural typologies generated with relative dating techniques such as seriation.[10] Binford criticised what he saw as a
tendency to treat artifacts as undifferentiated traits,[11] and to explain variations in these traits only in terms of cultural diffusion.
He proposed that the goal of archaeology was exactly the same as that of anthropology more generally, viz. to "explicate and
explain the total range of physical and cultural similarities and differences characteristic of the entire spatio-temporal span of
man's existence."[11] This would be achieved by relating artifacts to human behavior, and behavior to cultural systems (as
understood by his mentor, cultural anthropologist Leslie White).[12]
Several other archaeologists at Chicago shared Binford's ideas, a group their critics began calling the "New Archaeologists". [13] In
1966 they presented a set of papers at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology which were later collected in the
landmark New Perspectives in Archaeology (1968), edited by Binford and his then wife Sally, also an archaeologist.[14] By the
time this volume was published he had left Chicago – dismissed, according to Binford, because of increasing tension between
himself and the senior archaeologists in the faculty, particularly Robert Braidwood.[15] He moved to the University of California,
Santa Barbara for a year and then on to UCLA. He did not like the atmosphere at UCLA's large faculty, and so took the
opportunity to relocate to the University of New Mexico in 1969.[14]

Ethnoarchaeology[edit]
Binford withdrew from the theoretical debates that followed the rapid adoption [16] of New Archaeology (by then also
called processual archaeology) in the 1960s and 70s, instead focusing on his work on the Mousterian, a Middle Palaeolithic lithic
industry found in Europe, North Africa and the Near East.[17] In 1969 he decided to undertake ethnographic fieldwork among
the Nunamiut in Alaska, in order to better understand the periglacial environment that Mousterian hominins occupied, and to see
first hand how hunter-gatherer behavior is reflected in material remains.[18] This methodology—conducting ethnographic
fieldwork to establish firm correlations between behavior and material culture—is known as ethnoarchaeology and is credited to
Binford.[19] Most of Binford's later work was focused on the Palaeolithic and hunter-gatherers in the archaeological record.
]

Binford's last published book, Constructing Frames of Reference (2001), was edited by his then wife, Nancy Medaris Stone. His
wife at the time of his death, Amber Johnson, has said that she and a colleague will finish editing a book Binford had in progress
at the time of his death.[20]

Influence[edit]
Binford is mainly known for his contributions to archaeological theory and his promotion of ethnoarchaeological research. As a
leading advocate of the "New Archaeology" movement of the 1960s, he proposed a number of ideas that became central
to processual archaeology. Binford and other New Archaeologists argued that there should be a greater application of scientific
methodologies and the hypothetico-deductive method in archaeology. He placed a strong emphasis on generalities and the way in
which human beings interact with their ecological niche, defining culture as the extrasomatic means of adaptation. This view
reflects the influence of his Ph.D supervisor, Leslie White. Binford's work can largely be seen as a reaction to the earlier culture
history approach to archaeology. New Archaeology was considered a revolution in archaeological theory.
Binford was involved in several high-profile debates including arguments with James Sackett on the nature and function of style
and on symbolism and methodology with Ian Hodder. Binford has spoken out and reacted to a number of schools of thought,
particularly the post-processual school, the behavioural school, and symbolic and postmodern anthropologies. Binford was also
known for a friendlier rivalry with French archaeologist François Bordes, with whom he argued over the interpretation
of Mousterian sites. Binford's disagreement with Bordes over the interpretation of Mousterian stone artifacts provided the impetus
for much of Binford's theoretical work. Bordes interpreted variability in Mousterian assemblages as evidence of different tribes,
while Binford felt that a functional interpretation of the different assemblages would be more appropriate. His subsequent inability
to explain the Mousterian facies using a functional approach led to his ethnoarchaeological work among the Nunamiut and the
development of his middle-range theory.

