Archaeological theory Archaeological theory Archaeological theory covers the debates over the practice of archaeology and the interpretation of archaeological results. There is no single theory of archaeology, and even definitions are disputed. Until the mid-20th century and the introduction of technology, there was a general consensus that archaeology was closely related to both history and anthropology. Since then, elements of other disciplines such as geology, physics, chemistry, biology, metallurgy, engineering, medicine, etc, have found an overlap, resulting in a need to revisit the fundamental ideas behind archaeology. ...more on Wikipedia about "Archaeological theory"
Cultural-history archaeology or simply Culture history is a form of archaeological theory. ...more on Wikipedia about "Cultural-history archaeology"
The Neolithic Revolution was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, as first adopted by various independent prehistoric human societies. The term refers to both the general time period over which these initial developments took place, and the subsequent changes to Neolithic human societies which either resulted from, or are associated with, the adoption of early farming techniques and crop cultivation. ...more on Wikipedia about "Neolithic Revolution"
The "Original affluent society" postulates that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. This theory was articulated by Marshall Sahlins at the symposium on "Man the Hunter" held in Chicago in 1966. This theory is significant as it played an integral role in shifting anthropological thought away from seeing hunter-gatherer societies as primitive to seeing them as practicing a refined mode of subsistence from which much can be learned. ...more on Wikipedia about "Original affluent society"
Postprocessual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory which is related to the broader development of postmodernism during the 1980s. Postprocessualism, as a movement in archaeology, was sometimes loose and discursive, at other times full of clear-headed polemic and rhetoric. Processual archaeologists had, if not a single theoretical position to unify them, then at least a common aspiration that drove them: the construction of a scientific and comparative archaeology. Conversely, Postprocessual archaeologies juxtaposed Neo-Marxism, feminist archaeology, cognitive archaeology and contextual archaeology. Such viewpoints are very different from each other. This diversity was unified, however, by a critique of Processualism, which was painted as positivist outlook on culture. ...more on Wikipedia about "Post-processual archaeology"
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory which arguably had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips work, Method and Theory in American Archeology when the pair stated that "American archeology is anthropology or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2). 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. This was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any information artifacts contained about past people and past lifeways were lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All that could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts (Trigger, 1989:148). ...more on Wikipedia about "Processual archaeology"
Systems theory is not native to archaeology. It originated with the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy who attempted to construct a theory that would explain the interactions of different variables in a variety of systems, no matter what those variables actually represented. It was thought that any system could be thought of as a group of interacting parts and the relative influence of these parts followed rules which, once formulated could be used to describe the system no matter what the actual components were (Trigger, 1989:303). This theoretical framework was at one point thought to be the Rosetta Stone for Processualist archaeologists. For years they had floundered trying to find a set of theories that could be used to explain, not just describe, cultural change over time in a scientific manner. ...more on Wikipedia about "Systems theory in archaeology" Be happy with shortopedia
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