:::Archaeology:::

Chapter Summary

Practice Quizzes

A difficult but important task of archaeology is to answer the question "why" and indeed much of archaeology has focused on the investigation of why things change. Before the 1960s changes in material and social culture were explained by migration and cultural diffusion.

The processual approach of New Archaeology, which began to take hold in the 1960s, attempts to isolate the different processes at work within a society. Rather than placing an emphasis on movements of people as the primary cause of change and development, processual archaeologists look more to humanity's relationship with its environment, on subsistence and economy, on ideology and the other processes at work within a society to explain why a society was how it was.

Processual archaeology often addresses big questions such as the rise of agriculture and the origins of the state. Such events are seen as having multi-causal explanations, rather than simply being attributed to single sources such as diffusion alone.

Marxist Archaeology, which focuses on the effects of class struggle within a society, does not contradict the ideas of processual archaeology. Evolutionary Archaeology, which is centered on the idea that the processes responsible for biological evolution also drive culture change, is also consistent with processual archaeology.

New cognitive approaches to archaeology began to emerge in the 1990s, largely as a reaction to the functionalism of early processual archaeology. A greater emphasis is placed on the ideas and beliefs of past societies and less on the importance of testing, as it is believed that all knowledge gained by such approaches in inherently subjective.

One aim cognitive archaeology is to keep track of the individual in explaining change. Agency, defined as the short-term intentionality of an individual, may indeed have long-term and unforeseen consequences that lead to cultural change. Another aim of con-temporary archaeology is to recognize the active role of material culture in the way humans engage with the world.

Key Concept Identifications

You should be familiar with the meaning and importance of each of the following terms:

The Processual Approach

Evolutionary Archaeology

Marxist Archaeology: Key Features

The Form of Explanation: General or Particular

The Origins of the State

Environmental Circumscription

Multivariate Explanations

Simulation

Origins of the State 2: The Aegean, a Multivariate Approach

Postprocessual or Interpretive Explanation

Structuralist Approaches

Critical Theory

Explaining the European Megaliths