Works[edit]
  Constructing frames of reference: an analytical method for archaeological theory building using hunter-gatherer
and environmental data sets Berkeley: University of California Press, (2001) ISBN 0-520-22393-4
 Debating Archaeology San Diego: Academic Press, (1989) ISBN 0-12-100045-1
 Faunal Remains from Klasies River Mouth (1984) ISBN 0-12-100070-2
 Working at Archaeology (Studies in Archaeology) (1983) ISBN 978-0-12-100060-8
 In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record (1983) ISBN 0-520-23339-5
 Bones, Ancient Men and Modern Myths (1981) ISBN 0-12-100035-4
 Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology (1978) ISBN 0-12-100040-0
 An archaeological perspective New York: Seminar Press, (1972) ISBN 0-12-807750-6
 New Perspectives in Archaeology (1968) ISBN 0-202-33022-2
 Archaeology as Anthropology (1962)

Processual archaeology (formerly, the New Archaeology) is a form of archaeological theory that had its beginnings in 1958 with
the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, in which the pair stated that
"American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of Frederic William
Maitland's comment: "My own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history, and being
nothing."[1] The idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer
questions about humans and human culture.
Proponents of the new phase in archaeology claimed that the rigorous use of the scientific method made it possible to get past the
limits of the archaeological record and to learn something about how the people who used the artifacts lived. Colin Renfrew, a
proponent of the new processual archaeology, observed in 1987 that it focuses attention on "the underlying historical processes
which are at the root of change". Archaeology, he noted, "has learnt to speak with greater authority and accuracy about
the ecology of past societies, their technology, their economic basis and their social organization. Now it is beginning to interest
itself in the ideology of early communities: their religions, the way they expressed rank, status and group identity." [3]

Theory[edit]
"New Archaeology represents a precipitate, unplanned and unfinished exploration of new disciplinary field space, conducted with
very varied success in an atmosphere of complete uncertainty. What at first appeared to be merely a period of technical re-
equipment has produced profound practical, theoretical and philosophical problems to which the new archaeologies have
responded with diverse new methods, new observations, new paradigms and new theory. However, unlike its parent, the New
Archaeology is as yet a set of questions rather than a set of answers; when the questions are answered it too will be Old
Archaeology."
Processualist David L. Clarke, 1973.[4]
Processual archaeologists believe they can understand past cultural systems through the remains they left behind. One theory that
influences this is Leslie White's theory that culture can be defined as the exosomatic (outside the body) means of environmental
adaptation for humans.[5] In other words, they study cultural adaptation to environmental change rather than the bodily adaptation
over generations, which is dealt with by evolutionary biologists. This focus on environmental adaptation is based on the cultural
ecology and multilinear evolution ideas of anthropologists such as Julian Steward. In exosomatic adaptation, culture is determined
by environmental constraints. As a result, processual archaeologists propose that cultural change happens within a predictable
framework, and they seek to understand that adaptation by the analysis of its components. Moreover, since that framework is
predictable, then science is the key to unlocking how those components interacted with the cultural whole. [6] Consequently,
processual archaeologists hold that cultural changes are driven by the evolutionary "processes" in cultural development; and
consequently, the resulting cultural changes would be adaptive relative to the environment. In this thought framework, the changes
within the culture are not only understandable, but also scientifically predictable once the interaction of the variables is
understood. In effect, archeologists should then be able to reconstruct completely these "cultural processes." Hence came the name
"processual archaeology," and its practitioners became known as "new archaeologists". [7]
Scientifically, however, the challenge facing proponents of New Archaeology was developing a methodology of analyzing the
archaeological remains in a more scientific fashion, as no such framework existed. The notable lack of this type of analysis in
works of archeological science led Willey and Phillips to state in 1958, "So little work has been done in American archaeology on
the explanatory level that it is difficult to find a name for it".[8] Different researchers had different approaches to this
problem. Lewis Binford felt that ethno-historical information was necessary to facilitate an understanding of archaeological
context.[9] Ethno-historical (history of peoples) research involves living and studying the life of those who would have used the
artifacts —or at least a similar culture. Binford wanted to prove that the Mousterian assemblage, a group of stone artifacts from
France during the ice age, was adapted to its environment, and so Binford spent time with the Nunamiut of Alaska, a people living
in conditions very similar to those of France during the period in question. Binford had a good deal of success with this approach,
and though his specific problem ultimately eluded complete understanding, the ethno-historical work he did is constantly referred
to by researchers today and has since been emulated by many.[10]
The new methodological approaches of the processual research paradigm include logical positivism (the idea that all aspects of
culture are accessible through the material record), the use of quantitative data, and the hypothetico-deductive model (scientific
method of observation and hypothesis testing).
During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, archaeologist Kent Flannery began championing the idea that Systems theory could be
used in archaeology to approach questions of culture from an unbiased perspective, as the study focuses on the symbiotic whole of
a culture rather than its parts, or artifacts. Systems theory, however, proved to have problematic limitations for archaeology as a
whole in that it works well when describing how elements of a culture interact, but performs poorly when describing why they
interact the way that they do. Despite its lacking, Systems Theory has become a very important part of processualism, as it sets
archaeologists with parameters to examine other cultures specific to its peoples, while limiting interference from the researcher's
own cultural biases.[citation needed]
As an example of processualism, in the field of paleolinguistics, Colin Renfrew—who in his 1987 re-examining of Proto-Indo-
European language made a case for the spread of Indo-European languages through neolithic Europe in connection with
the spread of farming[11]—outlined three basic, primary processes through which a language comes to be spoken in a specific area:
initial colonization, replacement and continuous development. Supported by linguistic analyses, accepted migration progressions
and archeological records, Renfrew proposed a radically new conclusion that contradicted long-held linguistic-origin theories.
With Renfrew's proposal being far from conclusive, the New York Times reported in its Feb. 24, 2015, "The Tangled Roots of
English," that Renfrew's work has since been both supported and challenged in multiple studies by linguists, archaeologists,
biologist, geneticist, statisticians and computational mathematicians. [12] Though Renfrew's conclusions still garner debate, the
breadth of scientific understanding gained from the wide interdisciplinary studies demonstrate that the rigors of processual
analyses of a complex topic provides invaluable data that can be analyzed, refuted and built upon to further cumulative
understanding of a system.

