Knowra Post-processual archaeology Post-processual archaeology A late-twentieth-century movement in archaeology that challenged processual explanations by emphasizing meaning, human agency, power, and the role of interpretation.
Hermeneutics : The theory and practice of interpreting meaning in texts, actions, and cultural expressions. Post-processual archaeologists use interpretive reasoning to relate material traces to cultural meanings.
Processual archaeology : An archaeological approach that explains past societies through testable models, systems, and general processes. Post-processual archaeology arose partly in opposition to its claims of scientific objectivity and broad explanation.
Positivism : A philosophy that treats observable evidence and scientific methods as the basis of reliable knowledge. Post-processualists challenged positivist assumptions that archaeological observations can be theory-free.
Archaeological theory : The concepts and arguments archaeologists use to interpret evidence and explain past human life. Post-processualism helped make theoretical debate central to archaeological research.
Agency (archaeology) : The capacity of people to act, make choices, and shape social life within historical conditions. Agency counters accounts that treat people as passive products of environmental or economic systems.
New Archaeology : The mid-twentieth-century movement that sought a more scientific, explanatory archaeology. Its positivist ambitions became a central target of post-processual critique.
Cultural-historical archaeology : An archaeological approach that reconstructs past cultures through artifacts, chronology, and spatial patterns. It offers a different explanatory tradition from both processual and post-processual archaeology.
Public archaeology : The practice of engaging communities and publics in archaeological research, heritage, and interpretation. Its attention to representation sharpened questions about who interprets the past and for whom.
Material culture : The physical objects and built environments produced, modified, or used by human societies. Post-processual interpretation treats artifacts as socially meaningful, not merely functional evidence.
Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence : A 1981 article by Ian Hodder arguing that archaeological interpretation is shaped by social and historical contexts. This essay helped articulate the movement's critique of supposedly neutral archaeological knowledge.
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