Introduction

Archaeology is at a crossroads. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, center stage in North American archaeology was reserved not for competing interpretations of historical processes but for discussion of the New Archaeology. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a public debate, generated in no small part by the exponential increase in empirical data during the 30 years prior to 1960. The gathering of facts had become increasingly additive, rather than contributing to a cumulative body of real information. Syntheses tended to be descriptive, simplistic, and speculative. The New Archaeology began as an American intergenerational conflict, as an introspective reassessment of means and purpose. But these painful beginnings, with the new castigating the old, were then followed by constructive debate among a new international generation of archaeologists in regard to goals and the optimal strategies to attain them. The net impact has been healthy, with refinement in the strategies of empirical research and far more sophisticated interpretation.

Nonetheless, the so-called great debate in archaeology also created its own simplifications. By polarizing old and new approaches, the impression was given that archaeologists were either empirical or theoretical. But on closer inspection the small group of active participants in the great debate are seen to be neither pure theorists nor pure deductivists. Archaeology is, by its nature, ultimately empirical. The great debate is far more than a matter of philosophical abstractions.