Taylor saw archaeology as an integrated discipline, combining the study of diet, settlement patterns, tools and other elements to provide a holistic view of the past.
Taylor was reacting to what he saw as his contemporaries' limited use of artifacts to produce culture chronologies and identify groups as opposed to their stated goals of reconstructing prehistory.
In response, he offered that archaeologists should focus more on quantitative data and spatial distributions of artifacts and features within sites.
Utilizing this lens, Taylor departed from Childe's and Clark's more materialist aims (the former working in something of a Marxist tradition and the latter in an early form of a paleoenvironmental approach).
[3][4][5] Taylor claimed that his ideas included testing of hypotheses and a systems approach decades before processual archaeology.
[6] In this book, the argument is partially laid out that Taylor's work might have had influence on Post-processual archaeology rather than processual, given his focus on ideational elements of culture as well as his deep conviction of the importance of a historical and historiographic approach (as compared to the processualists' aims for objectivity).
Perhaps the most difficult part of interpreting Taylor's influence on the discipline as a whole is that neither he nor anyone else ever produced a substantive work within the framework of conjunctive archaeology.