A Grammar of the Archaeological Record (Version 2, Beta release)

References. Topics

Theory and method

Giorgio Buccellati – August 2026

New archaseology

New Archaeology, more commonly called processual archaeology, emerged principally in the United States and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. It represented a deliberate challenge to culture-historical archaeology. Instead of treating archaeology primarily as the reconstruction and chronological ordering of past cultures, its proponents sought to make archaeology an explanatory, scientific discipline concerned with cultural processes.

The foundational publications

The canonical starting point is: Binford, Lewis R. 1962. “Archaeology as Anthropology.” American Antiquity 28(2): 217–225.

This is effectively the manifesto of New Archaeology. Binford argued that archaeology should explain cultural systems and cultural change rather than merely describe artifacts, construct typologies, and establish chronologies. Other fundamental works are:

Binford, Lewis R. 1965. “Archaeological Systematics and the Study of Culture Process.” American Antiquity 31: 203–210.

Binford, Sally R., and Lewis R. Binford, eds. 1968. New Perspectives in Archaeology. Chicago: Aldine.

Clarke, David L. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen.

Clarke, David L., ed. 1972. Models in Archaeology. London: Methuen.

Renfrew, Colin, ed. 1973. The Explanation of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory. London: Duckworth.

Flannery, Kent V., ed. 1976. The Early Mesoamerican Village. New York: Academic Press.

Clarke is especially important. His famous statement that “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology” expressed the conviction that archaeology possessed its own body of theory and methods rather than simply serving as an auxiliary to history.

What was “new” about it?

New Archaeology changed the questions being asked.

The older culture-historical approach tended to ask:

What culture is this? When did it exist? Where did it come from?

New Archaeology instead asked:

How did the system work? Why did it change? What processes produced the archaeological pattern we observe?

Its characteristic features were therefore:

Explanation rather than description.
Explicit hypotheses that could in principle be tested.
Search for regularities and generalizations about human behaviour.
Strong interest in ecology, adaptation and subsistence.
Analysis of cultures as systems composed of interacting subsystems.
Greater use of statistics, sampling and quantitative methods.
Explicit concern with the relationship between the archaeological record and the behaviour that produced it.
Greater methodological self-consciousness: archaeologists should make their assumptions and inferential procedures explicit.

Binford and middle-range theory

One of Binford’s most consequential later contributions was middle-range theory: the attempt to establish reliable connections between static archaeological remains and the dynamic behaviour that created them. Key publications include:

Binford, Lewis R. 1977. For Theory Building in Archaeology. New York: Academic Press.

Binford, Lewis R. 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press.

Binford, Lewis R. 1981. Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths. New York: Academic Press.

This leads directly to formation processes, because an archaeologist cannot simply assume that the spatial distribution of artifacts corresponds directly to ancient behaviour.

Michael Schiffer developed this issue systematically:

Schiffer, Michael B. 1976. Behavioral Archaeology. New York: Academic Press.

Schiffer, Michael B. 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Its relationship to stratigraphy

This is particularly interesting in relation to your previous question. New Archaeology did not invent stratigraphic archaeology. Stratigraphic excavation had been developed much earlier by Pitt-Rivers, Wheeler, Kenyon and others. Nor was Harris’s stratigraphic theory simply an expression of processual archaeology.

The two developments nevertheless intersect intellectually.

Traditional stratigraphy could be represented as:

layer ? artifact assemblage ? phase ? chronology

whereas the processual perspective increasingly encouraged:

deposit ? formation process ? human behaviour ? cultural system

Harris then introduced a somewhat different analytical emphasis:

stratigraphic unit ? physical relationship ? sequence ? event

This distinction matters. The Harris Matrix is not itself a processual model of human behaviour. It is fundamentally a formal representation of stratigraphic relationships. Interpretation comes afterward.

The reaction: post-processual archaeology

By the late 1970s and especially the 1980s, dissatisfaction with New Archaeology produced what came to be called post-processual archaeology. The central figure was Ian Hodder:

Hodder, Ian, ed. 1982. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hodder, Ian. 1986. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The critique was that processual archaeology tended to underestimate meaning, symbolism, agency, ideology, historical particularity and the interpretive position of the archaeologist.

Thus a simplified intellectual genealogy would be:

Culture history ? classification, chronology, cultural groups

New/Processual Archaeology (1960s–70s) ? explanation, systems, adaptation, hypothesis testing, scientific method

Post-processual Archaeology (1980s onward) ? meaning, agency, symbolism, contextuality, reflexivity

Contemporary archaeology ? selective integration of all three traditions, alongside materiality, network approaches, formation theory, digital archaeology, Bayesian chronology and renewed concern with archaeological epistemology.

For the question of objectivity in archaeology, which you raised previously, the transition from Binford ? Clarke ? Schiffer ? Hodder ? Lucas is especially revealing: it charts the movement from confidence that archaeological inference could be rendered explicitly scientific to a much more complicated understanding of the relationship between observation, archaeological record, inference, and interpretation.

Clarke

The precise citation for David Clarke’s famous phrase is: “Archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.”

Clarke, David L. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen, p. 13.

It occurs in the introductory discussion where Clarke argues for archaeology as an autonomous discipline, with its own concepts, methods, and theoretical structure, rather than merely as an adjunct to history or anthropology. For citation in a bibliography:

Clarke, D. L. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen.

There is also an important second edition, revised by Bob Chapman: Clarke, D. L. 1978. Analytical Archaeology. 2nd ed., revised by Bob Chapman. London: Methuen.

A closely related—and exceptionally important—statement of Clarke’s conception of disciplinary development is Clarke 1973, “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” Antiquity 47: 6–18, where he describes archaeology’s transition from “noble innocence” toward disciplinary self-consciousness. If you wish, I can also locate the exact surrounding passage on p. 13 and explain what Clarke meant by “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.”

In the 1968 first edition of David L. Clarke, Analytical Archaeology, the statement occurs on p. 13, in Chapter 1, “Introduction and Polemic.” A searchable reproduction of the book confirms the location, and a published retrospective on Clarke likewise cites it as AA:13. (PagePlace) The key passage reads:

“The view taken in this work is that archaeology is archaeology is archaeology (with apologies to Gertrude Stein). Archaeology is a discipline in its own right, concerned with archaeological data which it clusters in archaeological entities displaying certain archaeological processes and studied in terms of archaeological aims, concepts and procedures.”

Clarke immediately adds that archaeological entities and processes were once historical and social entities, but argues that the character of the archaeological record prevents any simple equation between archaeological observations and the vanished historical events that produced them.

The preceding sentence is particularly important for understanding the famous formula: “Archaeological data are not historical data and consequently archaeology is not history.”

So Clarke’s argument is stronger than simply asserting disciplinary independence. His sequence of reasoning is: material remains ? historical events ? archaeological data ? historical data ? archaeology ? history ? “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.”

This also explains the contrast with the American New Archaeology slogan of Willey, Phillips, and later Binford that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” A modern assessment of Analytical Archaeology explicitly emphasizes this contrast.

There is an interesting connection here with archaeological stratigraphy: Clarke’s insistence that archaeological percepta cannot simply be equated with past events anticipates, in a different theoretical vocabulary, the later problem addressed by Harris and Schiffer—how one moves from the material archaeological record to the sequence of events and processes that generated it.