ABSTRACT
Archaeologists are active participants in broad social science debates. The overlap in interests between cultural anthropology and archaeology is considerable. Archaeological interpretations commonly stress the material characteristics of the physical environment, such as climate, soil fertility, and rainfall. Cultural anthropologists and archaeologists are frequently members of the same anthropology departments in the United States, giving them ample chances to talk with each other. Archaeologists, like social scientists generally, have tended to be interested primarily in the structural aspects of power, those overarching frameworks that encourage some actions while discouraging others. Archaeologists who emphasize a generalizing approach to studying the past seek to identify principles of human behavior that are not restricted to specific times and places. Agency theory does not signal a return to the "Great Person" approach to understanding human behavior. Human behavior in this approach is knowable, operates within certain broad restrictions, and, hence, follows specifiable channels that repeat in historically unrelated sequences.
