Processual Archaeology - Criticism

Criticism

Processual archaeologist David L. Clarke suggested that the New Archaeology would face particular opposition from amateurs, historical archaeologists and practical excavators, although argued that such individuals would nevertheless benefit from the theory's adoption.

Processualism began to be critiqued soon after it emerged, initiating a theoretical movement that would come to be called post-processualism. Post-processualist critics consider the main weaknesses of processual archaeology to be:

• environmental determinism
• lack of human agency
• view of cultures as homeostatic, with cultural change only resulting from outside stimuli
• failure to take into account factors such as gender, ethnicity, identity, social relations, etc.
• supposed objectivity of interpretation

Writing in 1987, the archaeologist Christopher Chippindale of Cambridge University spoke on the view of processualism at that time, putting it in the context of the 1960s, when he stated that:

The sharper students of the current generation reasonably regard the "New Archaeology" in its pristine form as a period piece, as strange an artefact of that remote era as the Paris évènements or Woodstock. They have some cause: the then-radical insistence that nothing valuable had been written in archaeology before 1960 matched the hippie belief that anyone over 30 was too ancient to be intelligent, and the optimism that anything could be recovered from the archaeological record if only you searched hard enough was the archaeological version of the hope that the Pentagon could be levitated if only enough people had sufficient faith.