Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific method was applied, come to completely objective conclusions.
The processualists, as positivists, believed that the scientific method should and could apply to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective statements about past societies based upon the evidence.
[8] Post-processualist Daniel Miller believed that the positivist approach of the processualists, in holding that only that which could be sensed, tested and predicted was valid, only sought to produce technical knowledge that facilitated the oppression of ordinary people by elites.
[9] In a similar criticism, Miller and Chris Tilley believed that by putting forward the concept that human societies were irresistibly shaped by external influences and pressures, archaeologists were tacitly accepting social injustice.
[11] While Hodder's viewpoint was not universally accepted among post-processualists, there was enough support for opposing racism, colonialism and professional elitism within the discipline that in 1986 the World Archaeological Congress was established.
[16] This structuralist approach was first taken from anthropology and applied into forms of archaeology by the French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), who used it to interpret prehistoric symbols in his 1964 work, Les Religions de la Préhistoire.
[22] Influenced by the sociologist Anthony Giddens (born 1938) and his structuration theory, many post-processualists accepted that most human beings, while knowing and understanding the rules of their society, choose to manipulate them rather than following them obediently.
A minority of post-processualists, such as Julian Thomas have however argued that human agency is not a useful aspect for looking at past societies, thereby accepting a culturally determinist position.
According to archaeologist Sam Lucy, "The agendas of feminist archaeology and post-processualism highlighted the importance of social and political factors on supposedly 'objective' investigation".
[26] Bruce Trigger, a Canadian archaeologist who produced a seminal study of archaeological theory, identified the existence of three main influences upon post-processualism.
"[29] Post-processual archaeology began in Britain during the late 1970s, spearheaded by a number of British archaeologists who had become interested in aspects of French Marxist anthropology.
Most prominent among these was Ian Hodder (born 1948), a former processualist who had made a name for himself for his economic analysis of spatial patterns and early development of simulation studies, particularly relating to trade, markets and urbanization in Iron Age and Roman Britain.
They also began to notice elements of ethnic prejudice within archaeology, particularly in regards to Native American peoples, who had commonly not had a chance to participate in their own heritage management up until the 1990s.
To these critics it brought in a variety of approaches from other disciplines, so that the term "postprocessual," while rather neatly echoing the epithet "postmodern" in literary studies, was a shade arrogant in presuming to supersede what it might quite properly claim to complement.