Processual archaeology

Colin Renfrew, a proponent of 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.

"[3] "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.

As a result, processual archaeologists propose that cultural change happens within a set predictable framework, and they seek to understand the adaptation analyzing its components.

To prove this, 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 was successful with this approach, and though his specific problem ultimately eluded complete understanding, the ethno-historical work he did is often 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).

Supported by linguistic analyses, accepted migration progressions, and archeological records, Renfrew proposed a radical new conclusion that contradicted long-held linguistic-origin theories.

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.

[15] 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.

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:[19]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.