ABSTRACT
Archaeologists working in southern Mesopotamia and Stonehenge places in 1950 operated within a different research structure than those who studied these areas and sites in 2000. Changes in archaeological theory opened up new interpretive possibilities, the pursuit of which generated novel data that encouraged the application of additional conceptual schemes. Archaeological theory constitutes a dynamic and democratic field that is constantly being transformed. Researchers pursuing investigations guided by processualist and Marxian premises in southern Mesopotamia, for example, saw evidence of cities, hierarchy, and centralized control of land in different lights. Where some processualists saw a monument to a particular form of communal power at Stonehenge, some interpretivists perceive a symbolic structure that conditioned experiences in ways that promoted culturally constructed understandings of difference among the living, and between them and the revered dead. Culture historians, processualists, Marxians, and interpretivists may well differ profoundly on political significance of those institutions that controlled land and labor in southern Mesopotamia by 3200 BC.