Further theoretical development[edit]

"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."
Processualist David L. Clarke, 1973.[13]
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. [14] 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.[15]
Processualism's development transformed archaeology, and is sometimes called the "New Archaeology." With few notable
exceptions such as Boston 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. 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.[citation needed]

Legacy[edit]
In his 2010 book on archaeological theory, Matthew Johnson- then of the University of Southampton, now at Northwestern
University- argued that despite the intervening 40 years since its development, the "intellectual questions" first posed by
processualism remained "absolutely central" to archaeology.[16]

Criticism[edit]
Processual archaeologist David L. Clarke suggested that the New Archaeology would face particular opposition from amateurs,
historical archaeologists and practical excavators but argued that such individuals would still benefit from the theory's adoption. [17]
Processualism began to be critiqued soon after it emerged, initiating a theoretical movement that would come to be called post-
processualism. Post-processualist critics consider the main weaknesses of processual archaeology:

 environmental determinism
 lack of human agency
 view of cultures as homeostatic, with cultural change only resulting from outside stimuli
 failure to take into account factors such as gender, ethnicity, identity, social relations etc.
  supposed objectivity of interpretation
Writing in 1987, the archaeologist Christopher Chippindale of Cambridge University spoke on the view of processualism at that
time, putting it in the context of the 1960s, when he stated that:
The sharper students of the current generation reasonably regard the "New Archaeology" in its pristine form as a period
piece, as strange an artefact of that remote era as the Paris évènements or Woodstock. They have some cause: the then-
radical insistence that nothing valuable had been written in archaeology before 1960 matched the hippie belief that
anyone over 30 was too ancient to be intelligent, and the optimism that anything could be recovered from the
archaeological record if only you searched hard enough was the archaeological version of the hope that the
Pentagon could be levitated if only enough people had sufficient faith.[18]

The 1960s witnessed the development of scientific archaeology or Processual archaeology. It represented a drastic change from
the culture, the historical and antiquarian approaches to more scientific theories.

• Processual archaeologist argued that Archaeology is a science and disagree to the traditional view that archaeology is a branch of
history that provide material evidences for the historical explanation of the past of prehistoric societies.

• The new archaeologists argued that archaeology should focus on explanation of archaeological materials.

