ABSTRACT
Criticisms of the empiricist perspective that dominated archaeology appeared in the 1960s. The new, processual archaeology – launched by Lewis Binford, Kent Flannery, and others in the United States and by Colin Renfrew in Britain – built more explicitly on Spencer and Durkheim in ways that were different from the evolutionists and empiricists of the preceding decade. The new archaeology as it developed in the United States consisted of several autonomous strands of thought that ultimately are theoretically incompatible. Settlement pattern is, in effect, human ecology, since it is concerned with the distribution of population over the landscape and an investigation of the reasons behind that distribution. Sanders proceeded to argue that the development of civilization in Mesoamerica refracted the enormous ecological diversity of the area. The ways in which Cowgill and other archaeologists engaged Marx's legacy in the decades immediately following the Second World War.
