[2] Systems theory allowed archaeologists to treat the archaeological record in a completely new way.
[3] The result was that in the long run systems theory turned out to be more useful in describing change than in explaining it.
[4] Systems theory also eventually went on to show that predictions that a high amount of cultural regularities would be found were certainly overly optimistic during the early stages of processual archaeology,[5] the opposite of what processual archaeologists were hoping it would be able to do with systems theory.
Systems theory, at least, was important in the rise of processual archaeology and was a call against culture-historical methods of past generations.
It held argument that one could contemplate the past impartially and sidestep pitfalls through rigour.