What Is Post-Processual Archaeology?

Archaeology is comparatively a young discipline amongst other fields of social sciences.

Through conceptuality and practicality, the discipline has been continuously enhancing,

especially within the last few decades. Since its development, practice and theory has become

the interlocked components of this discipline. Theory is particularly a vital component of

the discipline because it constructs the archaeological interpretations which vary between

methodologies. There is a great theoretical debate in the discipline of archaeology between

schools of thought regarding the concerning the fundamental causes of human behavior, dubbed

“biology versus culture” for example. The school of thought on the biology panel is called

the ‘processualism’

Post-processual archaeology itself had originated as a

critical response to processual archaeology, rejecting the scientific approach of the processual

archaeologists; post-processual archaeologists gave importance to subjectivity (Hodder 1982;

Shanks and Tilley 1987; Miller and Tiley1984;). Post-processual reasoning claim that the

interpretation of the archaeological data is influenced by current political and social settings, and

therefore archaeologists cannot truly interpret the past.

The principal critiques are the processual interest in adaptive technologies, the acceptance

of a cross-cultural anthropology at the deprivation of historical content, and the processual

definition of archaeology being a science and defined as positivist (which is the idea that

arguments are constructed by testable theories against objective data). The emphasis of post- processual critique focused around meaning, history, agency, and on the individual. Processual

archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s proposed that material culture ought to be considered in

long term adaptive processes. But the post-processual critiqued processual archaeology

In contrast, post-processual archaeology deems material culture active and

people had used and altered material culture to effect social change.

Another post-processual critique was the processual archaeology’s embrace of the

hypothetico-deductive positivism in the 1960s and 1970s which had derived from Carl Hempel,

a philosopher of science. The hypothetico-deductive approach comprised of inferring statements

from general theories and testing them against observable data. Post-processual archaeologists

thought this was obsolete due to epistemology previously receiving profound critique in the

natural science.

To alleviate theoretical dichotomies within the discipline as mentioned above, Cullen

(1995) had proposed the Cultural Virus Theory (CVT) to satisfy the dominant and the

challenging paradigms of archaeological theory. CVT is a theory in which concepts such as

virology, psycho-biology, ecology, and immunology are unified within the archaeological

theory. In this theory, neither realist nor relativist model of the spirit of cultural phenomenon is

FIRST EXAMINATION IN ARCHAEOLOGY

DAY II: RELATING THEORY TO RESEARCH PROBLEMS

characterized. CVT eliminates all distinctions of objectivism/subjectivism. Instead it