ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore each of the different approaches to establish some background against which one can compare more recent developments. It considers culture history, processual archaeology and postprocessual approaches. This sequence represents a pretty standard narrative for the history of archaeological thought. There are two major issues with this, however. The first is that none of these 'paradigms' have ever gone away; they continue to play a role in the work that all archaeologists do. Second, there are fundamental assumptions shared between these different approaches. In particular, they are all structured around the same set of dualisms. The chapter expresses that these dualisms are quite problematic. Compared with culture history and processual archaeology, postprocessual archaeology is incredibly diverse. The role of dualisms in postprocessual archaeology was certainly explicit in structuralist accounts like Hodder's interpretation of Neolithic Europe.
