Vere Gordon Childe was an Australian archaeologist who specialized in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London, and wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing", a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment: "My own belief is that by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing." This idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human society. That was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any information that artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life was lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts.
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of "very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions". Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology.
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm. Recent appraisals have judged that his approach owed more to prior work in the 1940s and 50s than suggested by Binford's strong criticism of his predecessors.
Prehistoric archaeology is the study of the past before historical records began. It is a field of research that looks at all the pre-urban societies of the world. It also has distinctive set of procedures for analyzing material remains so that archaeologists can reconstruct their ecological settings. The study of prehistoric archaeology reflects the cultural concerns of modern society by showing interpretations of time between economic growth and political stability. It also has very close links with biology, biological anthropology, and geology. It is also sometimes termed at anthropological archaeology because of its indirect traces with complex patterns.
Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology which focuses on the ways that ancient societies thought and the symbolic structures that can be perceived in past material culture.
In the history of archaeological theory the term migrationism was opposed to the term diffusionism as a means of distinguishing two approaches to explaining the spread of prehistoric archaeological cultures and innovations in artefact. Migrationism explains cultural change in terms of human migration, while diffusionism relies on explanations based on trans-cultural diffusion of ideas rather than populations.
Archaeological theory refers to the various intellectual frameworks through which archaeologists interpret archaeological data. Archaeological theory functions as the application of philosophy of science to archaeology, and is occasionally referred to as philosophy of archaeology. There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways. Throughout the history of the discipline, various trends of support for certain archaeological theories have emerged, peaked, and in some cases died out. Different archaeological theories differ on what the goals of the discipline are and how they can be achieved.
The causes and degree of Olmec influences on Mesoamerican cultures has been a subject of debate over many decades. Although the Olmecs are considered to be perhaps the earliest Mesoamerican civilization, there are questions concerning how and how much the Olmecs influenced cultures outside the Olmec heartland. This debate is succinctly, if simplistically, framed by the title of a 2005 New York Times article: “Mother Culture, or Only a Sister?”.
Richard E. Blanton is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, and academic. He is most renowned for his archaeological field and theoretical research into the development of civilizations in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly those from the central Mexican plateau and Valley of Oaxaca regions. Blanton taught at Rice University and Hunter College of the City University of New York before joining the faculty at Purdue University in 1976. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Purdue's College of Liberal Arts.
Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information within the framework of Marxism. Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels described how archaeology could be understood in a Marxist conception of history, it was developed by archaeologists in the Soviet Union during the early twentieth century. Becoming the dominant archaeological theory in that country, it was subsequently adopted by archaeologists in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where it was propagated by influential archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. With the rise of post-processual archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s, forms of Marxist archaeology were once more popularised amongst the archaeological community.
Peter N. Peregrine is an American anthropologist, registered professional archaeologist, and academic. He is well known for his staunch defense of science in anthropology, and for his popular textbook Anthropology. Peregrine did dissertation research on the evolution of the Mississippian culture of North America, and then did fieldwork on Bronze Age cities in Syria. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Lawrence University and Research Associate of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. From 2012 to 2018 he was an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
The philosophy of archaeology seeks to investigate the foundations, methods and implications of the discipline of archaeology in order to further understanding of the human past and present.
Albert Clanton Spaulding was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science. His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate. He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.
Sally Binford née Rosen (1924–1994) was an archaeologist and feminist.
There are two main approaches currently used to analyze archaeological remains from an evolutionary perspective: evolutionary archaeology and behavioral ecology. The former assumes that cultural change observed in the archaeological record can be best explained by the direct action of natural selection and other Darwinian processes on heritable variation in artifacts and behavior. The latter assumes that cultural and behavioral change results from phenotypic adaptations to varying social and ecological environments.