• Scientific explanations would demand that archaeologists focus on dynamic systems—an approach called “systems theory”—
with the goal of understanding the complex factors driving cultural change, and explaining how people adapted to the
environmental factors that drove cultural changes.

Focus on culture process: Arguing that culture–historical archaeology results in static snapshots of phases of occupation (an
artifact of archaeological collection and not a representation of reality), the processualists focused on generating a more lifelike,
fluid understanding of the past, one based on understanding the complex interrelated cultural and environmental factors that
contribute to cultural (and archaeological) change over time.

• An expressly theoretical approach: The theoretical goals of processual archaeology resulted in a number of methodological
changes in the ways in which archaeology was (and is) practiced, resulting in a strong focus on survey, the integration of a wide
range of new types of data, and on the replacement of the solo archaeologist with an archaeological team of experts, representing a
number of fields that contribute to the explanation of the past.

Processual, Postprocessual, and Interpretive archaeologies Michael Shanks and Ian Hodder pg 1-3

Processual archaeology (Trigger 1989a, Willey and Sabloff 1982; a recent textbook expression is Renfrew and Bahn 1991.) is the
orthodoxy which emerged after the reaction, beginning in the 1960s and calling itself 'new archaeology', against traditional
culture-historical and descriptive approaches to the material past.

Its characteristics are as follows.

• Archaeology conceived as anthropological science rather than allied with history.

• Explanation of the past valued over description.

• Explanation via the incorporation of particular observations of the material past into crosscultural generalisations pertaining to
(natural and social) process (hence the term 'processual').

• Explanation via explicit methodologies modelled on the hard sciences.

• An earlier interest in laws of human behaviour has shied to an interest in formation processes of the archaeological record:
regularities which will allow inferences about processes to be made from material remains.

For many, and although it may not explicitly be described as such, processual archaeology is a good means, if not the best, of
acquiring positive knowledge of the archaeological past. Positive archaeological knowledge is of the past, which means that it
aspires to objectivity in the sense of being neutral and indeed timeless (the past happened in the way it did, that much at least will
not change). Under a programme of positive knowledge, archaeologists aim to accumulate more knowledge of the past. The
timeless and objective quality of knowledge is important if the aim is to accumulate and build on what is already known; it would
be no good building on facts which cannot be relied upon, because they might change. The aspiration to timeless and value-free
knowledge also enables high degrees of specialisation, knowledges isolated in their own field, and disconnected from the present.
The cultural politics of the 1990s do not affect what happened in prehistory, it is held. The archaeologist can live with one while
quite separately gaining knowledge of the other.

To secure this timeless objectivity is the task of method(ology), and in processual archaeology this may be described as coming
down to reason or rationality working objectively upon data or the facts. Reason is that cognitive processing which is divorced
from superstition, ideology, emotion, subjectivity, indeed anything which compromises the purity or neutrality of logical
calculation. To attain objectivity means carefully relying on those faculties which allow access to the past - particularly
observation, controlled perception of those empirical traces remaining of what happened. Theory building may be involved in
moving from the static archaeological record of the present to past social dynamics (Binford 1977), but to move beyond controlled
observation is to speculate and to invite bias and subjectivity, contamination of the past by the present. These aspirations to
positive scientific knowledge, neutrality, and reliance on controlled observation of facts have led to processual archaeology being
described as positivist and empiricist (see, among others, Shanks and Tilley 1987a).

Processual archaeology is anthropological in a sense of being informed by an interest in social reconstruction of the past. The
following form the main outlines of processual conceptions of the social as they developed from the late 1960s.

• Society is essentially composed of patterned sets of behaviours.

• Material culture and material residues, the products of processes which form the archaeological record, reflect the patterned
behaviours which are society, or they are the result of natural processes which can be designed scientifically (the decay of organic
materials; the corrosion of metals.

• Society is a mode of human adaptation to the social and natural environment.

• Accordingly, explaining social process means focusing on those features of the society which most relate to adaptation to
environments: resources, subsistence and economic strategies, trade and exchange, technology. Attention has, however and more
recently, turned to symbolism and ritual.

• The interest in cross-cultural generalisation and patterning is expressed in societal typing (identifying a particular society as
band, lineage based, chiefdom, state etc) and schemes of cultural evolution.