ABSTRACT
PROCES SUAL ARCHAEOLOGY I S the orthodoxy which emerged after the reac-tion, beginning in the 1960s and calling itself ‘new archaeology’ (Trigger 1989a; Willey and Sabloff 1980; Renfrew and Bahn 1991), against traditional culturehistorical and descriptive approaches to the material past. Its characteristics are as follows: archaeology conceived as anthropological science rather than allied with history; explanation of the past valued over description; explanation via the incorporation of particular observations of the material past into cross-cultural generalisations pertaining to (natural and social) process (hence the term ‘processual’); explanation via explicit methodologies modelled on the hard sciences; an earlier interest in laws of human behaviour has shifted to an interest in formation processes of the archaeological record – regularities which will allow inferences about processes to be made from material remains.
