ABSTRACT
The new interest in evolution was part of an intense theoretical ferment, a seeming change in archaeological direction that became known, erroneously, as the 'new archaeology'. Today, it is more commonly known as 'processual archaeology', the subject of this chapter. Three decades after Binford formulated it, middle-range theory has become a useful way of mediating between the past and the present, largely because of ethnoarchaeology the study of living societies as a way of understanding and interpreting the archaeological record. This chapter discusses the development of multilinear evolution as a new perspective on culture change, which was strongly influenced by the doctrines of cultural ecology proposed by Julian Steward. Binford was also concerned with the relationship between the dynamic living world and the static archaeological record a gap that he bridged with ethnoarchaeology, the study of living people, and what he called middle-range theory.
