Processual archaeology

Processual archaeology is an approach that explains past societies through scientific methods, explicit hypotheses, and systems theory. It emphasizes cultural processes and general explanations rather than description alone.

Systems theory: An approach that explains phenomena as interacting components and relationships within organized wholes. Processual archaeologists modeled societies as systems whose environmental, economic, and social parts interact.
Lewis Binford: An American archaeologist who became the leading advocate of processual archaeology. His arguments and research made the movement explicit and influential.
Post-processual archaeology: A family of archaeological approaches that emphasizes interpretation, agency, symbolism, and the situated nature of knowledge. It challenged processualism’s claims to objective explanation and broad regularities.
Amazonian Dark Earth: Fertile, human-modified soils created through long-term occupation in parts of the Amazon Basin. Research on these soils illustrates processual analysis of human-environment interaction.
Cultural ecology: The study of how cultural practices and social organization relate to environmental conditions. Processual archaeology drew on ecological approaches to explain cultural adaptation.
Middle-range theory: Explanations that connect observable evidence to broader claims about past behavior. It bridges archaeological traces and claims about the processes that produced them.
New Archaeology: The 1960s movement that advocated scientific explanation and theory in archaeology. This name captured the reform program that developed into processual archaeology.
Historical particularism: An approach that explains cultures through their distinct histories rather than universal laws. It represents the historical focus that processualists sought to supplement with general explanations.
Pueblo Bonito: A large ancestral Puebloan great house in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Its regional setting and settlement history have supported systems-oriented interpretations of Chaco society.
Archaeological science: The use of scientific methods and natural-science techniques to investigate archaeological questions. Processualism helped normalize explicit methods, measurement, and hypothesis testing in archaeology.

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