ABSTRACT
Paleolithic archaeology is the offspring of two intellectual parents: the progressive evolutionary arguments, which sought to document the “emergence” of man out of the bestial “ooze”; and the culture history arguments, which sought to trace the several “cultures” or “races” of man back to their primordial beginnings. More recently, Paleolithic archaeology has developed into an independent science of the archaeological record, dedicated to understanding the past and its dynamics through fine-grained study of the processes that brought that record into being. To the extent that such an investigation is successful, archaeologists may direct their study of the past toward an evaluation of the theories previously advanced to explain human evolution, in addition to providing their own constructions of the past, which then demand explanation and hence theory building.
