Summary of the New Archaeology Make archaeology a science with science define as –Deductive explanations through hypothesis testing and/or laws Two kinds of explanations sought: –Culture reconstruction (functional and behavior –Explanations of culture process Developed new methods for connecting artifacts to cultural behavior: –Record formation processes –Ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology –mid range theory

Was/is the New Archaeology a Paradigm There is some debate on this issue: –The changes called for were certainly “revolutionary” and a far cry from what culture historians had been doing. –They discussed and developed new methods: How to achieve certainty in conclusion Reliance on quantitative methods Emphasis on spatial variation and how to sample to obtain representative samples of that variation Identification and description of record formation processes to build better analogues BUT, they never constructed the explanation they so wanted. Do change in methods constitute a paradigm shift?

Changing Directions from the NA Binford’s call for Science resulted in a push in that direction with a focus on ultimate causation Binford’s focus on culture reconstruction was transformed into humanistic archaeology, e.g., post-processualism New Archaeology ScientificPost Processualism Archaeology Evolutionary Theory