ABSTRACT
Much critical archaeology now focuses on understanding the pasts of people who have been 'denied' a history women, African Americans, societies in the developing world the archaeology of inequality. Post-processualism ultimately stemmed not only from a dissatisfaction with processualism, but also from a growing concern on the part of some very fine archaeologists that their discipline engage more closely with society as a whole, as well as with the wider academic community. The first is the study of the cognitive faculties of early hominids and archaic humans, such as, for example, the relationship between tool-making and cognitive abilities, the origins of language, and the social contexts of early human behavior. It is as if those who rose to prominence were associated with lightning's descendants, in an ideological shift in which hereditary social inequality was condoned for the first time. Three approaches played an important part in the development of processualism: functionalism, structural archaeology, and critical archaeology.
