ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, archaeology went through a transition from asking largely descriptive questions to asking more theoretical ones. The “new archaeology” that grew out of this transition led to the more scientific research process I am trying to present in this book. It also led to a recognition that archaeology, at least in terms of its theoretical frameworks, must be tied to anthropology and the other social sciences. One of the prominent figures in the new archaeology movement was Lewis Binford, who argued that archaeology is not a discipline independent of anthropology but rather is a method or set of techniques for collecting and analyzing a particular type of anthropological data.1 In the last two chapters, we looked at archaeology’s particular types of data-artifacts, ecofacts, and features. In the next few chapters, we look at how archaeologists go about collecting those data.
