ABSTRACT
The past would be very boring if we all agreed about it. Neither would archaeology last long if we believed we could work out a final, final answer to a big question such as how we became human. The opportunity for fresh discoveries and new techniques means that the picture will always change. But, even so, many archaeologists believe that there is one true past. Here it is not new data that concerns them but rather their deeply held convictions about the best theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence. There are many types of archaeology, but I like to boil them
down to two: culture history and anthropological archaeology. These represent alternative paradigms, where a paradigm is a set of beliefs and assumptions about how the world of archaeological enquiry works and how it should be investigated in order to gain knowledge about the past. Different paradigms present different ways of doing archaeology. They are a way of measuring how many archaeologies there are on offer.
