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Archaeological theory functions as the application of philosophy of science to archaeology, and is occasionally referred to as philosophy of archaeology. There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways.
In his 2010 book on archaeological theory Matthew Johnson, then of the University of Southampton, now at Northwestern University, argued that despite the 40 years since its development, the "intellectual questions" first posed by processualism remained "absolutely central" to archaeology.
Michael Brian Schiffer (born October 4, 1947, in Winnipeg, Canada) is an American archaeologist and one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. [ 1 ] Schiffer's earliest ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archeology and many journal articles, are mainly concerned with the formation processes of the ...
Until the mid-20th century and the introduction of technology, there was a general consensus that archaeology was closely related to both history and anthropology. Since then, elements of other disciplines such as physics , chemistry , biology , metallurgy , engineering , medicine , etc., have found an overlap, resulting in a need to revisit ...
Post-processual archaeology, however, questioned this stance, and instead emphasized that archaeology was subjective rather than objective, and that what truth could be ascertained from the archaeological record was often relative to the viewpoint of the archaeologist responsible for unearthing and presenting the data. [5]
"Behavioural Archaeology" was first published by Michael B. Schiffer, J. Jefferson Reid, and William L. Rathje in 1975 in the American Anthropologist journal. [1] Leading up to the publication, archaeology as a discipline was expanding in its practice and theory due to the specialisation of various areas and new ideas that were being presented to the community.
Gordon Randolph Willey (7 March 1913 – 28 April 2002) [1] was an American archaeologist who was described by colleagues as the "dean" of New World archaeology. [2] Willey performed fieldwork at excavations in South America, Central America and the Southeastern United States; and pioneered the development and methodology for settlement patterns theories. [3]
These range broadly from an empirical archaeology viewed as a science, to a relativistic post-modern concept of archaeology as an ideology that cannot verify its own concepts. Therefore, the search for a unifying explanatory theory is a major concern among philosophers of archaeology.