In the early 1980s, Hodder and his students at Cambridge first developed postprocessualism, an approach to archaeology stressing the importance of interpretation and subjectivity, strongly influenced by the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.

Tilley and his early collaborator Daniel Miller were amongst the most strongly relativist of first wave postprocessualist archaeologists, and was particularly critical of what he saw as the negative political implications of positivist processual archaeology.

"[4] In a 1989 paper of his published in the academic journal Antiquity, Tilley openly criticised the aims of rescue excavation, arguing that it was simply designed to collect "more and more information about the past", most of which would remain unpublished and of no use to either archaeologists or the public.

Phenomenology in archaeology entails the 'intuitive' study of material things, especially landscapes, in terms of their meanings to people in the past, and has been influential in both Britain and the United States.

[7] In the late 1990s, Tilley worked with Barbara Bender and Sue Hamilton to investigate the Bronze Age landscapes of Leskernick on Bodmin Moor, with a number of UCL students.