ABSTRACT
Pollard, Handbook of archaeological sciences 2001;
Pollard, New developments in archaeological science
Chapter 1 outlined the growth of archaeology as
a distinctive discipline; a parallel account of the
history of science would be necessary for a full
discussion of the relationship between them. It is
easy to recognise archaeological science when it draws upon laboratory procedures that take
place in institutions whose main activities are
not archaeological. However, many museums and
universities possess their own scientific labora-
tories, which use identical methods for entirely
archaeological purposes. Scientific archaeology is quite another matter, for like archaeologists,
scientists do not possess a uniform philosophical
and theoretical outlook. One part of the agenda of
the New Archaeology, which developed in the
United States in the 1960s, was to make archae-
ology more scientific (chapter 6: 244); however, it
took a rather narrow view of science which
demanded that the subject should be conducted
in a manner that allowed everything to be hypoth-
esised, tested and used to generate explanatory
laws. Other approaches that emerged in the 1980s
and 1990s shared the New Archaeology’s links
with anthropology, but rejected rigid scientism and directed attention towards human experience
of society and the world rather than general
processes that governed them (chapter 6: 251).