Processual Archaeology

In 1962, a 27-year-old archaeologist named Lewis Binford published an article accusing his entire field of basically just collecting old pots without ever explaining WHY ancient societies changed. That article, "Archaeology as Anthropology," set off a revolution that split archaeology into a before and an after.

- What "processual" means and why Binford chose that word - How the New Archaeology of the 1960s differed from earlier "culture history" approaches - The scientific method processualists demanded archaeologists use - A real case study where processual methods changed how we understand an ancient collapse

Through most of the early 1900s, archaeology mainly practiced CULTURE HISTORY: dig up artifacts, sort them by style and location, and build timelines showing which culture came before which. This work was valuable — it created the pottery sequences and chronologies archaeologists still use — but it rarely asked WHY a culture changed its tools, migrated, or collapsed. It described the WHAT without explaining the WHY.

Binford argued archaeology should become a true science, borrowing methods from ecology, systems theory, and cultural anthropology. He proposed that societies function like SYSTEMS made of interacting parts (technology, social organization, ideology, and environment), and that changes in ARTIFACTS reflect changes in that whole system — driven by real, testable PROCESSES like population growth, climate shifts, or resource scarcity. This is why the movement is called PROCESSUAL archaeology: it's about explaining the underlying processes of cultural change, not just describing artifacts. Binford insisted archaeologists form a hypothesis, then test it against evidence — just like a chemist or biologist would.

Processual archaeologists studying Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (home to enormous stone "Great Houses" built by Ancestral Puebloans between roughly 850 and 1150 CE) didn't just catalog the abandoned buildings. They tested environmental data — tree-ring records showing a severe drought beginning around 1130 CE — against population and resource models to build a testable explanation: declining rainfall likely strained a food-supply system that had already stretched to its limits, contributing to migration away from the canyon. This kind of testable, systems-based explanation, backed by measurable climate data, is exactly the approach Binford was demanding — a hypothesis you can check against hard evidence, not just a story.