ABSTRACT
Most archaeological work around the world was interrupted by World War II, and many researchers entered the military service of their respective countries. A direct outgrowth of the wartime atomic bomb program was the development of the radiocarbon-dating technique, certainly one of the most important events in archaeology after World War II. As early as 1948, Walter Taylor proposed that archaeology should be anthropological; it should do more than classify artifacts and should try to understand past societies. Lewis Binford argued that archaeology is a science, that the past is real and knowable, and that archaeology, like any science, should adopt the scientific method, using data to generate hypotheses to be tested by additional data. A basic principle in processual archaeology is that any evaluation of the past can be made only through the analysis of the static record of the past as recorded in the present.
